Which brings me to my point: how can the other side of DH, the DH as using digital research methods to explore phenomena in the humanities, benefit from close(r) dialogue with HST? Franco Moretti’s most recent paper – ‘Operationalizing’ – uses the work of another path finding Obi Wan Kenobi of scholarship, Thomas Kuhn, to frame its argument. So like Moretti I went back to HST, back to Kuhn, and in particular back to his 1961 essay ‘The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science.’ Here Kuhn makes three important claims whose relevance to digital research, especially quantitative work, should be clear:
