Humanities Research Part II: Secondary Sources
Digital Abundance?
This brings with it opportunity — imagine being able to search for keywords across millions of documents, leading to radically faster search times — but also challenge, as the number of electronic documents increases exponentially.
Identify the Problem
Topic Modeling
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
https://pro.europeana.eu/page/issue-13-ocr
Keyword Searching
OCR/Keyword Research
- Greater access to (some) resources
- New ways of searching across documents
- Can find information more quickly
- Can ask new questions that you couldn't explore before
- False positives / false negatives
- Accuracy of content
- Often takes longer to browse/skim
- Lose context that comes from browsing sources/shelves of books
What do we gain?
What are some challenges?
Best Practices/Solutions
- Always skim/browse documents for event-based history (convenience + comprehensive)
- Do multiple searches for important information (singular/plural, abbreviated forms, alternate spellings, etc.)
- Be upfront about searches and how you found/didn't find information
- Humanities scholars working with database managers and/or crowdsourcing OCR transcriptions
