The digital humanities themselves have had a rather interesting history. Originally called ‘computing in the humanities’, or ‘humanities computing’, in the early days they were often seen as a technical support to the work of the ‘real’ humanities scholars, who would drive the projects. This involved the application of the computer to the disciplines of the humanities, something that has been described as treating the ‘machine’s efficiency as a servant’ rather than ‘its participant enabling of criticism’ (McCarty 2009). As Hayles explains, changing to the term ‘ “digital humanities” was meant to signal that the field had emerged from the low-prestige status of a support service into a genuinely intellectual endeavour with its own professional practices, rigorous standards, and exciting theoretical explorations’ (Hayles 2012).

The effects of such feedback loops can be powerfully transformative, as shown in the work of historian Philip J. Ethington, a pioneer in incorporating spatial and temporal data into library records (Hunt and Ethington 1997). For more than a decade, Ethington has undertaken an intellectual journey towards what he calls ‘the cartographic imagination’.7 Beginning with the insight that spatial and temporal markers are crucial components of any data record, he conceived a number of digital projects in which meaning is built not according to a linear chain of A following B (a form typical of narrative history) but according to large numbers of connections between two or more networks layered onto one another. He writes in the highly influential website and essay, ‘Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge’, that the key element ‘is a space-time phenomenology wherein we take historical knowledge in its material presence as an artifact and map that present through indices of correlation within the dense network of institutions, which themselves are mappable’ (2000: 11).

Rather than being drawn into what may appear as partisan in-fighting, I posit the digital humanities as a diverse field of practices associated with computational techniques and reaching beyond print in its modes of enquiry, research, publication, and dissemination. In this sense, the digital humanities includes text encoding and analysis, digital editions of print works, historical research that re-creates classical architecture in virtual reality formats such as Rome Reborn and The Theater of Pompey, archival and geospatial sites, and since there is a vibrant conversation between scholarly and creative work in this field, electronic literature and digital art that draws on or remediates humanities traditions.

The financial considerations are also new with these computational disciplines as they require more money and organisation than the old individual scholar of lore did. Not only are the start-up costs correspondingly greater, usually needed to pay for the researchers, computer programmers, computer technology, software, digitisation costs and so forth, but there are real questions about sustainability of digital projects, such as: ‘Who will pay to maintain the digital resources?’ ‘Will the user forums, and user contributions, continue to be monitored and moderated if we can’t afford a staff member to do so? Will the wiki get locked down at the close of funding or will we leave it to its own devices, becoming an online-free-for all?’ (Terras 2010).

The necessity for executable code creates new requirements for digital literacy. Not every scholar in the digital humanities needs to be an expert programmer, but to produce high quality work, they certainly need to know how to talk to those who are programmers. The digital humanities scholar is apt to think along two parallel tracks at once: what the surface display should be, and what kinds of executable code are necessary to bring it about. This puts subtle pressure on the writing process, which in turn also interacts with the coding. [...] Willard McCarty (2009) extrapolates from this development a future in which humanities scholars are also fluent in code and can ‘actually make things’. Once critical mass is achieved, developments at any one place have catalysing effects on the field as a whole. Intimately related to institutionalisation

This volume provides pathways of thought for refracting our study of the humanities through a new prism of digital media and technology, while simultaneously helping us to explore the intrinsic and inevitable connection between technology and humanity. The March 2010 conference it is based on4 offered participants a snapshot of approaches to the digital humanities, which we propose might broadly be categorised into two waves of activity: the first based on new quantitative approaches to understanding the humanities, and the second an arguably more revolutionary qualitative approach in which the digital is embedded within our very perceptions of the humanities, providing a completely new interpretation and therefore the development of new theoretical concepts.

