TY - JOUR TI - Working at scale: what do computational methods mean for research using cases, models and collections? AU -Daniel C S Wilson PY - 2023 VL - Congruence Engine IS - Autumn 2022 KW - AI for GLAM KW - Computational Humanities KW - History KW - Machine Learning KW - scale KW - STS AB - N1 - Sabina Leonelli has written widely on this issue; for a comprehensive overview, see her entry, ‘Scientific Research and Big Data’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , edited by Edward N Zalta, Summer 2020 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2020), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/science-big-data/. N1 - For suggestive examples, see https://www.turing.ac.uk/news N1 - The controversy surrounding The History Manifesto turned, to an extent, on the equation of scale and significance; discussed further below. N1 - In relation to the turn to micro-histories such as by Carlo Ginzburg, see for example, Jacques Revel, ed, Jeux d’échelles: la micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris: Gallimard le Seuil, 1996). N1 - https://www.turing.ac.uk/news/data-science-and-ai-glossary N1 - See (Da, 2019) and the ensuing responses in Critical Inquiry and elsewhere. N1 - See (Moretti, 2013), but others have attempted to differentiate between quantitative and digital approaches altogether, see (Underwood, 2017). The work of digitisation is always difficult, complex and expensive; nonetheless, literary texts tend to have presented fewer barriers to usability than other sources such as maps or newspapers, to take just two examples. N1 - See the work of the Stanford Literary Lab, Ted Underwood, Peter de Bolla and the centrality and widespread availability, for example, of collections such as ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online). N1 - A recently published book stakes a claim for ‘Scale Studies’ as a sub-field of English, (Horton, 2021). N1 - See (Ahnert et al, 2021) for an exploration of this approach. N1 - C.f., (Bode, 2020) N1 - See (Pechenick, 2015) N1 - (‘Scientists pinpoint the year Britons were happiest’, 2019) N1 - In specific relation to metrology and the shift from local to global, see Simon Schaffer, ‘Les cérémonies de la mesure’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 70.2 (2015): 409–35. N1 - See Lino Camprubí and Philipp Lehmann, ‘The Scales of Experience: Introduction to the Special Issue Experiencing the Global Environment’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 70 (2018): 1–5. For a discussion of the appropriate scale, in relation to both time and space, see Deborah R Coen and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, ‘Between History and Earth System Science’, Isis 113, no. 2 (1 June 2022): 407–16) as well as Coen’s prize-winning monograph, Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020). N1 - On the latter point see John Forrester’s classic discussion, which departs from the clinical case history, but goes much further (Forrester, 1996); on the former, Michel Callon’s study of scallops pushed ‘scaling down’ to new limits (Callon, 1996). N1 - (Krause, 2021, pp 14–32) emphasis added. N1 - See on this point, Long, 2021. N1 - See The Turing Way, as an attempt to formalise such practices (https://zenodo.org/record/6909298) (accessed 10 September 2022). N1 - This spirit continues in the work of the Seshat: Global History project, see (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/4/000272/000272.html). N1 - See this excellent, if alarming, overview: ‘History as a giant data set: how analysing the past could help save the future’ by Laura Spinney, The Guardian 12 November 2019 (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/12/history-as-a-giant-data-set-how-analysing-the-past-could-help-save-the-future) N1 - See also the approach to scalar reading in history proposed by Clavert and Fickers, 2020. N1 - See https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/side-by-side for an example of this functionality, created by Chris Fleet. N1 - Such as in the work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, pioneered by the late Tony Wrigley and Peter Laslett (https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/). N1 - See (https://github.com/Living-with-machines/MapReader). PB - The Science Museum Group SN - 2054-5770 LA - eng DO - 10.15180/221805 UR - https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/working-at-scale-what-do-computational-methods-mean-for-research-using-cases-models-and-collections/ T2 - Science Museum Group Journal