From reading texts to reading data: the making of digital humanities

With the advent of AI and its ability to generate, translate, summarise, classify texts, analyse speeches, and identify patterns, computational humanities is moving from being merely a tool to a potential participant in human inquiry.

The humanities and social sciences, as disciplines, have been undergoing a transformative shift globally, with digital humanities (DH) and/or computational social sciences emerging as a vital interdisciplinary fusion of computer science with history, anthropology, digital humanities, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and translation studies. DH as a discipline combines computational insight and grounding in a particular humanistic field with varied manifestations as per the societal issues to be solved.

Institutes of excellence in India, such as IITs and deemed universities, have begun to experiment with DH by restructuring their curriculum and changing the nomenclature of degree programmes. Tier-1 universities abroad have begun to navigate their research and academic trajectories in this direction by adapting their curriculum.

The scenario in the tertiary education sector of State and central universities and colleges has not yet fully embraced this change as part of the curriculum and research in social sciences and humanities. It is pitiable to learn that State universities, in their syndicate meetings, are closing humanities and social science departments and courses owing to zero enrollment or a decline in enrollment, without even realising the implications.

In this context, there have been apprehensions among traditionalists concerning the restructuring of disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences in legacy-based institutions that hail the past glory at the cost of incorporating current trends.

As a consequence, it is pivotal to offer a compelling narrative to show how this change has evolved globally under technological advancements that have navigated transitions since the 1940s. This account might help educational leaders to align with the context and to make efforts to restructure the social sciences and humanities as a proactive measure to prevent the closures or mergers of departments in their institutions.

Origin of digital humanities

The conventional origin of digital humanities can be traced to the work of Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit scholar who began working in the late 1940s alongside early punch-card processing using mainframe computers on a machine-assisted concordance by collaborating with IBM to process millions of words from the works of Thomas Aquinas, titled Index Thomisticus.

During the 1950s and 1960s, computers were increasingly used to organise, search and analyse language and cultural texts using concordances, frequency counts, authorship studies, linguistic analysis, textual indexing, statistical analysis of literary language, biblical and classical textual studies, apart from arithmetic purposes, under the banner of "Humanities Computing", rather than digital humanities. The second phase (1970-80) of humanities computing began to shift from analysing texts to modelling and encoding humanities knowledge computationally.

According to Susan Hockey's widely cited book, The History of Humanities Computing, 1970 to the mid-1980s is designated as a period of consolidation rather than a change of direction. Her writing records the rise of dedicated professional groups like the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) (which Hockey chaired for many years) and the creation of standard software tools like the Oxford Concordance Program (OCP), which Hockey directed at Oxford University. Further, the Association for Computers and the Humanities (1978), and the journal Computers and the Humanities (1966) were launched during this era. In addition, activities surrounding text archives and corpora, such as the Oxford Text Archive (1976) and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (1972), were progressively published as part of consolidation.

One of the most significant developments was the emergence of standards for encoding texts through the c (TEI), launched in 1987. The text therefore became not merely digitised, but structured as data. Consequently, the computer transitioned from being just a machine that could merely count words to a medium capable of representing the structure and scholarly meaning of texts, including author, title, paragraph, quotation, person, place, date, manuscript variant, editorial corrections, annotations, footnotes, linguistic features and relationships between texts. This rendered a text searchable, analysable, interoperable, and reusable by computers.

The emergence of digital humanities was witnessed in the 1990s with the advent of personal computers, CD-ROMs, the internet and the World Wide Web.

Humanities scholarship began moving from isolated computational projects toward networked digital resources. Books began to serve as structured datasets that are searchable, with corpus-linked resources facilitating computational analysis, resulting in new scholarship.

Democratisation of humanities

From the 2000s, the expansion of the web began to transform DH scholarship, rendering it networked, collaborative, open, interactive, geographically visual, and data-driven. Consequently, access to humanities was democratised from physical spaces through digital archives.

Secondly, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) allowed scholars to place humanities information onto geographical space, leading to the advent of spatial humanities as a discipline.

Thirdly, this phase led to the era of digital visualisation as an agent for scholars to represent humanistic arguments using literary relationships, historical events, migration, social networks, cultural diffusion, economic relationships and geographical change.

The period from 2010 to 2020 witnessed the changeover from digital humanities to data humanities, with the proliferation of social media, digitised archives, large text corpora, online behavioural data, computational linguistics, machine learning and network analysis, and the emergence of a concept known as distant reading as the norm against close reading. This facilitated the analysis of large bodies of literature computationally rather than reading every text individually.

A large collection of texts could be computationally examined for themes, keywords, sentiment, semantic relationships, authorship, stylistic patterns and historical change through a process called text mining. Further, humanities scholars began to scrutinise relationships between people, characters, institutions, places, and intellectual movements through the process designated as network analysis, thus expanding from texts and artefacts to relationships and systems.

The present dispensation has now started questioning the assumption that technology was neutral and that there were no cognitive, algorithmic or cultural biases from those who built databases, algorithms, and platforms through dritical digital humanities as a domain.

With the advent of AI and its ability to generate, translate, summarise, classify texts, analyse speeches, and identify patterns, computational humanities is moving from being merely a tool to a potential participant in human inquiry.

The query now is about what happens to the humanities when computers, algorithms, and intelligent machines become part of the environment in which human experience itself is produced. We need to keep our fingers crossed to follow up with the trends prospectively.

What began as computational assistance for textual scholarship progressively evolved into a field that could digitise cultural memory, map literary and historical relationships, analyse vast textual collections and interrogate the algorithms shaping contemporary life.

The emergence of digital humanities has already begun to shape curriculum design and will spill over into school education prospectively. However, we still tend to argue, as traditionalists, for the conservation of literature over language teaching, while hampering the development of contemporary necessities. There is an urgent need to embrace the natural evolution of academic disciplines in response to technological advancements and demographic transitions, recognising that higher education is redefining its academic identity and charting a new trajectory across all disciplines.

(Dr. Paul Wilson is the Principal and Secretary of Madras Christian College, Chennai, India. Views are personal)