This is the transcript of a long paper I gave as part of the “Digital Scholarship in Action: Research” panel at CSRS (Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies) in Calgary on May 30, 2016. The attendant PowerPoint is stored and indexed on the MLA Commons Open Repository Exchange, and is available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6CK59
“REED and the Prospect of Networked Data”
At the MLA in January I gave a short paper entitled “Data Envy” – a contemplation of my inferiority complex with regards to scholars who have massive corpora to work with – Moretti-sized data. I reflected on the fact that the type of research with which I’m usually involved relies on close reading of texts and maps – and at the very most I’ve been able to work with is 2,500 records. I’ll get back to that in a moment, but I’d just like to say that I ended that short talk with a provocation – one that I’d like to use as the jumping off point for this paper: in today’s DH environment, where big data and linked data are increasingly the focus of scholars looking for ways to extend their research questions through more expansive and complementary datasets, what is the role of the individual research project? Is its value now truly in its integration and association and aggregation with other datasets?