And I would argue that the notion of reproducible research in the humanities just doesn’t have much currency, the way it does in the sciences, because humanists tend to believe that the scholar’s own subject position is inextricably linked to the scholarship she produces.
Humanist scholarship may take the form of personal experience shored up by theory, or theory influenced by identity. There may be less distance between scholar and scholarship.
When you call something data, you imply that it exists in discrete, fungible units; that it is computationally tractable; that its meaningful qualities can be enumerated in a finite list; that someone else performing the same operations on the same data will come up with the same results. This is not how humanists think of the material they work with.
Information and data are elastic and expansive to humanists, allowing for more nuance to be extracted when compared to traditional data and traditional interpretations of data
We can know something to be true without being able to point to a dataset, as it’s traditionally understood. We can know, to take just one example, that early silent film relied on the conventions of melodrama to create legible narratives, not because we have a spreadsheet somewhere, but because we’ve immersed ourselves so deeply in our source material that we’re attuned to its nuances.
Humanists possess an intellectual instinct borne of qualitative evidence/information.