Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 191

the full text content of digital historical records . . . using medieval char-
ters which survive in abundance from the 12th to the 16th centuries and
are one of the richest sources for studying the lives of people in the past.
The new ChartEx tools will enable users to really dig into the content of
these records, to recover their rich descriptions of places and people, and
to go far beyond current digital catalogues which restrict searches to a
few key facts about each document (the 'metadata')” ( Digging into Data
Challenge 2011).
The ODH program has succeeded in giving the humanities a signiicant
push into quantitative research that takes advantage of cloud computing
systems to examine large sets of data. 3 ODH has also attracted interna-
tional attention and support. Its 2009 and 2011 “digging into big data”
competitions received proposals from 150 research teams and funded 22
from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and the Netherlands.
For 2013, support and sponsorship expanded across new research councils
and government funding authorities, giving the program ten sponsors.
This is signiicant because government support for the humanities, includ-
ing research, teaching, and archiving, has declined to perilous levels in
most Western societies, leaving cloud-based, big-data research one of the
few areas where funding is on the rise (Delany 2013). Moreover, govern-
ment research councils that have seen their budgets cut are devoting more
of what little is left to funding computational research in the humani-
ties. Defenders of the digital humanities support this shift because they
believe it is bringing about a revolutionary transformation in all facets of
humanities education and research. As the head of the NEH exclaimed,
“A revolution has commenced where science and technology are melding
with the humanities” (Leach 2011).
Not everyone in the humanities sees it this way, including Stanley
Fish, one of the most distinguished literary and cultural-studies scholars
of our time. For Fish, most supporters of the digital humanities advance
a view that he considers “theological” because it promises freedom from
the constrictions of a medium that is both linear and time-bound, which
can only produce knowledge that is discrete, partial, and situated (i.e.,
for here and now, by this author, and for this audience). For its support-
ers, the digital humanities use the cloud and computational methods to
provide a universe in which knowledge is fully available everywhere and
to everyone. Through it, we all become nodes in a network of meaning