Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities

International audienceThis paper is about data in the humanities. Most of my colleagues in literary and cultural studies would not necessarily speak of their objects of study as "data." However, in the humanities just as in other areas of research, we are increasingly dealing with "data." With digitization efforts in the private and public sectors going on around the world, more and more data relevant to our fields of study exists, and, if the data has been licensed appropriately, it is available for research. The digital humanities aim to raise to the challenge and realize the potential of this data for humanistic inquiry. As Christine Borgman has shown in her book on Scholarship in the Digital Age, this is as much a theoretical, methodological and social issue as it is a technical issue