Digitaal historisch onderzoek Op zoek naar

‘Reference Cultures’ in ‘Big Data’

Pim Huijnen

Universiteit Utrecht Europeana Newspapers Informatiedag

KB Den Haag, 28 oktober 2014

Translantis ‘The Digital Turn’ & Big Data De beperkingen van ‘Big’ Van vinden naar zoeken

Translantis ‘The Digital Turn’ & Big Data De beperkingen van ‘Big’ Van vinden naar zoeken

www.translantis.nl

Translantis

Digital Humanities Approaches to Reference Cultures; The Emergence of the United States in Public Discourse in the Netherlands, 1890-1990 “…uses digital technologies to analyze the role of reference cultures in debates about social issues and collective identities, looking specifically at the emergence of the United States in public discourse in the Netherlands from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the Cold War.  

De Verenigde Staten als een ‘referentiecultuur’

Bedrijfsleven Burgerschap Consumptie Media Drugs & misdaad Gezondheid

Amerikanisering: bedrijfsleven & economie

1870-1914 - 1918-1940 - 1945-1989

Fordism Taylorism Managerism Professionalisering Standaardisering Rationalisering Productiviteit

Efficiency Consultancy Accountancy Massaproductie Massaconsumptie Marktdenken Krediet

Text mining in historisch onderzoek

KB Den Haag: ~10.000.000 gedigitaliseerde pagina’s van Nederlandse kranten1618-1995 Biedt belofte voor historisch onderzoek:

transnationale geschiedenis mentaliteitsgeschiedenis intellectuele geschiedenis

Translantis ‘The Digital Turn’ & Big Data De beperkingen van ‘Big’ Van vinden naar zoeken

Top-down vs. bottom-up

From: Bob Nicholson, ‘The Digital Turn’, Media History 19 (2012) 59-73, on pp. 66-67.  

Uit: Het Centrum, 10 oktober 1919, 4.

The change of scale has led to a change of state. The quantitative change has led to a qualitative one. […] [B]ig data refers to things one can do at a large scale that cannot be done at a smaller one, to extract new insights or create new forms of value

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger en Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think

(Boston 2013) 13.  

“

Big Data

≈ Distant reading

‘Distant reading’, I have once called this type of approach; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge; fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models.

Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees. Abstract Models for a Literary History (Londen en New York 2005) 1.

“

Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees. Abstract Models for a Literary History (Londen en New York 2005) 19.

‘Vraag en aanbod’

Histogram (SPSS)

Query: ‘manager’ (191.710 hits)

‘opzichter’ (≈’supervisor’) vs. ‘manager’ in KB data  

‘Efficiency’ 1945-1960 (46040 hits)

Translantis ‘The Digital Turn’ & Big Data De beperkingen van ‘Big’ Van vinden naar zoeken

Vertrouw op correlaties Maak je niet druk om ruis “Letting the data speak”

De zegeningen van Big Data volgens VMS

The era of big data challenges the way we live and interact with the world. Most strikingly, society will need to shed some of its obsession for causality in exchange for simple correlations: not knowing why but only what. This overturns centuries of established practices and challenges our most basic understanding of how to make decisions and comprehend reality. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger en Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution

That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Boston 2013) 13.  

“

1 Correlaties vs. causaliteit

https://www.google.org/flutrends/nl/#NL

http://tylervigen.com

10.000

Artikelen per jaar beschikbaar in het digitale krantencorpus van de KB  

Representativiteit

2 Ruis

3 “Letting the data speak”?

Data speaks rhetorically!  

Often these visualisations possess spectacular aesthetic qualities which make them powerful argumentative tools. This begs the question of how to approach these rhetoric qualities and in what way the argumentative power of images can (or should) be criticised.

Bernhard Rieder and Theo Röhle, ‘Digital Methods: Five Challenges’, in: David M. Berry, Understanding Digital Humanities

(Basingstoke et.al.: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), p.73.  

“

4 t/m 8 (nee, 9!)

Big data is here to stay, as it should be. But let’s be realistic: It’s an important resource for anyone analyzing data, not a silver bullet.

“

Translantis ‘The Digital Turn’ & Big Data De beperkingen van ‘Big’ Van vinden naar zoeken

Eploratory text mining

[R]igorous mathematics is not necessarily essential for using data efficiently and effectively. In particular, working with data can be playful and exploratory and deliberately without the mathematical rigor that social scientists must use to support their epistemological claims. Frederick W. Gibbs and Trevor J. Owens, ‘The Hermeneutics of Data and

Historical Writing’, in: Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty (eds.), Writing History in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan

Press, 2013).  

“

Exploratory text mining

In other words, data does not always have to be used as evidence, but can be simply for discovering and framing research questions. […] [P]laying with data – in all its formats and forms – is more important than ever. Frederick W. Gibbs and Trevor J. Owens, ‘The Hermeneutics of Data and

Historical Writing’, in: Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty (eds.), Writing History in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan

Press, 2013).  

“

‘Playing with data’

Cooccurrence patronen van het woord ‘typisch’ binnen een subcollectie documenten op basis van de query 'Vorbild/Modell/Beispiel Amerika’ in Duitse kranten

BILAND

Query: ‘Heredity’ (1876) (22/1465 hits)

BILAND

Query: ‘Heredity’ (1935) (1465 hits)

Histogram of topic models based on query ‘Vorbild/Modell/Beispiel Amerika'