The Digital Turn in the Humanities: Foundations and Contexts

The Digital Turn in the Humanities: Foundations and Contexts

The year 1949 witnessed an event that, at the time, seemed merely curious to most humanists: Father Roberto Busa, a Jesuit priest and Thomistic scholar, began collaborating with IBM to create an index to the works of Thomas Aquinas. This massive undertaking would eventually produce the *Index Thomisticus*, a complete concordance of Saint Thomas's writings, comprising over ten million words of Latin text. What made this project remarkable was not simply its scale but its method: for the first time, a humanistic inquiry was being conducted with the aid of electronic computation. Busa's work foreshadowed a transformation that would reshape the humanities over the subsequent seven decades. Today, we call this transformation digital humanities—though the path from Busa's mainframe-assisted scholarship to contemporary computational literary studies has been neither straight nor uncontested.

This chapter provides the intellectual and historical groundwork for understanding the digital turn in the humanities. We begin by tracing the evolution from early humanities computing to the contemporary field, examining the key technological, institutional, and theoretical developments that have shaped this transformation. We then explore the epistemological implications of computational approaches to humanistic questions, engaging with ongoing debates about methodology, evidence, and interpretation. Finally, we introduce you to the digital humanities community—its organizations, projects, and resources—preparing you for practical engagement with the field.

1. Historical Foundations: From Humanities Computing to Digital Humanities

Understanding the contemporary landscape of digital humanities requires familiarity with its historical development. The field did not emerge fully formed but rather evolved through distinct phases, each characterized by particular technologies, methodologies, and institutional formations. By examining this history, we gain not only context but also insight into ongoing tensions and possibilities within the field.

1.1 The Pioneering Era (1940s–1960s)

The origins of computational humanities scholarship lie in the immediate postwar period, when electronic computers first became available for civilian research. Father Busa's collaboration with IBM, begun in 1949, represents the earliest sustained application of computing to humanistic text analysis. His work on the *Index Thomisticus* demonstrated that computers could handle the massive repetitive tasks involved in concordance creation—work that would have taken human scholars decades to complete by hand.

Several other pioneering projects emerged during this era. In 1952, the Modern Language Association established its Annual Bibliography, which would later incorporate computational methods for tracking scholarly publications. The Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English, created between 1961 and 1964, represented the first large-scale machine-readable corpus of a language variety, containing one million words of text from various genres. This corpus became foundational for subsequent linguistic research and established the model of systematically collected, annotated text collections.

The work of Father Busa and his contemporaries was characterized by what we might call humanities-driven computation: scholars with humanistic questions sought out computational assistance, often working directly with computer scientists and engineers to develop appropriate tools. This pattern would recur throughout the field's history, as humanists repeatedly discovered that existing computational methods required significant adaptation to suit humanistic inquiry.

1.2 Institutionalization and Expansion (1970s–1980s)

The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the gradual institutionalization of computational humanities research. University centers dedicated to humanities computing began to emerge, providing infrastructure and expertise for researchers interested in computational methods. The University of Toronto's Centre for Computing in the Humanities, founded in 1969, became one of the earliest such institutions, while similar centers followed at Oxford, Michigan, and elsewhere.

This period also saw the development of markup standards that would prove foundational for subsequent digital humanities work. The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), developed in the late 1970s and standardized in 1986, provided a systematic way to describe the structure of documents through tags. Rather than simply formatting text for display, SGML allowed scholars to mark semantic elements—chapters, paragraphs, speaker turns, footnotes—enabling both human comprehension and machine processing.

The emergence of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) in the late 1980s represented a crucial milestone. Originally conceived as a means of standardizing the encoding of machine-readable texts in the humanities, the TEI developed a comprehensive set of guidelines for marking up literary texts, historical documents, and other primary sources. The TEI guidelines, now maintained by the TEI Consortium, remain the dominant standard for scholarly text encoding and embody a crucial principle: that markup should be interpretive, capturing not merely surface features but scholarly understanding of texts.

The rise of personal computing during this period also democratized access to computational tools. While early humanities computing required access to mainframe computers, the proliferation of microcomputers enabled individual scholars to conduct computational research without institutional computing support. This shift would accelerate in subsequent decades, eventually leading to the current era where powerful computational tools are accessible to anyone with a laptop and internet connection.

1.3 The Internet Era and Networked Scholarship (1990s–2000s)

The emergence of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s transformed the digital landscape for humanities scholarship. Suddenly, digital texts, tools, and communities could be accessed globally through networked connections. This transformation had several significant consequences for the field.

First, the web enabled the creation of digital libraries and archives that made primary sources widely accessible. Projects like the Oxford Text Archive, established in 1976 but vastly expanded in the 1990s, and the University of Michigan's Making of America project demonstrated the potential for networked access to digitized historical materials. The Digital Library Federation, founded in 1995, coordinated efforts among institutions working on digital preservation and access.

Second, the web facilitated new forms of scholarly communication and collaboration. Email, discussion lists, and eventually dedicated platforms enabled scholars to share resources, discuss methods, and collaborate across institutional and national boundaries. The establishment of digital humanities journals, such as *Digital Humanities Quarterly* (launched in 2007), provided venues for peer-reviewed publication of computational humanities research.

Third, the period saw increasing attention to infrastructure development. Organizations like the Digital Humanities Alliance (later the Digital Humanities Association) and the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities (established in 2000) provided funding and coordination for large-scale digital projects. The term "digital humanities" itself came into widespread use during this period, gradually replacing the earlier "humanities computing" to encompass a broader range of activities beyond text analysis.

The establishment of dedicated digital humanities centers accelerated during this period. The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia (founded 2