“Worked Up About Data” explores the history of and controversies around humanities data to help understand why the humanities have not been considered data-driven, even though scholars in these fields have long pioneered studying culture as essentially data and today are relying increasingly on digital platforms in their research. Looking at both critical histories of humanities data and the subsequent controversies about the concept of data as somehow opposed to humanism, I argue that our distraction about what counts, or doesn’t count, or shouldn’t count, as humanistic labor has obscured our ability to adequately track, theorize, and formalize our methods.

Meredith Martin is the founder and faculty director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, where she has also been a professor in the English department since 2006. Her book The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture 1860-1930 won the MLA First Book Prize and the Brooks-Warren Prize for Literary Criticism and was co-winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Prize. Her book, Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the Future of Historical Prosody is forthcoming from Princeton University Press, as is her co-written book Data Work in the Humanities, with Professor Zoe LeBlanc at University of Illinois-Champaign. With Mary Naydan, she oversees the Princeton Prosody Archive, a full-text searchable database of a variety of textual materials about the study of poetry and pronunciation in English from the 16th-century to the current copyright year.