Classics and Digital Humanities
Allen J. Romano · 2011
“Digital Humanities” is the current umbrella term, one which is gaining wide currency, despite its relatively recent popularization, for a variety of activities at the intersection of humanities and computing. Though the field itself is well over fifty years old, Digital Humanities seems to have recently caught the attention of the popular press. The New York Times’ series, entitled “Humanities 2.0,” explores “how digital tools are changing scholarship in history, literature and the arts.” One such piece earlier this year highlighted work like that of Stanford’s Dan Edelstein on the intellectual networks of Enlightenment thinkers. (In classical circles, the Hestia Project is doing analogous work on spatial networks in Herodotus.) A more recent piece shows off the use of Second Life and the 3–D models of the Theatron project for teaching and research. The attention is great, but there is of course a certain blindness in these reports. One report in the New York Times seems astounded that humanities scholars – they’re the pale ones hanging out near the library, right? – even know how to use computers. (The piece is framed with an appraisal of the whole digital project by Anthony Grafton which misleadingly makes Grafton’s sober assessment sound like partial condemnation.) The popular press’s rhetoric of “cutting edge” distorts the situation, illustrated easily enough within our own discipline. Classics boasts some of the longest-running projects in the digital realm, many of which are now so familiar that it is difficult to think of them as “Digital Humanities.” The Bryn Mawr Classical Review, for example, is the second-oldest online academic journal. The Perseus Digital Library started up in 1985 and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae some forty years ago, in 1972. Computer analysis of classical texts extends back to the earliest days of humanities computing. It is worth recalling that the very first project in Digital Humanities was the work of Father Roberto Busa, beginning in 1949, to construct a concordance to the works of Thomas Aquinas with the aid of early computers, a project which, if not strictly “classical,” has at least linguistic kinship. So even if the Grey Lady is oblivious to the history of Digital Humanities, this most recent percolation into the popular press captures something essential and distinctive about Digital Humanities at this particular moment (and in distinction to the modes of doing humanities computing over the past decades). Matthew Kirschenbaum, in a recent genre piece on the perennial Digital Humanities question, “What is Digital Humanities,” ends with this public dimension: