Welcome to the World of Digital Humanities

What happens when you combine thousands of years of human stories with millions of lines of computer code? The answer is one of the most exciting adventures of the twenty-first century, and you are invited to join it right now, today, even if you have never written a single line of code before.

Imagine a library so big you could never finish visiting it. Inside it are books about dragon riders, secret recipes, forgotten queens, dinosaurs, soccer matches, the rings of Saturn, the recipes your grandmother used to bake bread, and every joke anyone has ever told on a Tuesday afternoon. In 2024, the world's libraries held more than 170 million different books. If a single historian tried to read just the opening sentence of every single one, working eight hours every day with a sandwich for lunch, the project would still take over three hundred years to finish. Three hundred years is longer than the United States of America has existed. It is longer than the telescope has existed. No human being, no matter how patient, has that much time.

Yet every one of those books contains an answer to a question that someone, somewhere, is dying to ask. The trouble has always been finding the answers quickly enough. This is exactly the problem a brand-new kind of scholar solves. The scholars are called *digital humanists*. They are part historian, part detective, part puzzle maker, part computer scientist, and part curious kid. They take the dusty shelves of the world's libraries and turn them into glowing screens full of color, where you can search across millions of pages in less time than it takes to brush your teeth. This opening chapter is your invitation into that world. By the time you reach the final paragraph, you will know what digital humanities really means, you will see three real tools that grown-ups and kids alike use every day, and you will start the very first project in your *Digital Humanities Passport*—a personal journal that will travel with you through every chapter of this book and beyond.

The World Before Screens: How Scholars Used to Work

To understand why digital humanities matters, you first have to picture what studying the humanities looked like before computers were small enough to fit on a desk. A *humanities scholar* is a person who studies things made by humans. That includes history, literature, languages, philosophy, religion, music, art, and folklore. The word *humanities* comes from a much older word, *humanitas*, which the ancient Romans used to mean "the things that make us people." A historian in the year 1920 had very different tools than a historian today.

Her main tool was a pencil. A pencil can do a lot. You can underline a sentence, copy a quote, mark a date, draw a little arrow pointing to a phrase you love. Around her on a long wooden table she would spread out open books, fragile newspapers torn from bound volumes, handwritten letters, and stacks of index cards. Index cards are small rectangles of stiff paper, about the size of a playing card, where scholars write down one piece of information per card. Some scholars kept tens of thousands of these cards, sorted into little wooden boxes called card catalogues. If you wanted to find every place the word *freedom* appeared in a thousand-page history book, you had to read the whole book and write each occurrence on its own card.

This took a long, long time. A famous historian named Richard Hakluyt, who lived in the 1500s, spent his entire adult life collecting stories of sea voyages. He never managed to finish. A team of brothers named Grimm collected German fairy tales by listening to old grandmothers, then writing everything down by hand. They collected over 200 tales, but there are thousands more they never reached. There was no way to speed things up. The scholar's brain could only read so fast, the pencil could only mark so many cards in a day, and the books themselves were sometimes so old and brittle that touching them too hard would crack the pages.

Computers started changing this in the middle of the twentieth century, but very slowly at first. A computer in the 1960s was the size of a room. It had no screen you could look at. You typed instructions on a punch card, carried the card across a hallway, fed it into a refrigerator-sized machine, and waited. Some big libraries in the United States began creating computer card catalogues in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of a wooden box with paper cards, they stored tiny typed records on giant magnetic tapes. When you wanted to know whether the library owned a book called *The Lost World*, the librarian typed the title into a terminal (a kind of early keyboard-and-screen combo), and a few seconds later the machine would print out a slip of paper with the book's shelf number. To modern kids, this looks slow. To a librarian in 1973, it was a miracle.

Then three big things happened, and they happened fast. First, the computer *shrank*. By the year 2000, you could carry a laptop in your backpack. By 2010, you could hold an entire library in your pocket in the form of a smartphone. Second, *the internet* connected computers around the world, so that a scholar in Tokyo could read a manuscript from a library in Paris without ever getting on an airplane. And third, books themselves started being digitized—that is, turned from paper into numbers stored on a hard drive. When a book is digitized, every page is photographed, every word on the page is recognized by a smart program called an *optical character recognition engine* (OCR for short), and the whole thing is saved as a file you can search with a keyboard. Digitization is the moment a physical book stops being a fragile object and becomes a *digital copy*, a mirror version made of light and electrons.

Once books became digital copies, a strange new kind of question became possible. You were no longer limited to asking, "What does this one book say?" You could now ask, "What do *all* the books ever written say about this topic?" That last question is so big that no human being can answer it alone. But a computer can. And that is the heart of digital humanities.

The Three Pillars of Digital Humanities

The field of digital humanities is bigger than any one tool or any one project. Yet almost everything in it rests on three big ideas, three *pillars*. Each pillar has a name, a job, and a special tool that makes it work. Once you understand the three pillars, you will start seeing them everywhere—in news articles, in museum websites, in school assignments, in apps on your phone. They are like the three secret ingredients of a magic recipe.

Pillar One: Text Mining

The first pillar is called *text mining*. To understand what text mining is, imagine you have a giant jar of alphabet soup. Thousands of tiny pasta letters floating in yellow broth. To find a hidden word, you could stir the soup with a spoon, fish out letters one at a time, and try to assemble the word yourself. That is the slow way. Text mining gives you a magical slotted spoon that *counts* the letters and *finds patterns*. It can tell you, in less than a second, how often each letter appears, which letters are next to each other most often, and what words they form.

In a real computer, "text" means words stored in a document, and "mining" means digging out patterns that are not obvious to a reader. When you read a paragraph, you notice what the paragraph *says*. But a text-mining program can notice things the paragraph doesn't even *know* it is saying. For example, it can count how many times certain words appear across a thousand books. It can find themes, like "love," "battle," "sea," or "forest." It can also find clusters of words that often appear next to each other, like "pirate ship," "morning light," or "rubber ducky." Those clusters are called *n-grams*. An *n-gram* is just a fancy word for a small chunk of words that travel together. A 1-gram (also called a *unigram*) is one word.