Melodee Beals (Loughborough), A Series of Small Things: The Case Study in the Age of Big Data
Scale is elusive. Too large and your project loses cohesion—your subjects, once flesh and blood, are diminished to mere ones and zeroes. Too small and you are hounded, relentlessly, by calls of ‘so what?’ and ‘yes, but!’ Yet, perhaps the answer lies not in finding some perfect mean or median of these extremes, but to explore how the case study can be reimagined and re-integrated into large-scale analyses of the human condition and how the combining of close and distant reading can lead to great things.
