In response to my last post on “the Stream,” Cameron Blevins (His​tory​-ing​.org) pointed out that one “issue with the stream is the seem­ingly eter­nal one of breadth vs. depth,” and that one of the “biggest” chal­lenges for a user was the “transi­tion from hori­zontal skim­ming to ver­tical bor­ing down” into the stream. I agree with Cameron that tran­si­tion­ing from one level to the other is a fun­da­men­tal skill and a chal­lenge to learn and prac­tice. I do, how­ever, believe that these are skill sets human­ists already use/​practice to a greater (or lesser) extent. I had to develop both skills, espe­cially the skim­ming tech­nique, for his­tory grad sem­i­nars: 1 mono­graph (+ any needed sup­ple­men­tary mate­r­ial) /​class /​week @ 2 — 3 classes /​semes­ter. In fact, I am still devel­op­ing these skills as I prep for quals this spring.

The deep drilling is, I would agree, the hard­est to nego­ti­ate. The ques­tion, at least for me, is how dig­i­tal tools may help us with deep bor­ing the ever-​thickening data stream – par­tic­u­larly with respect to the point Dr. Cohen made in “Inter­change: The Promise of Dig­i­tal His­tory” about research and drilling deep in a research project. What the tools are/​is/​will be is an open ques­tion, at least for me.

I think that the API Work­shop hosted by NiCHE looks very promis­ing in help­ing the dig­i­tal human­ist find and/​or cre­ate such tools:

His­to­ri­ans and other human­ists now have access to dig­i­tal pri­mary and sec­ondary sources on an unprece­dented scale, but almost all of these resources are deliv­ered through web browsers with the assump­tion that a per­son will be plod­ding through them one at a time. What we need now are ways to make these sources read­ily avail­able to com­puter pro­grams: intel­li­gent agents, machine learn­ers, adap­tive fil­ters, data min­ing pack­ages, you name it. We need to be able to recom­bine infor­ma­tion from mul­ti­ple sources in a way that sup­ports the dis­cov­ery of new infor­ma­tion. And we need to pro­vide tools that allow net­worked col­lec­tives to work together and lever­age the power and diver­sity of the indi­vid­u­als that com­prise the group.

– William Turkel

Our abil­ity to tap the stream, whether on a hor­i­zon­tal or ver­ti­cal level, as Cameron noted, is the one area “that has the great­est poten­tial for real advance­ment, espe­cially in the dig­i­tal human­i­ties.” Our skim v. bore skill set honed in sem­i­nars, quals, and research in gen­eral gives us (I think) a unique per­spec­tive in devel­op­ing or realign­ing exist­ing dig­i­tal tools to address this issue.

What are your thoughts on this issue? What other issues exist for the human­ist with respect to the real-​time stream? What are the tools that exist or should exist for deep bor­ing this stream?