Digital Humanities Didn’t Begin with the Computer

[This formed the basis of a plenary lecture I gave at IIT-Jodhpur in 2024.]

Every discipline has its origin myth. For Digital Humanities, it is often the story of Father Roberto Busa and the Index Thomisticus: a monumental mid-20th century effort to encode the works of Thomas Aquinas using IBM punch cards. It is an impressive origin story that really writes itself: how a clergyman met and tamed the machine. It is the story many of us learn in the first decade of the 21st century.

But what if this isn’t where it began? What if tying the origins of a field to a machine — a particular instantiation of technology at a particular moment — obscures something older, more essential?

My concern is not with the figure of Busa, but with what his positioning implies: that Digital Humanities is defined by its relationship to the modern computer. That computation and the computer are one and the same. This, I would argue, is both historically and conceptually misleading.

Computation precedes the computer. Long before circuits and silicon, there were systems of reckoning. The abacus, Napier’s bones, Leibniz’s calculator, Babbage’s Analytical Engine — each a step in a lineage of mathematical imagination. The computer is not the origin of computation; it is one of its many manifestations. If we think of Digital Humanities as computationally inflected humanistic inquiry, then its history cannot begin with the mid-twentieth century. It must begin much earlier, in the moments when pattern, structure, and formal constraint became tools for thinking in the humanities.

Take literature, for instance. The claim that literature resists mathematical thinking — that it is unrepeatable, affective, beyond system — is, I suspect, more myth than fact. Literature has long been shaped by form, rule, and design. The sonnet is a constraint. So is tragedy in five acts. So is the rhyme scheme of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Mathematical imagination is not an intrusion into literature; it is one of its substrates.

Consider Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928). From a modest corpus of one hundred Russian fairy tales, Propp extracted a system of 31 functions, basic narrative moves that always occur in a fixed order. It is a kind of proto-algorithmic thinking. A recognition that stories are not infinite, but patterned. That imagination has structure.

Or consider the Oulipo group, founded in the 1960s, a gathering of writers and mathematicians who used constraint as a source of creative energy. For them, the literary work was a combinatorial engine. Form came first. Meaning would follow, if it could.

If this is computation — understood as rule-based generation and systemic variation — then surely it existed long before the computer. And if Digital Humanities is about these modes of inquiry, then it too predates its name.

So why does this matter?

Because origin stories shape expectations. When we tie a field to a specific technology, we make it vulnerable to that technology’s limits, its obsolescence, its market logics. We confuse the machine with the method. We risk reducing thought to tool-use.

We also risk absurdity. If the presence of a computer defines Digital Humanities, then every action on a device — from writing a document to checking email — becomes a DH act. This is clearly untenable. Not everything done on a computer is Digital Humanities. Nor must Digital Humanities always involve a computer.

What matters is the disposition. A willingness to think structurally, to formalise ambiguity, to trace patterns in what seems singular. To ask: what else might this text or this image or this object reveal if we look at it sideways?

And here, the computer is simply one more lens. Powerful, yes. But not foundational.

I have no desire to unseat Busa. His work was remarkable, and symbolic in all the right ways. But perhaps it is time to write a different prelude to the field — one that begins not with machines, but with a form of thought. Not with a moment, but with a method.

Digital Humanities, then, is not defined by the digital. It is animated by the mathematical. And mathematics, quietly, but intently, has always been part of the humanities.