How should digital humanities scholars develop research questions? Spurred on by this recent conversation on twitter, I figured I would lay out a few different ways to go about answering this question about questions. The gist of the dialog is that Jason Heppler suggested that one should “Fit the tool to the question, not the other way around” in terms of working with various kinds of new digital humanities tools. I take tools here to mean any computational instrument employed to understand the world; for examples GIS, topic modeling, creating simulations using cellular automata or agent based models, analyzing frequencies of audio files, or visualizing trends in images. I get where Jason was going, but at least as it was formulated I don’t think it is the right advice.
The conversation prompted me to try and clarify a bit of how I see the relationship between research questions, primary sources, and tools and methods.