Introducing The Fish and the Painting: a new open access handbook-in-progress on data-driven humanities research

"I think it’s becoming increasingly clear to people all of the ways data is giving us insights into how literature and culture works.

What’s not totally clear is how we make this transition institutionally and pedagogically.

There are still a ton of roadblocks for adapting these methods in the humanities. Some of those are ideological (insert obvious examples), but many are simply practical. Like, how do you create courses that can help students with little to no quantitative or programming skills learn to apply these methods to studying culture? If you’re a faculty member, journalist, or independent researcher interested in studying a large collection of documents, how do you know where to begin?

This is where The Fish and the Painting comes in. I’ve been teaching a course like this for several years now and have learned many of the challenges students face, but also seen the rewards and the exciting outcomes when things finally click. Watching students become competent data scientists and have their thinking about culture transformed has been truly transformative for me as a teacher.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers about the best ways to introduce students or peers to these new methods. But my hope is that this handbook can be a useful tool to help teachers create syllabi that give students hands-on access to data-driven research or give faculty an overview of the type of thinking that goes into successful data-driven research...."