Chapter 2

我母静恒

Content Interpretation：
This chapter provides a systematic analysis of how digital technologies are restructuring the core workflows of humanities research.
It begins by establishing a foundational distinction between the evidentiary paradigms of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. While the former often relies on quantitative data analyzed for broad patterns, the humanities have traditionally been defined by their focus on the unique artifact—the specific document, artwork, or life that embodies "alterity."
Then it argues that the digital shift is not merely a change in efficiency but a transformation in the very nature of accessing and constituting evidence. This is powerfully illustrated by the Darwin Online project, which turns a physically dispersed and inaccessible archive into an immediately available, searchable digital corpus, epitomizing the move from scarcity to abundance.
The most critical section of the chapter deals with the concept of "representation." It posits that all scholarship is a curated representation of a lost reality, a sampling whose authority in the print era was built on the reputation of the scholar and the publisher. The digital environment, however, creates a paradox: it offers more extensive and potentially more accurate representations through massive aggregation, yet it simultaneously risks diminishing our connection to the materiality of original sources and challenges the traditional "grammar" of humanistic interpretation.
It concludes by examining the practical tools for this new organization, from digital libraries and search engines replacing curated catalogs, to databases and spreadsheets replacing index cards, emphasizing how these tools require new forms of disciplinary rigor and planning.

Personal Insights：
The chapter’s discussion of representation resonates profoundly with a central epistemological tension in Digital Humanities. The promise of digital aggregation—exemplified by projects like Google Books aiming to scan "all known existing books"—creates an illusion of totality, a potentially complete historical record. However, this very illusion is dangerous. A billion search results are not a closer approximation of "reality"; they are a new, algorithmically constructed representation whose biases and silences are often more hidden than those of a physical card catalog curated by a subject librarian.
My key insight is that the primary task of the digital humanist is therefore to become a critical cartographer of this new digital territory. We must not just use these tools but interrogate how they shape our scholarly gaze.
The design of a database, for instance, is not a neutral pre-research activity; it is an argument. Deciding which fields to include when tagging a Shostakovich composition (e.g., prioritizing instrumentation over reception history) inherently privileges a certain analytical framework. Thus, the "new digital rhetoric" we must develop is not just about presenting findings, but about making transparent the constructedness of our digital evidence.
The core humanistic value shifts from interpreting texts to also interpreting and designing the infrastructures that make those texts digitally legible. This ensures we use the power of the digital not to chase a mirage of total knowledge, but to ask deeper, more complex questions about the human record.