What makes digital humanities, digital?

Abstract

While not quite a neologism at this point, the term “digital humanities” for some still bears a significant measure of ambiguity. What separates digital humanities from the humanities? Throughout this article, I will attempt to offer some clarity on this separation, outlining what it is that makes digital humanities, digital. The field of scholarship now recognised as the digital humanities has not always held this particular mantle. Initially, this emerging discipline was referred to as “humanities computing”, a term that gathered momentum as early as the late ‘70s, the evidence for which can be found in a quick n-gram of Google Books. N-grams offer an approach to probabilistic language modelling that can be used for a variety of purposes, in this case, to identify the frequency of a sequence of words in a set of texts. Google Ngram Viewer is not a scholarly tool appropriate for research, but it is ...