Making Museum Global Impacts Visible: Advancing Digital Public Humanities from Data Aggregation to Data Intelligence

Abstract

The chapter pursues two goals: first, it aims to situate big data analysis within the growing field of digital humanities; second, it employs an empirical exploration of the project “Deep Mapping” to discuss and demonstrate challenges and opportunities of the recent advancements in the big data digital humanities, specifically in the field of cultural geo-visualization. It identifies and examines three foundational levels of digital humanities research practices which include (1) Data Aggregation, (2) Data Visualization, and (3) Data Intelligence. Each of these levels forms a progression of the digital public humanities research from the mere capture of cultural data to its strategic employment for generating new insights to forecast development of a specific digital phenomenon, object, or process. Drawing on this framework, the chapter conceptualizes big data curation within digital humanities as an area of research and practice that entails a strong engagement with the wider public beyond academia.