What Is Digital Humanities? Defining an Evolving Field

What Is Digital Humanities? Defining an Evolving Field

The Digital Humanities Moment

In the autumn of 2019, a peculiar announcement appeared in the newsletter of the Modern Language Association: the organization was establishing a new affiliated society dedicated to digital humanities. For scholars who had spent decades arguing that computational methods belonged in literary studies, this moment represented a remarkable vindication. Yet for many traditionalists within the academy, the announcement raised uncomfortable questions about the future of humanistic inquiry itself. What did it mean when the largest professional organization for literary scholars in the English-speaking world formally recognized a field that many still viewed with suspicion?

This tension—the simultaneous embrace and anxiety surrounding digital humanities—captures something essential about the field's nature. Digital humanities exists at a disciplinary crossroads, drawing practitioners from literary studies, history, archaeology, linguistics, art history, and countless other humanistic traditions. It encompasses researchers who write code to analyze thousands of novels and those who craft digital archives preserving endangered cultural heritage. It includes archivists wrestling with the challenges of preserving born-digital materials and historians mapping the social networks of medieval societies through prosopographical databases. Such diversity makes digital humanities extraordinarily vibrant but also extraordinarily difficult to define.

The question "What is digital humanities?" admits no simple answer, and this chapter does not pretend otherwise. Instead, we explore how scholars have attempted to define the field, trace its historical development from early computational humanities projects to its current institutional prominence, examine the key tensions and debates that animate DH communities, and introduce the concept of computational thinking as a bridge between humanistic inquiry and digital methods. By the chapter's end, readers will possess a mental framework for understanding both what digital humanities has been and what it might become.

Tracing the Roots: From Roberto Busa to the Digital Revolution

The Pioneering Effort

Any history of digital humanities must begin with Father Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit priest who spent more than thirty years working with IBM to create the *Index Thomisticus*, a comprehensive concordance of the works of Thomas Aquinas. Beginning in the late 1940s, Busa enlisted early computers to sort and index millions of words across Aquinas's corpus—a monumental undertaking that required punching data onto cards and using mainframe computers to process information that would have taken human indexers centuries to compile. The *Index Thomisticus*, completed in the 1970s and later made available online, stands as one of the earliest and most ambitious examples of applying computational methods to humanistic scholarship.

Busa's project illustrates both the possibilities and limitations of early computational humanities. The technology was cumbersome, expensive, and required enormous labor simply to prepare data for processing. Yet the results demonstrated something profound: computers could handle tasks at a scale impossible for human readers alone, revealing patterns and connections that close reading might never uncover. Busa did not merely use computers to store information; he used them to enable new forms of analysis that transformed how scholars understood Aquinas's intellectual contribution.

The Busa example also reveals something important about the relationship between technological capability and humanistic vision. Busa was not trained as a computer scientist but as a theologian and medievalist. His deep knowledge of Aquinas's work drove his interest in applying whatever tools might illuminate that work more fully. This pattern—humanistic questions motivating technological engagement—would repeat itself throughout the field's development, even as the technologies themselves became ever more sophisticated.

The Expansion of Computational Humanities

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, computational approaches to humanistic questions spread across academic disciplines, though these efforts remained largely separate from one another. In literary studies, scholars developed stylometric techniques to analyze authorship questions, using statistical analysis of vocabulary, sentence length, and other textual features to distinguish between works by different writers. In linguistics, researchers built corpora and used computational methods to study language patterns across large bodies of text. Historians began experimenting with quantitative approaches to social history, analyzing demographic data, economic records, and other structured information to understand past societies.

The establishment of academic journals dedicated to these approaches—particularly *Computers and the Humanities*, founded in 1966—helped create a sense of community among practitioners. Yet this community remained marginal within the humanities more broadly. Computational humanists often faced skepticism or outright hostility from colleagues who viewed statistical analysis and quantitative methods as incompatible with the interpretive traditions that defined literary and historical scholarship.

This resistance reflected deeper epistemological disagreements about what constituted legitimate humanistic knowledge. Traditional humanists emphasized close reading, deep familiarity with primary sources, and the cultivation of interpretive judgment developed over years of scholarly apprenticeship. Computational approaches seemed to threaten these values by privileging breadth over depth, quantification over interpretation, and pattern recognition over individual insight. The humanities, in this view, could not and should not be reduced to data processing.

The Digital Turn

The transformation from "computational humanities" to "digital humanities" occurred gradually, accelerating in the 1990s and 2000s as computing technology became more powerful, more accessible, and more embedded in everyday life. Several developments proved particularly significant.

First, the proliferation of personal computers and the emergence of the World Wide Web made computational methods accessible to scholars who lacked institutional access to mainframe computing facilities. Researchers could now conduct digital projects using equipment available in their own offices, share their findings through online publications, and collaborate with colleagues around the world without traveling to centralized computing centers.

Second, the digitization of cultural heritage materials—books, manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings, and other primary sources—created new possibilities for humanistic research. Google Books, the Internet Archive, and institutional digitization initiatives made millions of texts searchable and accessible online, enabling scholars to work with corpora far larger than any physical library could house. Digital archives and databases preserved fragile materials while making them available to researchers who could never travel to see the originals.

Third, the emergence of new computational techniques—particularly in natural language processing, machine learning, and network analysis—provided more sophisticated tools for humanistic inquiry. Researchers could now automatically extract entities (people, places, organizations) from large text corpora, analyze the structure of social networks, identify topics and themes across thousands of documents, and visualize patterns in ways that supported interpretation.

The term "digital humanities" itself came into widespread use during this period, gradually displacing "humanities computing" and related terms. This linguistic shift reflected something more than mere preference: it signaled a field that had expand