AS I READ Joanna Drucker and others posit new, fantastic ways digital humanities could, or should, be approaching visualization, I was struck by just how difficult it is to make these ideas a reality. Scholars imagine forms of visualization that capture nuance and are interactive in ways that align with the “values” of the humanities rather than “co-opting” methods from the sciences but have no easy way to enact those imaginings with the current technical tools available to them. At times, criticism of visualization in digital humanities, even from practitioners of visualization, feels naive in its failure to acknowledge the current state of visualization tools. Of course, imagining what might be possible in the future drives innovation and development of new tools, but such software development requires skills not already in the wheelhouse of most humanities researchers.

While it is possible to do network analysis without any programming skills at all, the process of data capture and transformation is made much easier by the ability to script. As an undergraduate studying computer science, I first came to digital humanities with more skills in the digital and spent the latter half of my undergraduate and all my graduate education skilling-up in the humanities aspects. But traditional computer science education is by no means the only, best, or even most common path for digital humanists to gain programming skills to aid their work. Websites like CodeCademy offer free lessons in languages common for DH work, like Python and R, and the journal The Programming Historian publishes free online tutorials for common digital history tasks and tools.

Even using with tools like Gephi and OpenRefine at one’s disposal, an aspiring network analyzer will find their work greatly eased by a little bit of scripting power. But it still is not easy: the work of capturing and transforming data is still labour-intensive—tedious, “mechanical,” and important work that can be difficult to have recognized by traditional academic structures.