Digital humanities (DH) was born, according to popular belief, at the desk of Italian priest Father Roberto Busa (1913- 2011). Father Busa aimed to index and digitise the entire works of Thomas Aquinas. With the help of IBM, it took him thirty years to complete. The project started on punch-cards and, ten years after completion, ended on CD-ROMs. The term, however, has much less sacred origins: it was proposed by John Unsworth in collaboration with Blackwell Publishing in order to title a book to appeal to as many people as possible.

A portion of academics tend to resent the vague definitions offered for what exactly DH is, which is unfair; at its centre, it is quite self-evidently the application of computer technologies to the humanities. DH is better seen less as a new discipline in itself, and more the application of new methods to traditional humanities. Many of the issues and questions that DH approaches are, in fact, not new.

Fernand Braudel, one of the most influential historians of the past century, spent a large portion of his latter career examining the effect of space, time, and geography on the development of history. He often used maps to illustrate his points, such as that shown on the right, which shows travel times from Venice. It probably took him several weeks to complete and is based on just a handful of sources, which we are not privy to. In modern times, we can ask the same question, but get a vastly more developed answer. The Roman-era ORBIS model is based on a huge trove of sources – each open to critique. The historian can modify their query to take into account method of transport, season, and so on.

DH solves some of the creeping issues of modern academia, too. Consider the main hindrances to the humanities today, proposed by Alex Reid:

• It suffers from the myopia of hyper-specialisation and bureaucracy

• It assumes information is scarce and communication is expensive

• It assumes intellectual work is fundamentally individual

And compare them to the core values of DH set out by Lisa Spiro:

1. Openness

2. Collaboration

3. Collegiality and Connectedness

4. Diversity

5. Experimentation

DH has therefore proven rather disruptive to traditional humanities. It is remarkable for its ability to drive its detractors into writing long and uninteresting articles about how this upstart ‘revolutionary’ field isn’t important or useful. Some are reminiscent of an elderly professor complaining about having to substitute his typewriter for a computer. Others spend their time tilting at windmills, or triumphantly ‘exposing’ issues that have actually been extensively discussed already. The epitome of these was presented in an essay by the otherwise respectable Adam Kirsch in The New Republic, who rambled for several thousand words about such issues as DH having ‘an undertone of menace’ and threatening a ‘post-verbal future’, which is about as stupid as it sounds. Most of these issues were imagined, and some of Kirsch’s points were so poorly constructed that responses to his essay bordered on questioning his academic integrity.

Of course, Kirsch was correct when he touched on the fact that there are legitimate and pressing issues within digital humanities, including: questions over diversity and identity politics, the role of neoliberalism and corporations, the effect of DH on shrinking humanities departments, the ‘black-box’ issue,and so on. These have been discussed for decades at great length and are not solved by green-ink essays penned by academics with a grudge. Nor will these academics be able to do away with DH. As evidenced by the enormous effect of something as simple as search engines and online archives, there is no chance of DH becoming a passing fad.

So what has DH actually done? Possibly the most basic of DH projects is digitisation. For texts, this is done either by manual transcription – i.e. by someone typing the contents of a book onto a computer – or by optical character recognition (OCR), where the computer does this automatically through viewing an image of text. Every pre-digital book or paper you have read, or turned up in a search on Google, will have been through this process.

There is also image digitisation, which can become an immensely complex task based on the size and medium the image is presented on. Images that were meant to be seen and touched often do not translate well to a simple photograph, so digital humanists have to consider how much they are willing to put into a project and what equipment they will use.

Digitisation can also come in the form of 3D scanning. When war threatened historical monuments in the Middle East, archaeologists were able to 3D scan many of them so that, even if they were destroyed, there would be something of a detailed record left for future archaeologists to examine. 3D printing technology means that archaeologists and historians who work with delicate or valuable items can examine an accurate plastic replica rather than risk handling the original. The open nature of DH means scanned objects are often left for the public to examine, too, which can produce wonders like Andrey Plaksin’s immersive tour of Queen Nefertiti’s tomb. After digitisation, DH can then move to further analysis. The digitisation of US ships logs can do far more than glancing over the originals; it paints us a picture of the nautical world through the eyes of American ships based on millions of points of data, all georeferenced and plotted onto a map.

We can imagine how much passages like the Suez and Panama canals were needed, and why certain naval bases were built. A similar effect can be achieved when plotting the data of Monroe and Florence Work, who recorded every lynching in the US; thousands of points, each given an immediately viewable human story, enabling us to see trends and patterns in racial violence.

The ‘big-tent’ nature of DH has often proved its strength. It refuses an ‘outer boundary’ and is constantly expanding into new areas of study. In 2019, for example, artificial intelligence was able to contribute to resolving questions of authorship in one of Shakespeare’s plays; scholars had long suspected that a second author, John Fletcher, had written sections. Based on AI analysis of each author’s writing style, this was indeed what it discovered. Digital humanists have also been looking to (cue groan) historical video games for their immersive aesthetic experiences or potential as simulations.

One final point to note regarding DH is that it has proved remarkably good at self-critique and introspection. It has started expanding into various areas of identity politics, for example, in the wake of articles critiquing its involvement – or lack thereof – in these spheres. Projects have emerged like the Digital Transgender Archive (below), which holds sources on transgender experiences across the world, or more localised endeavours like Mapping the Stacks, which brought to light previously ignored primary sources on African-American life across Chicago.

Digital humanities, then, has proven far older, durable and expansive than its critics would claim. As computer technology continues to improve, it is highly likely these projects will continue to become evermore powerful in how they affect and direct the study of the humanities. Topics of debate once thought stagnant have since been revived by DH and, as the field becomes larger and more diverse, this is a trend likely to continue.

Further reading:

Digital Humanities Quarterly - http://www.digitalhumanities.org

Monroe and Florence Work Today - https://plaintalkhistory.com/monroeandflorencework/

Digital Humanities Projects at Stanford - https://digitalhumanities.stanford.edu/projects

3D projects – The tomb of Nefertiti (https://skfb.ly/6spnS), a Frisno steam locomotive (https://skfb.ly/6tCLv), Heddal Stave Church (https://skfb.ly/FRPR), and the von Hallwyl Porcelain Room (https://skfb.ly/6wB6p) 

Digital Resources Guide – Art History - http://imageresources.weebly.com/digital-humanities-projects.html

The Digital Transgender Archive - https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/

Thomas Bachrach is completing a Masters in History at the University of Exeter.