The early history of digital humanities: An analysis of Computers and the Humanities (1966–2004) and Literary and Linguistic Computing (1986–2004)

Abstract

Abstract Most commentators locate the origin of digital humanities (DH) in computational text analysis of the mid-twentieth century, beginning in 1946 with Roberto Busa’s plans for the Index Thomisticus, a massive attempt to encode nearly 11 million words of Thomas Aquinas’ writings on IBM punch cards. This event (and the narrative that follows) is found throughout the literature, leading some to believe that early DH work ‘concentrated, perhaps somewhat narrowly, on text analysis (such as classification systems, mark-up, text encoding, and scholarly editing)’ (Presner, 2010, p. 6). Others seem convinced that DH is still only text analysis or too dominated by it (Meeks, 2013)—and misguided in its approach (Fish, 2012). Meanwhile, Underwood (2017) has recently made a case for disentangling distant reading methods from DH generally, noting that the former predates and does not depend on digital technology. This article presents an empirical perspective on the early history of DH by tracing publications in two foundational journals (Computers and the Humanities (CHum), established in 1966, and Literary and Linguistic Computing (LLC), established in 1986), with particular emphasis on media types, authors’ disciplines and locations, and teaching and learning. In doing so, we examine the extent to which early DH work focused on text analysis as well as broader trends in the early history of the field.