Small, thick, and slow: Thinking about data and research publication in the Humanities in the age of Open and FAIR

We often speak about "Scholarly Communication" as if it is a single enterprise. This is despite our experience, which suggests that every (sub)discipline has different understandings about almost every part of the process: from the value of journals, to the function of referees, to the very point of publication. 

This is particularly true of the Humanities, which often seem like a complete outlier when it comes to many core aspects of modern networked research communication. They have different monopolistic presses, can be even more difficult to capture using standard bibliometric tools, and, perhaps most importantly, can have completely different understandings as to the purpose and nature of their major processes and elements.

In this paper, I look particularly at the question of data and their relation to research publication in the Humanities. I argue that at least some types of traditional humanities data are quite different from those dominant  in other disciplines, and that the failure to recognise this has prevented us from fully understanding the strengths of traditional approaches to research in these disciplines. 

I conclude by discussing an approach to the publication and citation of data in the Humanities that attempts to account for these differences and make it easier to incorporate traditional research in "big data" approaches to aggregation and reuse.