Big Data, Grand Challenges: On digitization and humanities research

When I started working on my PhD, in 1987 at the University of California, San Diego (US), I wanted to examine how a public debate on a controversial issue results in consensus. My PhD thesis resulted in a book on the course of the public debate around in vitro fertilization in the US news media between 1978 and 1985 (Van Dijck, 1995). Due to the enormous supply of newspapers and journals it was infeasible to retrieve all information from this debate, so selection was necessary. Fortunately, I encountered a (private) archive of an institute that had documented very systematically (though not exhaustively) clippings about this subject. Audiovisual sources were almost impossible to collect and, even if I would have had them, I would have lacked the time to plow through all of them. Thus my corpus was limited, and within this limitation, I had to show my mastery. The interpretative approach I chose turned out to be an excellent exercise in analyzing a public debate. The most important lesson from that aptitude test, now twenty-five years ago: available data determine the nature of the research question as well as the set of instruments with which you can query the sources.