Speaker
Description
It is too complicated to define what Digital Humanities are, since it depends on the field of humanities in which you work. Mine is philology (another difficult term to define) and most of the time I work with texts, with large amounts of text. Unless mother nature has endowed you with a great capacity for memory, it is impossible for any human being to handle large amounts of text and make any sense of them. Computers can handle large amounts of text and help you extract sense, meaning, and patterns from them. There are many superb applications for working with textual data. However, ready-to-wear applications can only do what they were designed to do, and they can certainly do a lot of things.
However, you will run into problems as soon as you want to go beyond the solutions that those apps offer. If you want to think out of the box and to be successful, you must use a programming language. I use R to handle and analyze texts, mostly Old Spanish texts, which implies an added difficulty since one of the greatest problems we face in the Digital Humanities realm is that it is a practically English only field, not only because the programs are designed for English speakers, but papers published by the finest journals are English only. There is little or no interest at all in opening it to other languages.
I also use R for many other tasks which, if done by hand, could take a lot longer than I think is reasonable. In this lecture I will show how I knew what R was, how I learned it and how, and why I use it on almost daily in my research.
