By way of concluding discussion of this approach, it is worth noting that there are a number of advantages provided by the use of DH tools that appear directly aimed at enhancing, rather than replacing, familiar approaches in the humanities. The least “flashy” advantage offered by the use of tools like QGIS, Atlas.ti, and Scalar is the one that would perhaps appeal the most to any graduate student or time-pressed scholar: they allow one to do more work in less time.¹ This increases capacity on the individual scale of research projects, but these tools can also contribute to an increase in productive capacity of groups of scholars across time. By using digital tools and platforms to produce and disseminate data, researchers can build upon one another’s research in more direct ways. Sharing a digital dataset may allow future researchers to supplement it with their own data for their own purposes, contribute to increasing a common data source, or validate experiments conducted using the dataset. 

This last opportunity points to the increase in transparency that can accompany the work of scholars conducted or disseminated using digital tools. The principles of transparency and accountability that remain vital to scholarly work have a chance to find new, powerful expression in digital publications. From reference management software to digital publication platforms, the digitization of academic writing processes can transform the analog “breadcrumb” trail of citations to a one-click hyperlink trail of trackable discourse. Although this may sound rather optimistic and utopian, it acknowledges that DH is not a solution to all scholarly problems. It is important to add, however, that issues like academic dishonesty and intellectual piracy that might seem more strongly associated with things digital, are old problems that can’t be said to have originated with the so-called “Digital Age.” On the contrary, it seems that tools that track authorship, version history, and citations in publications, for instance, offer much promise at potentially being able to slow, if not prevent, such problems in digital contexts.