Digital Humanities: On Finding the Proper Balance between Qualitative and Quantitative Ways of Doing Research in the Humanities

Abstract

Are we currently confusing being connected with communicating - and does the sort of communication people are typically engaging in on the Internet, in social media and when they use their mobile phones merely lead to superficial rather than meaningful dialogue? If this is the case, it ought to concern Digital Humanities (DH) scholars, many of whom continue to be more interested in how we connect than in the substance and dialogue of that very connectedness. I would like to argue for a better balance between the how and the what of DH - for a qualitative turn of sorts away from an interest in gaining and making accessible more information only, to an interest in also making sense of and understanding that information. For such a turn, computer scientists need input from the humanities whose specialty has always been to turn information into knowledge by means of critical interpretation and contextualization.