Digital humanities

History[edit]

Digital humanities descends from the field of humanities computing, whose origins reach back to 1940s and 50s, in the pioneering work of Jesuit scholar Roberto Busa, which began in 1946,^[11] and of English professor Josephine Miles, beginning in the early 1950s.^{[12][13][14][15]} In collaboration with IBM, Busa and his team created a computer-generated concordance to Thomas Aquinas' writings known as the Index Thomisticus.^[3] Busa's works have been collected and translated by Julianne Nyhan and Marco Passarotti.^[16] Other scholars began using mainframe computers to automate tasks like word-searching, sorting, and counting, which was much faster than processing information from texts with handwritten or typed index cards.^[3] Similar first advances were made by Gerhard Sperl in Austria using computers by Zuse for Digital Assyriology.^[17] In the decades which followed archaeologists, classicists, historians, literary scholars, and a broad array of humanities researchers in other disciplines applied emerging computational methods to transform humanities scholarship.^[18][19]


As Tara McPherson has pointed out, the digital humanities also inherit practices and perspectives developed through many artistic and theoretical engagements with electronic screen culture beginning the late 1960s and 1970s. These range from research developed by organizations such as SIGGRAPH to creations by artists such as Charles and Ray Eames and the members of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology). The Eames and E.A.T. explored nascent computer culture and intermediality in creative works that dovetailed technological innovation with art.^[20]


The first specialized journal in the digital humanities was Computers and the Humanities, which debuted in 1966. The Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) association was founded in 1973. The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) were then founded in 1977 and 1978, respectively.^[3]


Soon, there was a need for a standardized protocol for tagging digital texts, and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was developed.^[3] The TEI project was launched in 1987 and published the first full version of the TEI Guidelines in May 1994.^[14] TEI helped shape the field of electronic textual scholarship and led to Extensible Markup Language (XML), which is a tag scheme for digital editing. Researchers also began experimenting with databases and hypertextual editing, which are structured around links and nodes, as opposed to the standard linear convention of print.^[3] In the nineties, major digital text and image archives emerged at centers of humanities computing in the U.S. (e.g. the Women Writers Project, the Rossetti Archive,^[21] and The William Blake Archive^[22]), which demonstrated the sophistication and robustness of text-encoding for literature.^[23] The advent of personal computing and the World Wide Web meant that Digital Humanities work could become less centered on text and more on design. The multimedia nature of the internet has allowed Digital Humanities work to incorporate audio, video, and other components in addition to text.^[3]


The terminological change from "humanities computing" to "digital humanities" has been attributed to John Unsworth, Susan Schreibman, and Ray Siemens who, as editors of the anthology A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004), tried to prevent the field from being viewed as "mere digitization".^[24] Consequently, the hybrid term has created an overlap between fields like rhetoric and composition, which use "the methods of contemporary humanities in studying digital objects",^[24] and digital humanities, which uses "digital technology in studying traditional humanities objects".^[24] The use of computational systems and the study of computational media within the humanities, arts and social sciences more generally has been termed the 'computational turn'.^[25]


In 2006 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) launched the Digital Humanities Initiative (renamed Office of Digital Humanities in 2008), which made widespread adoption of the term "digital humanities" in the United States.^[26]


Digital humanities emerged from its former niche status and became "big news"^[26] at the 2009 MLA convention in Philadelphia, where digital humanists made "some of the liveliest and most visible contributions"^[27] and had their field hailed as "the first 'next big thing' in a long time."^[28]