The Data Deluge: Developments and Delights

In the humanties data is plentiful, i.e., in fields such as history, linguistics, archaeology, musicology, art and literature. Large amounts of data require some form of automatic analysis if they are to be exploited systematically. A barrier to the deployment of computational techniques, and therefore to the blossoming of humanities computing, has been the acquisition of data in digital form. But more data is becoming available regularly, and there is every indication that this tendency will continue.

Processing large amounts of data has its own challenges, essentially sacrificing depth for breadth, and also appreciating what can be seen broadly. We illustrate this primarily with work in humanties computing in Groningen – on dialectology, economic history, grammar, and architectural history.

An advantage of the focus on large data sets is the renewed engagement it enables with traditional humanities questions. We are even *now* answering older questions with new methods.