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Working with Digital Texts: Challenges, Opportunities, and Best Practices

This article discusses the challenges and opportunities of working with digital texts, including mass digitization, digital scholarly editions, electronic literature, social media, and the "prosumer" phenomenon. It also explores the issues of authorship, ownership, platform obsolescence, and preservation. The article highlights the importance of critical interpretation and the potential for unexpected discoveries when working with millions of digital texts.

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Working with Digital Texts: Challenges, Opportunities, and Best Practices

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  1. Working with digital texts part 1 Francesca Benatti and David King, The Open University

  2. Do you work with digital texts?

  3. Mass digitisation

  4. Digital scholarly editions

  5. Electronic literature Produced for aesthetic ends through digital means and to be read/viewed/listened to through digital means e.g. Electronic Literature Organization (ELO)’s collections

  6. Social media

  7. Challenges from digital media The “prosumer” phenomenon: erasing barriers between producers and consumers Who is the author? Who owns what? The problem of abundance: should we keep “everything”? What is everything anyway?

  8. Challenges continued Digitised texts: Digital is not a surrogate or window (Ryan Cordell 2017) but a new object Born-digital texts: Platform obsolescence, preservation (Acid-Free Bits) Gatekeepers new and old that we are possibly not as aware of

  9. Even more challenges Research methods: Humanities research methods are predicated on scarcity “Beautiful histories of small things” (Tim Hitchcock) Social sciences methods rely on explicit consent What do social media users consent to exactly?

  10. Distant vs close reading How can we cope with “big data” and its challenges? Macroscope and microscope (Hitchcock again) Significant debate in digital humanities at the moment

  11. Opportunities of digital texts Close examination, at word- or even letter-level of a single text or small number of texts Comparisons between large amounts of texts Unexpected discoveries e.g. Old Bailey Online is largest repository of 17th-century spoken English

  12. What can you do with millions of digital texts?

  13. Ted Underwood’s map of working with digital texts http://tedunderwood.com/2015/06/04/seven-ways-humanists-are-using-computers-to-understand-text/ CC-BY-SA 3.0

  14. What can you do continued

  15. What can you do continued

  16. What should you not do with digital texts? Consider them just as “surrogates” of a material text or as transparent windows They are cultural artefacts Assume the data you derive from them is in any way “objective” All data, all texts, all tools require critical interpretation

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