Databases in DH

I echo Matt Smith’s sentiments about the author assessing value between two mediums, that is print and digital mediums. I don’t believe that digital is the only medium which foregrounds questions. Many research articles begin with questions, provides some answers, and more often than not end with more questions for the future. However, the author of “Databases: Intro to Relational Databases & Structured Query Language” may intend that digital mediums are more question-agnostic than print media. When using a database, answers are perceived as less concrete since they rely purely on the query in data cultures or digital mediums. Print media requires disaggregation of data from a research question and reconstruction of data when trying to use it for another purpose. Databases leave more room for manipulation of data, yielding more uses out of a data set. The data can be contextualized for  more than one purpose due to the ability to manipulate queries. So, data cultures are transforming humanities because researchers no longer reverse engineer documents to find the questions, instead the questions guide the data that is being collected in the digital medium.