Big Data and Digital Humanities

In academic discourse, the term Big Data is often used incorrectly or not considered in relevant use cases. This paper investigates the term Big Data in the context of text oriented digital humanities and in the process shows that it is not necessarily an issue of big data sets. The goal is to provide a starting point or a guideline for researchers in the humanities to relate their work to the concept of Big Data. It may even show the reader that they might be working on a task that can be considered as Big Data even though the data set itself is comparatively small. As such, this paper should not be seen as a concrete solution to specific problems but as a general overview that is based on several years of practical research experience. This paper also argues that interoperability is one of the most prominent Big Data issues in text oriented digital humanities.