Two of the most significant benefits to scholarship of creating data from humanities sources are that 1) the data often prompts additional questions and avenues for research about those sources as a result of their new arrangement, and 2) properly cleaned and normalized data can allow for visualizations to aid our understanding of the sources. In terms of new questions that arise as a result of data, the Tudor Network, Fairfax Court Slavery Index and Early African American Film projects drove home the idea of relationships in a way that the original sources alone may not have. One example of how these projects reveal new relational information comes from the African American film data table – the linking of film data to people data allows one to compile a filmography for a particular actor who might have otherwise been lost to history. Because data can also feed into visualization software, these relationships can be visualized in a way that makes these projects more amenable to public view and study.
In each of these three projects, the team of scholars was clear about their methodology to gathering, cleaning and normalizing the data. Hoekstra and Koolen’s article emphasizes this need for methodological transparency regarding data creation, a point that may be obvious for researchers in the social sciences but one that not all humanities scholars may fully appreciate. Posner attributes this to the fact that traditionally humanities scholars have been less interested in the reproducibility of results, in contrast with other fields. In the Fairfax Slavery Index project, for example, the project scholars explain in great detail which types of records they chose to include, how they defined categories related to one’s status as enslaved or free, and even how they chose to notate different currencies. Finally, in addition to the need for disclosure of these modelling methods, Drucker draws attention to the ethical concerns related to data collection and privacy, particularly given that some jurisdictions such as the EU have enacted very strict data privacy laws (26).