Reflexivity in Issues of Scale and Representation in a Digital Humanities Project

TL;DR

This paper discusses challenges and considerations in developing a digital humanities pipeline that integrates NLP, data analysis, and visualization for a longitudinal personal diary corpus, emphasizing issues of scale and representation.

Contribution

It highlights the conceptual and practical challenges of representing and visualizing a single-person, multi-decade diary corpus in digital humanities research.

Findings

Addressed issues of data representation and visualization in a longitudinal diary corpus

Identified conceptual challenges in scale and historical interpretation

Explored team-based approaches to data analysis in digital humanities

Abstract

In this paper, we explore issues that we have encountered in developing a pipeline that combines natural language processing with data analysis and visualization techniques. The characteristics of the corpus - being comprised of diaries of a single person spanning several decades - present both conceptual challenges in terms of issues of representation, and affordances as a source for historical research. We consider these issues in a team context with a particular focus on the generation and interpretation of visualizations.