The increasing availability and accessibility of big data, whether digitized material or digital-born data, challenges scholars in various disciplines to develop new theories and methods, explore new venues for research, and develop new technological tools to research data sets and present the results to the academic community and society.
In order to expand the traditional scope of the humanities, researchers from various disciplines cooperate in the Groningen Centre for Digital Humanities. It promotes a multi- and interdisciplinary approach to foster innovative research and to fuse the strengths of humanities research with those of computer and information science.
While new methods will be developed to analyze newly established big data sets, ranging from text corpora to digitized archives, audiovisual media and social media content, theoretical reflection is necessary to give findings meaning in historical and cultural contexts.