Further, it is not merely the quantification of research which was traditionally qualitative that is offered with these approaches. Rather, as Unsworth argues, we should think of these computational ‘tools as offering provocations, surfacing evidence, suggesting patterns and structures, or adumbrating trends’ (Unsworth, quoted in Clement et al. 2008). For example, the methods of ‘cultural analytics’ make it possible, through the use of quantitative computational techniques, to understand and follow large-scale cultural, social and political processes for research projects – that is, it offers massive amounts of literary or visual data analysis (see Manovich and Douglas 2009). This is a distinction that Moretti (2007) referred to as distant versus close readings of texts. As he points out, the traditional humanities focuses on a ‘minimal fraction of the literary field’, ...  still less than one per cent of the novels that were actually published ... – and close reading won’t help here, a novel a day every day of the year would take a century or so. ... a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases, because ... it’s a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole.

A decade later, the term is morphing again as some scholars advocate a turn from a primary focus on text encoding, analysis, and searching to multimedia practices that explore the fusion of text-based humanities with film, sound, animation, graphics, and other multimodal practices across real, mixed, and virtual reality platforms. The trajectory can be traced by comparing Unsworth’s 2002 ‘What Is Humanities Computing and What Is Not’, with Schnapp and Presner’s 2009 ‘Manifesto 2.0’. At the top of Unsworth’s value hierarchy are sites featuring powerful search algorithms that offer users the opportunity to reconfigure them to suit their needs. Sites billing themselves as digital humanities but lacking the strong computational infrastructure are, in Unsworth’s phrase, ‘charlatans’. By contrast, the ‘Manifesto’ consigns values such as Unsworth’s to the first wave, asserting that it has been succeeded by a second wave emphasising user experience rather than computational design:

As Leigh Starr and Geoffrey Bowker have persuasively argued, the ordering of information is never neutral or value-free. Databases are not necessarily more objective than arguments, but they are different kinds of cultural forms, embodying different cognitive, technical, psychological, and artistic modalities and offering different ways to instantiate concepts, structure experience, and embody values (Manovich 2002; Vesna 2007).

The ‘computational turn’ inevitably has its doubters. Cheeseman (2011) confessed being sceptical about the computability of most of the problems he dealt with as a literary translator, editor, critic, and cultural historian, while conceding that digitisation and computation make helpful tools. For instance, digital software might be able to systematically and thoroughly analyse the differences and similarities between a large set of redactions of ‘a’ text, and would probably be essential, for example, to manage a large data set such as a broad corpus of texts across different languages. But, Cheeseman questions, what is it exactly that computation can offer other than searchability and low-level pattern recognition? He accepts that computation is capable of identifying recurrent or parallel lexical and syntactic features, but sees it as little help in dealing with semantics. For Cheeseman the connective, pattern-seeking abilities of digital machinery cannot replicate the deep reading of primary readings, the cultural context provided by further texts, and the development of a cognitive critical argument.

As Moretti (2007) points out, the traditional humanities focuses on a minimal fraction of the literary field ... [a] canon of two hundred novels, for instance, sounds very large for nineteenth-century Britain (and is much larger than the current one), but is still less than one per cent of the novels that were actually published: twenty thousand, thirty, more, no one really knows – and close reading won’t help here, a novel a day every day of the year would take a century or so. ... And it’s not even a matter of time, but of method: a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases, because it isn’t a sum of individual cases: it’s a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole. (Moretti 2007: 3–4)

Working together within a shared framework of assumptions, expert scholars and expert amateurs can build databases accessible to all and enriched with content beyond what the scholars can contribute. An example is the Clergy of the Church of England Database directed by Arthur Burns (2009), in which volunteers collected data and, using laptops and software provided by the project, entered them into the database. Hypermedia Berlin (Presner 2006, 2009b) offers another model by providing open-source software through which community people can contribute their narratives, images, and memories, while HyperCities (Presner et al. 2008) invites scholars and citizens across the globe to create data repositories specific to their regional histories. In addition to contributions to scholarship, such projects would create new networks between scholars and amateurs, from which may emerge, on both sides of the disciplinary boundary, a renewed respect for the other. This kind of model could significantly improve the standing of the humanities with the general public.

