The Digital Humanities: Our Future Of Humanistic Study?

Digital art showing computer pixels intertwined with historical writing.

A new approach to studying the human experience has been gaining popularity over the last twenty years: the digital humanities. Supported by major institutions, grant programs, and research centers, this up-and-coming field explores the intersection of technology and the human experience. A truly interdisciplinary framework, the digital humanities uses computational tools, digital archives, visualization techniques, and interactive platforms to create an engaging, accessible, and innovative method of teaching and learning.

The origins of this fascinating field can be traced back to the 1940s, when Jesuit scholar Roberto Busa wanted to make scholarly texts easier to navigate. In 1949, he approached the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). He began what would become the Index Thomisticus, a corpus of more than eleven million words from the works of Italian priest Thomas Aquinas. It took decades to complete, and its early stages relied on punched-card machines that processed Latin words by the thousands. Busa later explained that he believed computers could help researchers “see connections that remain hidden to the human eye.” His collaboration with IBM is now widely cited as the first large-scale humanities computing project. By the late 1960s and 1970s, universities began taking on similar projects. 

By the 1990s, major libraries began digitizing manuscripts at scale. The British Library reported in 1998 that it had scanned more than 100,000 pages from its early modern collections, and the Library of Congress announced similar numbers shortly after. These efforts show how quickly computational methods were shifting from small-scale experiments to global research infrastructures. In the early 2000s, the rise of high-resolution imaging and open metadata opened new doorways. Extensive online archives such as the Walt Whitman Archive, the Rossetti Archive, and the Women Writers Project began offering public access to digitized materials with clearer images, structured information, and dependable transcriptions. These developments allowed researchers to examine literary and historical sources with more detail and flexibility, opening new paths for analysis that were not possible in traditional print collections.

The National Endowment for the Humanities reported in 2023 that more than 1,000 digital humanities projects had received funding since the program began, reflecting a widespread shift in how scholars engage with the past and with contemporary digital life.

One contribution of the digital humanities is the large-scale digitization of cultural heritage materials. Projects such as the Library of Congress National Digital Newspaper Program, which has digitized more than 20 million pages of historic newspapers, have opened avenues for research that didn’t exist just a generation ago. Scholars can now search for specific phrases in nineteenth-century regional newspapers, track how political language has changed over time, or examine how information moved between cities during key historical moments. Europeana provides access to more than 50 million cultural artifacts from museums and libraries across Europe. The Smithsonian’s digitization efforts have placed more than 4.5 million objects and specimens online. These platforms have redefined what it means to study history and literature by allowing both scholars and the public to examine material that was once available only to a very niche audience.

A photo showing a room of servers that keeps the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive up and running.

They also play an important role in preservation. The University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, which contains more than 55,000 video testimonies from survivors of genocide, provides a powerful example of how digital preservation protects voices that might otherwise be lost.

Another big part of the digital humanities is visualization and mapping. The “Mapping the Republic of Letters” project at Stanford University uses geographic data to show how correspondence networks connected Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. The project revealed that many intellectual networks were far more international and interconnected than previously thought. The “Transatlantic Slave Trade Database,” which includes information on more than 36,000 voyages, allows researchers, educators, and descendants to trace routes, dates, and demographics. Visualizations from this project have highlighted the scale of forced migration, the regional diversity of African origins, and the mortality rates on the voyages taken. These examples show how visualization can illuminate systems of power, movement, and cultural exchange with a level of detail that textual description cannot provide.

The digital humanities is also known for its emphasis on collaboration and community engagement. Many projects involve teams of programmers, librarians, designers, community partners, and subject experts who work together to build digital exhibits, crowdsourced transcription platforms, or community archives. The Colored Conventions Project, for instance, brings together scholars and public historians to recover the history of nineteenth-century Black political organizing. It includes digitized maps, biographies, and essays that reveal the depths of Black political tradition. This collaborative approach challenges older academic norms by demonstrating the benefit of multiple perspectives working on the same materials.

However, the digital humanities field also faces many challenges, such as unequal digitization. A large share of digitized texts comes from North American and European institutions, meaning many languages and communities are underrepresented. Another issue is resources. Digital projects often require funding for software, servers, personnel, and long-term preservation. Smaller institutions may not have the same capacity to support complex digital work as larger universities. There are also labor concerns. Many digital initiatives rely on graduate students, librarians, and archivists who may not receive the recognition or compensation they deserve. Scholars such as Lauren Klein and Amy Earhart have highlighted how uneven power structures influence whose histories are digitized and prioritized.

Even with these complications, the digital humanities offers powerful ways to explore both culture and digital life. It supports new forms of analysis, new ways of presenting research, and new opportunities for public participation. As we continue to navigate this new tech age, the digital humanities provides us with tools for studying both the stories we inherit and the ones we create.