Complete the principle.
Digital methods change the ______, not the epistemology. The digital corpus is the archive after two extra filters — ______ and OCR-legible, neither of which is random. So every question you would ask a document, you must ask the ______: who made it, why, and what is missing.
Word bank: scale · scanned · corpus · meaning · canon
Hints
- The collection must be interrogated like any other source.
- Scale changes what can be asked, not what counts as evidence.
Show the answer
Digital methods change the scale, not the epistemology. The digital corpus is the archive after two extra filters — scanned and OCR-legible, neither of which is random. So every question you would ask a document, you must ask the corpus: who made it, why, and what is missing.
Scale, scanned, corpus. The machine finds where to look and has no idea what it found, which is fine, as long as you never mistake its output for a population.
Practise Digital Humanities and Big Data
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Digital Humanities and Big Data
- Why is "metadata is an argument" more than a slogan?
- Sort each task by whether computation or a human reader does it better.
- Why is the OCR floor more dangerous than a simple gap in coverage?
- An n-gram chart shows 'liberty' declining sharply after 1800. Why is that not yet evidence that liberty…
- Why does a full-text archive quietly narrow what historians end up writing about?
- Which are genuine achievements of computational history?
- A large digitized corpus can be treated as a representative sample of the archive.