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The Early History of Digital Humanities

Most commentators locate the origin of digital humanities (DH) in humanities computing of the mid20th century. Dalbello (2011), for example, begins her account in 1946 with Roberto Busa’s plans for the Index Thomisticus, a massive attempt to encode nearly 11 million words of Thomas Aquinas 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, 6). Others seem convinced that DH is still only text analysis—and misguided in its approach (Fish 2012). This paper presents an empirical perspective on the early history of digital humanities by tracing publications in two foundational journals (Computers and the Humanities, established in 1966, and Literary and Linguistic Computing, established in 1986), with particular emphasis on media types and authors’ disciplines.