Mid 1980s – Early 1990s
After the period of mostly technology-related advances, substantial progress in the digital humanities/humanities computing was made in the period starting in the mid-1980s. These developments in humanities computing were facilitated through widespread usage of personal computers (PCs) and electronic mail (email). The most popular text analysis programs, run from the (DOS) command line, were Word-Cruncher, TACT, and MicroOCP.
Before the advent of Microsoft Windows, the Apple Macintosh PCs featured a graphical user interface that facilitated working with these systems. In fact, advanced graphics was a characteristic feature of Apple PCs. These computers could also represent special characters in many languages. For these reasons, Apple PCs gained widespread popularity in the humanities computing community. The emergence of the Internet sparked electronic discussion lists (such as “Humanist”). In addition, as was the case with most academic disciplines, email tremendously facilitated communication amongst practitioners, thereby accelerating advanced in the field. Very importantly, major academic conferences on the subject were held. A two-volume bibliography of work (e.g., research papers, software, projects) on humanities computing was published as the Humanities Computing Yearbook (1988, and 1989-1990).
According to Hockey, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was the most significant advance in humanities computing. The purpose of TEI is to characterize and categorize text through the use of tags, and addressed some of the shortcomings of older versions of the Hypertext Markup Language HTML (especially prior to HTML5). TEI was codified through the Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. A draft version describing the work was distributed for public comment in 1990. The TEI Guidelines were published and distributed in May 1994. The TEI has been operating continuously since that time.
As is the case with the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and XML, tags are represented in the <tag>…</endtag> format. The most fundamental tags are:
Header (<teiheader> … </teiheader> );
Front Matter (<frontmatter> … </frontmatter>);
Back Matter (<backmatter> … </backmatter>); and
Body (<body> … </body>)
All 128 standard ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters, as well as special characters, can be represented. The latter are encoded through an extended coding structure known as Unicode, where characters in all the major language can be represented.
