Digital Humanities Cheat Sheet

The core ideas of Digital Humanities distilled into a single, scannable reference — perfect for review or quick lookup.

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Quick Reference

Distant Reading

A computational approach to literary analysis, coined by Franco Moretti, that uses quantitative methods to study large collections of texts rather than performing close reading of individual works. It reveals macro-level patterns in literary history that are invisible when reading single texts.

Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)

An international standard for representing texts in digital form using XML markup. TEI provides guidelines for encoding manuscripts, literary works, linguistic corpora, and other textual materials so they can be searched, analyzed, and displayed by computer programs.

Corpus Linguistics

The study of language through large, structured collections of texts (corpora) using computational tools. It allows researchers to identify patterns of word usage, collocations, and linguistic change over time that would be impossible to detect through manual reading.

GIS and Spatial Humanities

The application of Geographic Information Systems to humanities research, enabling scholars to create layered digital maps that visualize spatial relationships in historical, literary, or cultural data. Spatial humanities treats geography as a category of analysis equal to time and theme.

Digital Archives and Collections

Online repositories of digitized primary source materials such as manuscripts, photographs, audio recordings, and artifacts. These archives use metadata standards and digital preservation practices to make cultural heritage materials widely accessible for research and public engagement.

Network Analysis

A method drawn from graph theory and social network analysis used to model and visualize relationships between entities such as historical figures, literary characters, institutions, or concepts. Nodes represent entities and edges represent connections between them.

Topic Modeling

A machine learning technique, commonly using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), that automatically identifies clusters of co-occurring words (topics) across a large collection of documents. It helps researchers discover thematic structures without prior knowledge of the content.

Digital Scholarly Editing

The practice of creating critical editions of texts in digital formats that can represent textual variation, editorial annotations, and multimedia context in ways that print editions cannot. Digital editions often allow users to compare manuscript witnesses side by side.

Stylometry

The statistical analysis of literary style, typically measuring features like word frequency, sentence length, and function word usage to identify authorship, detect forgeries, or trace stylistic influence. It operates on the principle that every author has a measurable linguistic fingerprint.

Linked Open Data

A method for publishing structured, interoperable data on the web so that datasets from different institutions can be connected and queried together. In digital humanities, it allows cultural heritage data from museums, libraries, and archives to be cross-referenced automatically.

Key Terms at a Glance

Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO):The international umbrella organization for digital humanities professional societies, sponsoring major conferences and journals in the field.

Algorithmic Bias:Systematic errors in computational outputs that reflect prejudices in training data, design assumptions, or societal structures.

Born-Digital:Materials created originally in digital form with no analog predecessor, such as emails, websites, and social media posts.

Close Reading:A traditional literary method involving detailed, careful interpretation and analysis of an individual text's language, structure, and meaning.

Computational Thinking:Problem-solving approaches drawn from computer science, including decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, and algorithmic design.

Concordance:An alphabetical index of all words in a text or corpus, showing their contexts. Father Busa's Index Thomisticus was one of the first computerized concordances.

Corpus:A large, structured collection of texts assembled for linguistic or literary analysis, often annotated with metadata and markup.

Crowdsourcing:Distributing research tasks to a large group of public volunteers, often via web platforms, to accomplish work at scale such as transcription or classification.

Data Visualization:The graphical representation of data and information, including charts, maps, network graphs, and timelines used to reveal patterns in humanities datasets.

Digital Archive:An online collection of digitized or born-digital primary source materials organized with metadata for research access and long-term preservation.

Digital Preservation:Practices and standards ensuring that digital materials remain accessible and usable over time despite hardware and software obsolescence.

Distant Reading:Franco Moretti's term for using computational methods to analyze large collections of texts quantitatively rather than reading individual works closely.

Dublin Core:A standardized set of 15 metadata elements used to describe digital resources for cross-institutional discovery and interoperability.

GIS (Geographic Information System):A system for capturing, analyzing, and visualizing spatial and geographic data, applied in humanities to map historical and cultural phenomena.

Humanities Computing:The earlier name for the field now called digital humanities, originating in the late 1940s with computational approaches to textual analysis.

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