In our Introduction to Digital Humanities class, we’ve come to the conclusion that the values of Digital Humanities consist of: Collaboration
Experimentation
Openness
Diversity
Transparency
Which doesn’t come as a surprise, broad enough but not the complete story, so I’ll add one at my convenience and hard to argue. If “Openness” and “Transparency” can both be a value in all of its redundancy, why shouldn’t a metric of measurement that is constantly used in humanities be a value.
How much did stocks drop by when the economy crashed, how many years between a civilization’s start till the last words of its language being breathed, how many lives lost in a tragedy that sparks international backlash. There is a metric of which all of these are measured by, the metric of “universal constants” and that will be my addition to values, “constants”.
On the cold and calculated, Physics is based on the values of a physical constant, a degree for all universal benchmarks for calculations and comparisons to be measured by. Constants including: elementary charge (1.602 × 10⁻¹⁹ C), the gravitational constant (6.674 × 10⁻¹¹ N·m²/kg²), and Avogadro’s number (6.022 × 10²³ mol⁻¹).
With that being said, how different is the question of “how many mols are in a gram of NaCl?” from “how many people are live on twitch at a given time?”?