The digital pioneers
Open a book to read. Gaze at a painting. Listen to music. For centuries, these private acts were at the heart of scholarship in the humanities, the cluster of academic disciplines that study the human condition. But 160 years ago, scholars began to think of literature at least as a cultural artifact subject to quantitative interpretation. In the 19th century, vocabulary-counting schemes were used to investigate the authorship of St. Paul’s writings and the plays of Shakespeare. Then came computers, and with them a growing desire to apply computational power to the humanities. Starting in 1949, an Italian Jesuit priest named Roberto Busa enlisted the aid of IBM computers to produce an index of the 11 million words of medieval Latin in writings by Thomas Aquinas and others. A flurry of interest in literary concordances followed, ushering in the first age of digital humanities. But now we are in the age of Digital Humanities...