I was really struck by how the article came back to the idea of always having to go back and read the sources, even if you make visualizations/use digital tools. Digital tools in the humanities is just a different tool in our arsenal, it shouldn’t replace traditional methods.
I was also intrigued by their challenge regarding digital tools: should radically different tools be expected to provide radically different findings? Aren’t we looking at the same data/sources we’ve always looked at in traditional methods? They touched on an answer briefly by noting that digital sources have the potential to fine tune or correct assumptions, but I’d be interested in reading an entire article on this challenge alone. In my opinion, I think that at times we’ll get radically different findings because some tools allow for a macro instead of micro level of analysis (like Cunfer). At other times, digital tools should reveal what we already know and not be radically different. That’s how we can learn to trust these tools, like Trading Consequences pointed out last week.
I like that the tutorial went over the multitude of ways nodes can be connected, whether through geographical proximity, ownership, or even media content, and how all of this variability is determined by your research question. It was nice to get to experience a different form of mapping that wasn’t based on geographic locations.