To return to our opening hypothesis then, the essays in this collection raise the question of what the digital humanities actually is. We begin to see the emergence of a division between digital humanities as a set of qualitative tools or methods, and the digital humanities as a newly emerging field influenced by computation as a way of accessing, interpreting, and reporting the world itself. The first distinctive wave uses quantitative data production and analysis, while the second wave is identified as a new field within the humanities that utilises digital tools to address existing concerns in the humanities. In doing so, this second wave reveals new analytic techniques and ways of exploring problems that the humanities tackle and seek answers for.

The digital humanities have been around at least since the 1940s,1 but it was not until the Internet and World Wide Web that they came into their own as emerging fields with their own degree programs, research centres, scholarly journals, and books, and a growing body of expert practitioners. Nevertheless, many scholars – particularly in literary studies – are only vaguely aware of the digital humanities and lack a clear sense of the challenges they pose to traditional modes of enquiry. This essay outlines the field, analyses the implications of its practices, and discusses its potential for transforming research, teaching, and publication. The essay concludes with a vision that sees the digital humanities revitalising the traditional humanities, even as they also draw on the traditional humanities for their core strengths. Coming to the scene with a background in scientific programming and a long-standing interest in machine cognition, I wanted to see how engagements with digital technologies are changing the ways humanities scholars think. The obvious and visible signs of a shift include the changing nature of research, the inclusion of programming code as a necessary linguistic practice, and the increasing number of large Web projects in nearly every humanities discipline. This much I knew, but I was after something deeper and more elusive: how engagements with digital technologies are affecting the assumptions and presuppositions of humanities scholars, including their visions of themselves as professional practitioners, their relations to the field, and their hopes and fears for the future. To explore these issues, I conducted a series of phone and in-person interviews with twenty U.S. scholars at different stages of their careers and varying intensities of involvement with digital technologies.2 The insights that my interlocutors expressed in these conversations were remarkable. Through narrated experiences, sketched contexts, subtle nuances, and implicit conclusions, the interviews reveal the ways in which the digital humanities are transforming assumptions. The themes that emerged can be grouped under the following rubrics: scale, critical/productive theory, collaboration, databases, multimodal scholarship, code, and future trajectories. As we will see, each of these areas has its own tensions, conflicts, and intellectual issues. I do not find these contestations unsettling; on the contrary, I think they indicate the vitality of the digital humanities and their potential for catalysing significant change.

Manovich’s paper, Cultural Analytics: Annual Report 2010, provides an update on his ongoing project of using visualisation techniques (computationally based) to explore cultural data – giving the examples of over a million manga pages, and every Time magazine cover since issue 1. The phrase ‘Cultural Analytics’ demands attention – the analysis of culture is the humanities, and analytics is the application of computation, computer technology, and statistics to solve a problem. While culture is the object of study, the methods of solving cultural questions here are quite clearly computational, and hence this is illustrative of the digital humanities tackling traditional humanities with the use of computational tools. Manovich argues for the application of cultural analytics software that can lead to insightful conclusions about changing trends over time, but also that those trends can be seen by the person observing the research. The graphic below – a visualisation of every Time magazine cover since the first publication – shows changes in colour and contrast over time, as well as how the present style and convention was reached over the entire history of the publication, thus offering a genealogical, rather than causal, history of the development of the publication.

The sceptic who states that data mining and pattern recognition in works of literature debases close reading ignores the prevalent mood of human action in a time of computational ubiquity – close reading has a role in the humanities, but it will not deal with the sprawl of textual information being produced daily and added to the incomprehensible deluge of textual information in the digital age. There will be no argument here that canonical texts should not be subject to close readings, but there is an underlying argument that digital humanities methods are necessary and appropriate as we attempt to grasp the information landscape available to us. It is this availability which is critical; we exist alongside, and interact with, computational devices continuously, and these devices offer easy, instant, and unhindered access to incomprehensible amounts of information. These conditions of availability have not been part of human life before, and hence the humanities require new, appropriate, and digitally focused methods to deal with this new condition of being-in-the-world.