Read the notes, then try the practice. It adapts as you go.When you're ready.
Session Length
~17 min
Adaptive Checks
15 questions
Transfer Probes
8
Digital humanities is an interdisciplinary field that applies computational tools, methods, and digital technologies to traditional humanities disciplines such as literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, and cultural studies. Rather than simply digitizing existing scholarship, the field fundamentally reimagines how humanistic inquiry can be conducted when scholars have access to large-scale data analysis, visualization, text mining, geographic information systems, and network analysis. Digital humanities bridges the divide between qualitative interpretation and quantitative evidence, enabling researchers to ask new kinds of questions about cultural heritage, literary traditions, and historical patterns.
The field emerged from earlier traditions of humanities computing that date back to the late 1940s, when Father Roberto Busa collaborated with IBM to create a computerized concordance of the works of Thomas Aquinas. Over the following decades, scholars developed markup languages, digital archives, and computational text analysis methods. The establishment of major centers such as the Center for Digital Humanities at University College London and the Stanford Literary Lab, along with the founding of organizations like the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), helped formalize the discipline. The publication of key works such as 'A Companion to Digital Humanities' (2004) and Franco Moretti's concept of 'distant reading' brought the field into mainstream academic discourse.
Today, digital humanities encompasses a vast range of practices including text encoding with TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), corpus linguistics, digital mapping, 3D modeling of archaeological sites, sentiment analysis of literary texts, network visualization of historical social relationships, and the creation of open-access digital archives. The field raises important theoretical questions about the nature of evidence, the politics of digitization, algorithmic bias in cultural analysis, and the accessibility of cultural heritage. As artificial intelligence and machine learning become more sophisticated, digital humanities scholars are at the forefront of debates about how computational methods can complement rather than replace close reading, critical interpretation, and humanistic values.
One step at a time.
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.
Example: Using text mining to analyze 10,000 nineteenth-century novels to identify how the average sentence length, genre conventions, or character naming patterns shifted over decades.
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.
Example: A scholar encoding a medieval manuscript in TEI XML tags structural elements like line breaks, page divisions, editorial corrections, and variant readings so the text can be searched and displayed in a web-based digital edition.
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.
Example: Using the Google Ngram Viewer to track how the frequency of the word 'democracy' changed in published English-language books between 1800 and 2000.
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.
Example: Mapping the locations mentioned in all of Charles Dickens's novels onto a digital map of Victorian London to reveal how his literary geography changed across his career.
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.
Example: The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine preserving snapshots of websites over time, or the British Library's digitized collection of illuminated manuscripts viewable in high resolution online.
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.
Example: Creating a network graph of correspondence between Enlightenment philosophers to reveal that certain lesser-known figures served as critical information brokers connecting major thinkers.
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.
Example: Running a topic model on 50 years of articles from a history journal to discover how research themes shifted from political and military history toward social and cultural history.
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.
Example: The Digital Thoreau project, which presents multiple draft versions of 'Walden' in a fluid-text interface where readers can see exactly how Thoreau revised passages across seven manuscript drafts.
More terms are available in the glossary.
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