Will the Future of Digital Humanities Lead to a New Global understanding of the human condition?
We can all see the way humans consume information has changed dramatically in the past twenty years. We have gone from reading newspapers, to digital media sources and cell phone applications. Social media has replaced telephones with GPS based meeting systems, and real time updates for wireless communication. The lag time between the histories we create and the present seems to be getting shorter with each new technological generation. This is a trend we have seen around the world, from regional uprisings on twitter, to the Arab Spring and the birth of technological activism. This trend is very exciting because of the cultural transparency created by crowd sourcing real time data. Many times we see that the majority tells the story, and transparency is often unavoidable due to statistical representation, and the individual voice everyone has with personal broadcasting. We all get to write history in the age of digital history and digital humanities. With access to more than just global news stories, we now can begin to data mine things like sentiment from the original source material, our voice. With more people gaining access to these types of technologies around the world, will the future of digital humanities lead to a better understanding of the human condition, and its correlation with history?
Currently an estimated 175 million people use twitter on a regular basis. This gives everyone, including digital humanists an insight into real time information that was never available before. This material covers a broad spectrum of interests and topics that can be collected, recorded and organized for future generations. The kind of data that is currently flowing in real time was once the kind of information a humanist or historian would have to dig for. According to Web Analytics World the top three countries using twitter are the United States with 107.7 million users, Brazil with 33.3 million and Japan with 29.9 million users. As of this year there are over 465 million accounts on twitter. While these numbers are staggering, I do not want you to think that this is all academic material being posted. The amount of historically significant data on twitter currently is a small percentage; with Lady Gaga topping current twitter traffic with over 19 million tweets this year. I would argue that the topic of the tweet is not always the most relevant information for a humanist, and the underlying data available is of even greater interest. With new tools like opinion mining and sentiment analysis, we can analyze this cluster of data and get something we have had very little access to in the previous historical records.
According to Bo Pang of Yahoo Research in Sunnyvale CA, and Lillian Lee of the computer science department of Cornell University in Ithaca NY " with the growing popularity of opinion-rich resources such as online review sites and personal blogs, new opportunities and challenges arise as people now can, and do, actively use information technologies to seek out and understand the opinion of others". Pang and Lee continue to say that " the sudden eruption of activity in the area of opinion mining and sentiment analysis, which deals with the computational treatment of opinion, sentiment, and subjectivity in text, has thus occurred at least in part as a direct response to the surge of interest in new systems that deal directly with opinions as first-class object." This is very important in the research digital humanists may be doing in the future. If our current worldview has decided to make sentiment part of commerce, marketing and communication, this is a field that needs to be studied and recorded by humanists around the world. This is knowledge that may have only been available by assumption of a 2nd party in oral or documented historic archives. This kind of information will most likely be a vital part of our historic footprint that should be recorded by historians of this age for future generations. It will be of great value to not lose the most human part of our current condition, and that is our feelings about the world.
Will recording and finding patterns in our sentiment and opinion lead to a greater understanding of the human condition at a global level? I would say that we have a great opportunity to see what happens right now. Many times the voices of cultures around the world, and generations of people have been silenced throughout history. Oppression of the human story has been suppressed by the state, by cultural practices, gender bias and religious intolerance for as long as we have been recording history. These technologies allow the user to maintain some level of antimony, and safety that was previously unavailable. We may now have a chance to see a bigger picture, a true picture of our world societies. I hope that future digital humanists make sentiment, opinion and the ability to data mine social media a staple in understanding the human condition.
Works Cited
Pang, Bo, and Lillian Lee. "Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis." Now the Essence of Knowledge 2 (2008): 1-2. Web. 10 June 2012. <www.cse.iitb.ac.in/>.
Kane, Brian. "Twitter Stats in 2012 [Infographic]." Twitter Stats in 2012 [Infographic]. Jump Digital, 5 Mar. 2012. Web. 11 June 2012. <http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2012/03/twitter-stats-in-2012-infographic.html>.
Manovich, Lev. "Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data." (n.d.): n. pag. 28 Apr. 2011. Web. 10 June 2012. <http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/Manovich_trending_paper.pdf>.
Like this:
Be the first to like this post.
No comments:
Post a Comment