Critical Search: A Procedure for Guided Reading in Large-Scale Textual Corpora
Jo Guldi · Journal of Cultural Analytics · 2018
Q: What happens when the good, old-fashioned virtues of Liberal Arts education, e.g. "Critical Thinking," enter the age of big data? A: We teach "Critical Search," a model process for approaching big data research. Critical Search models a way of engaging humanities question, textuality, secondary literature, data, and tools. It is suitable to both the statistician who wishes to make meaning from the past as well as the traditional humanist who browses library catalogs through keywords. This article presents the concept of "critical search" and offers an exposition of its application to a search for the history of eviction in nineteenth-century Britain.