User:Standard Drone/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Digital humanities

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it provides a general summary of the field of digital humanities in which our course is situated, making it critical as a widely available introduction for anyone looking to gain a brief understanding of it. My first impression was that it was interesting to see much of the topics and themes that our course has focused on featuring in the "Criticism" section, but also unsettling that such important criticisms, still works within the field in their own right, take up less than half the page.

Evaluate the article
Lead section

The lead section successfully condenses the definition of digital humanities with a dictionary-like clarity in its first sentence. It does not include any information unavailable in the main article, however it does suffer from an issue of attempting neutrality by not including enough summation of the major sections. In confining itself to a false sense of neutrality, this introductory section focuses almost entirely on describing only the “Definition” section.

Content

All of the article’s content is consistently relevant to the topic at hand but that apparent relevance is then stifled by both not being up-to-date enough and missing crucial content. It is clear that the content is not current especially when noticing most of the information covered is only as recent as 2018, with only a handful from 2020 or later. This excludes a huge amount of newer scholarly work and DH projects. The “History” section is also a prime suspect for a great gap in content with a stark jump between two major events in 2009 and 2018, lacking even brief notes for important events throughout a whole decade while older periods like the 1940s and 1950s are given adequate summation. Although the article’s “Criticism” section does deal with historically marginalised groups and the inattention to injustice within the field, it problematically relegates these issues to only that section rather than featuring more examples of underrepresented work in the “History” and “Projects” sections.

Tone and Balance

The article’s writing itself appears neutral without any specific signposts of bias in tone alone but the form and balance of topics is unfortunately far from neutral. Aside from the “Digital Archives” sub-section and “Criticism” section focusing on the underrepresented, the article skews heavily towards overrepresented views painting an image of DH as being interested in human behaviour from a seemingly universal perspective neglecting aspects like gender, race and class. This exact approach reinforces deliberate ignorance that targets marginalised groups. The imbalance of pushing underrepresented issues into a “Criticism” section combined with not featuring them as much elsewhere in the article, whether intentionally or not, appears to be persuading readers that the scholars who bring up these criticisms are not themselves part of the DH field, unlike those they are criticizing.

Sources and References

The article’s facts are all indeed supported by reliable evidence, with most being taken from journals and books and even when websites are listed, these are often tied to reliable institutions such as universities. While there are not necessary better sources to replace the ones included, the problem of thoroughness and being current once again continues from my previous criticisms of content where not enough recent work is covered beyond 2018 and within that, not remotely enough work from diverse or marginalised scholars. The links where available and open to public access do work and show the source.

Organization and writing quality

The article is effectively clear and concise with a succinct and direct style that was easy to read, all grammatically correct and well-spelt. Outside of my criticisms towards content and bias, the division of sections is laid out professionally.

Images and Media

The images included are well-placed in demonstrating examples of how digital tools are used in the field and all abide by Wikipedia’s copyright regulations. The captions are clear and give enough context to understand what is being shown though there is a legibility issue with the quality of the image captioned “Narrative network of US Elections 2012”. On a minor note, the page could do with many more images to better illustrate the abundant variety of tools.

Talk page discussion

Many conversations are happening in the Talk page, much of it surrounding confusion over concepts and concerns over how to cohesively present the many different aspects of such a big topic. The article is a part of several WikiProjects such as ‘WikiProject Science’ and ‘WikiProject History’ and its ratings are largely the same B-class with some slight differences between some WikiProjects rating it as mid-importance and others rating it as top-importance. Very few of the users in the Talk page highlight the same issues I noted with underrepresentation which is the main contrast against how deeply we cover these topics in our course, and once again the lack of attention to these issues is cyclically part of the problem.

Overall impressions

When compared to the actual field of digital humanities, it is severely lacking, especially with a focus on information that attempts ‘neutrality’ by way of separating work that incorporates social issues and minoritized groups. While it offers a good amount of information about some aspects of digital humanities such as the use of digital programs and data mining, it leaves much underrepresented. For my own evaluation, as a current student in a digital humanities course with a focus on justice and matters of representation, the article is deeply underdeveloped.