Digital Humanities Workbench


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Data collection

In the section From source to data the process of creating digital data on the basis of original (analogue) sources is described.

In this section you can find information about the collection of data, both of existing digitized sources and of data sets that are acquired by a number of different research methods.

  • Digital archives
    It is advisable to make use of digital archives and other source collections for the acquisition of digitized sources. In this section various aspects of this approach are described.
  • Corpus compilation
    For empirical language research scholars often compile text corpora of various sorts.
  • Survey
    A survey is a type of data collection tool used to gather information from a sample of people, usually with the intention of generalizing the results to a larger population.
  • Interview
    An interview is a formal meeting in which the researcher questions one or more persons about a specific subject.
  • Experiment
    An experiment is a procedure carried out to support, refute, or validate a hypothesis. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated. *
  • Field work
    Data acquisition in the field, both for archaelogy and for linguistics (to describe undocumented languages).

Research data lifecycle Collecting data and preparing it for analysis are part of what is often called the research data lifecycle. The encompassing set of activities is called data management or data curation. This concerns the overall organisation of the data, including aspects like storage, archiving and preservation.

Other topics in this section: Digital archives   Corpus compilation   Survey   Interview   Experiment   Field work   Data management