Early 1990s – 2004 – the “Era of the Internet”
The importance of the Internet and its impact on humanities computing cannot be overstated. The World-Wide Web (WWW), known simply as the Web, is one the most important service provided by the Internet, from the point of view of users. The Web facilitated publication and venues for scholarly work in the humanities, as well as dissemination of information about academic activities and conferences. During this time period, electronic scholarly editing and electronic scholarly editions were introduced. “Editions” that were produced had a more scholarly connotation, where the views of editors were represented.
Text began to be considered as a physical “object” that can be represented with digital images. Collections of electronic resources began to be known as “archives”, which usually indicated a collection of material that can be navigated by users. Overlapping with this development, libraries began to put their collections on the Internet. Not only were printed, “analog” documents and text scans and made available as Web content, for example, in the form of PDF (Portable Document Format) files, but optical character recognition (OCR) technology was employed so that these texts became searchable, greatly enhancing their utility. Because the original scanned images of pages of text were converted into a form to which computational algorithms can be applied, searching, digital text analysis, and other useful operations became possible without having to manually enter the text into a word processing system.
Around 2004, “humanities computing” was re-branded as “digital humanities”, as evidenced by the publication of the collection A Companion to the Digital Humanities (Blackwell, Oxford) in that year (Jones, 2016), (Kaplan, 2015), which is the term that has gained widespread acceptance, and is the preferred term at present. However, around the period of 2004 – 2008, it was recognized that this re-branding was more subtle than simply a name change. In contrast to the (older) humanities computing, the (newer) digital humanities emphasized “big data”, specifically the analysis and visualization of large datasets of humanities materials. “Distant reading”, in which a large volume of texts or large corpora are analyzed with computational methods and visualization approaches, also entered the field during this period. It was also a period of coding (software development and programming) as well as the development of digital tools, archives, and websites. Wearable computing devices also influenced the new field and contributed to the spatial turn in the humanities. Finally, it was the period of new media (simulations, virtual worlds, computer games, websites), (Jones, 2016) which are usually generated computationally and disseminated through computer technology. In the words of Steven E. Jones, “[i]n one sense, the new digital humanities is humanities computing, everted”, where “eversion” refers to the overflowing and interpenetration of digital technology, sometimes called “cyberspace”, into everyday reality (Jones, 2016). At the end of the era of “humanities computing”, significant opportunities were identified, and many have become realized in the ensuing years. For instance, there was a growing recognition of the importance of putting the cultural heritage on the Internet, and significantly increasing its accessibility for scholars, lifelong learners, and the general public. The Perseus Project is an example of applying the tools and techniques of humanities computing, including computational linguistics, that assist in achieving this goal. New digitization and encoding techniques have been, and will continue to be, developed to reduce data creation costs without sacrificing value or utility. Furthermore, through the study of humanities computing, students gain skills that are transferable to professional positions in electronic publishing, the then-emerging field of educational technologies, and digital multimedia, as well as in academic research and teaching. The innovations, research, and insights afforded by the humanities correspond to the ever-increasing pervasiveness of the Internet, which, in turn, has made the contributions and results of humanities computing readily available to a wide and varied audience (Hockey, 2004).
