ABSTRACT
In recent years, large amounts of data with great humanistic and historical relevance have become available to researchers. Digitized archives of socioculturally relevant material, such as newspapers, historical records, and material native to the digital sphere (e.g., online forums and social networking sites), are expanding at a fast rate. It is evident that this material can be of vital value to the humanities; in the digital humanities (DH), scholars argue that Big Data allows scholars in the humanities and history to ask new, different questions (e.g., Guldi and Armitage 2014) or predict that tools will answer such new questions eventually (Scheinfeldt 2010). Nicholson (2013) suggested that history might be in the process of a digital turn. Big Data is a buzzword and it has been for over a decade. This is also apparent from the continuing emergence of many projects devoted to developing tools fit for specific data sets. Unfortunately, tools are often not sustained beyond their initial projects, preventing a more elaborate network of DH tools (Snelders et al. 2017). The focus on new projects and tools means that the exploration of new approaches, driven by the profitable urge for the new, takes priority over sustaining and elaborating on existing methodological approaches characterized by the critical engagement and contextual awareness crucial to humanities research.
