Brandeis Library

Google Trends for “digital humanities” as a search term (worldwide, 2004 – present)

Ten years ago, nobody used the term “digital humanities”: now it seems to be ubiquitous, to the point of attracting the sarcastic attention of academic job-seekers on Tumblr:

“The English department at Regional U invites applications for a tenure-track position in the digital humanities. Selected candidate will be responsible for explaining to everyone what ‘digital humanities’ is, and teaching a 4/4 load of composition, literature surveys, and Shakespeare”

and the wrath of Quentin Tarantino fans:

So, how did we get here?  When I first became involved in digital humanities, it was called “humanities computing,” and while people agreed on a few elements of a creation story, there was no coherent account of where this “new” field came from.  Over the years, I’ve pieced together some of the significant events leading up to the current state of digital humanities, a timeline that I’ve shared in list form, below.  From that series of events, we can also deduce that digital humanities has at least four distinct lines of descent, with different periods of ascendancy:

1. Computer Centers, late 1940s through the present (Tuebingen, Oxford, NCSA)
2. Scholarly Societies and Journals, mid-1960s through the present (ACH, ALLC)
3. Standards efforts, late 1980s to present (TEI)
4. Library Digitization & Digital Humanities Centers, 1990s to present (esp. research libraries)

Whatever mystery has attended the evolution of digital humanities, there is general agreement that it has a founder–a father, literally, in Padre Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit who began working with Thomas Watson, CEO of IBM, in 1949, on a punch-card concordance of the works of Thomas Aquinas.  Fifty-five years later, Father Busa contributed the foreword to the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities (the publication that introduced the term “digital humanities” into the academic vocabulary, in 2004). Understandably, given technology trends over that fifty-five years, Father Busa saw the history of digital humanities as a history of miniaturization:

I began, in 1949, with only electro-countable machines with punched cards. My goal was to have a file of 13 million of these cards, one for each word, with a context of 12 lines stamped on the back. The file would have been 90 meters long, 1.20 m in height, 1 m in depth, and would have weighed 500 tonnes. In His mercy, around 1955, God led men to invent magnetic tapes. The first were the steel ones by Remington, closely followed by the plastic ones of IBM. Until 1980, I was working on 1,800 tapes, each one 2,400 feet long, and their combined length was 1,500 km, the distance from Paris to Lisbon, or from Milan to Palermo.

And given the sheer magnitude of the technical challenge a project like this presented, it’s not hard to see why, at this stage, digital humanities was first addressed in emerging university-based computer centers.  Here, then, are some of the milestones that have marked the way from then to now, organized chronologically and labeled according to where the leading-edge challenges were being addressed over time:

1949-1970: DH in Computing Centers:

• 1949: Father Roberto Busa began his index of every word in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas (11M words); visits Thomas Watson and enlists IBM
• 1963: Roy Wisbey founded the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing in Cambridge to support his work with Early Middle High German Texts.
• 1966: Computers and the Humanities founded; Wilhelm Ott (developer of TUSTEP) learns to program (http://www.allc.org/node/210); see also his early experiments in “multimedia”: http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unsworth/Ott.multimedia.mov
• 1970: The first instance of what later became the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing conference is held at the University of Cambridge.

1973-1992: DH and Scholarly Societies:

• 1973: Founding of  The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing
• 1978:  Founding of the  Association for Computers and The Humanities
• 1985: Perseus Project begun at Harvard
• 1986: Literary and Linguistic Computing founded
• 1986: SGML specification released
• 1987: Text-Encoding Initiative, Humanist begun
• 1989: First joint ACH/ALLC conference held in Toronto (at which Bob Kraft demonstrates Ibycus, TLG, hypertext)
• 1991: Electronic Beowulf Project
• 1992: H-Net founded

1992-2004: DH and Libraries:

• 2005: The Blake Archive approved by MLA’s CSE
• 2006: MLA publishes Electronic Textual Editing
• 2006: ACLS report on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences
• 2006: NEH Office of Digital Humanities
• 2007: NEH DH Start-up grants
• 2007: Centernet founded
• 2008: CLIR Survey of Digital Humanities Centers
• 2012: CLIR “One Culture: Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences”

That brings us up to the present.  If you’re interested in following the story from here, I recommend a twitter search on “digital humanities,” or the THATCamp at Northeastern before MLA 2013, or the HASTAC conference in Toronto next April, or the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, British Columbia next June, or the DH2012 Conference in Nebraska next July.  More locally, you could follow DH in Boston and Beyond, or get in touch with Dave Wedaman about joining the Brandeis Digital Humanities Working Group!  I hope to see you there…