New problems beg for new methods to reach new solutions. The Humanities, like every other aspect of life has evolved and with exponentially advancing technology, new issues arise constantly, and sometimes, our traditional methods of answering these questions just don’t cut it anymore.

We used to have this issue called: not enough information to conduct research. Now we have a new issue that goes by the name: INFORMATION OVERLOAD!!!!

When Google scholar gives us 1.2 million books about the American Civil War, reading all of them and gathering information book by book, is not only insane, but impossible. This is a new problem, and now we have digital tools that can sove them for us! New ways of searching, analyzing, and organizing texts, words, and phrases can garner new insights into old stuff.

Visualizations are the quickest way to understand something and so a simple chart or word cloud can tell us more about a text in 30 seconds than we can glean from a text by actually reading it for 30 seconds. That’s not to say that reading a text is now an obsolete practice, but finding new and multiple ways to look at the same thing can help garner more understanding.

To demonstrate this, I made a word cloud from a free generator online of all the parts in Tooling up for Digital Humanities. Just by looking at this visualization, you can tell that the article was mainly about words, text analysis, the humanities, and data. Now isn’t that pretty?