Humanities researchers and students use data all the time in their work, but until relatively recently, many would not have classified the material they worked with as data. While data can absolutely be raw files of numbers and spreadsheets, data is inherent to the work of humanities:
Primary sources, survey results, methodologies, photographs, recordings, and more can all be considered types of data that can be worked with digital tools. Knowledge of the tools, helps you to see how to apply them to your data, but often you need data first to understand how to use the tools. A conundrum! If you're looking for starter data to begin your first project, we recommend looking at some of the resources below:
Government resources are a rich source of data to be mined, but they are not always easy to navigate either. As you navigate, consider all the unique levels of government data that might be useful for your specific type of data: Federal, State, County/Parish, or City.
The library subscribes to a number of databases which allow for us to download and pull reports on data. Each of these downloading methods will be unique per database. Please reach out to a librarian if you have difficulty figuring out how to grab data.
The world's largest archive of digital social science data. Contains over 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences, including specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields. (Note: You must create a personal account to access the datasets. ICPSR IS ONLY AVAILABLE TO THE GONZAGA COMMUNITY.)
Qualitative data analysis can be done a number of ways. Finding large corpus' of text depends on what on your unique subset.