15 Is There a Text in These Data? The Digital Humanities and Preserving the Evidence

The “digital humanities” umbrella shelters scholars curious about novel computer-mediated analysands—software, computer games, works of digital art and literature, social media, online-only forms such as the video supercut, and so forth—as well as scholars applying computational analysis methods to text, image, sound, and video corpora both small and unimaginably large. 1 Nearly all of these scholars discover that fitting their work and its associated evidence into the humanities' present print-centered scholarly communication system—is there a readable, reviewable, (print-)publishable, citable, immutable, preservable text in these data?—carries serious challenges. Until the humanities consciously break the hegemony and path dependency of print, digital humanists will remain alienated from the rest of the humanities, preventing the humanities from adopting open processes such as data sharing and open-access publishing. In turn, this harms the reach and sustainability of the humanities as a whole.