I seem to have been to a feast of digital humanities talks in the last couple of days… At Thursday’s CoDE/CMT seminar, James Wade (Emmanuel, Cambridge) and Peter Stokes (King’s, London) discussed the digitization of medieval manuscripts, with Wade discussing the transmogrifications of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur as it moved from manuscript to print and into twentieth and twenty-first century editions, and Stokes asking what it means to ‘put a manuscript on the web’, given that such an act is literally impossible. Perhaps (he suggested) we need to stop thinking that we are accurately ‘representing’ the manuscript, and instead admit that we’re engaged in acts of modelling, which need to be tailored precisely to our sense of how the digitized materials will be used. For me this raised the question of how much we know about the ways in which people use digital resources–do we really read things online, or do we just raid them? (Or are reading and raiding much the same thing?)

Yesterday lunchtime I just managed to make time for the CRASSH Digital Humanities Network seminar on ‘Using Social Media Data for Research: The Ethical Challenges’. Here Fabian Neuhaus (UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) and Dr Sharath Srinivasan (Centre of Governance and Human Rights, POLIS) posed some difficult questions about the viability of gathering evidence from tweets or text-messages. The delight of such sources for the researcher is that they provide very precise details that allow you to locate the point of origin of a message; you can map the way in which people are using these media, and you can perhaps begin to tie up particular behaviours and viewpoints with places, times, and social strata (see http://urbantick.blogspot.com/ for more). But this also makes the data–which is difficult to anonymize–very sensitive and open to abuse.  How do you get ‘informed consent’ to use this material for research purposes in the first place? And what do you do when the police (or, in some circumstances, the local dictators) come to your office and ask if they can share your information?