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Quote :"What is Digital Humanities and What is it Doing in English Departments?"
So what is digital humanities and what is it doing in English departments?...First, after numeric input, text has been by far the most tractable data type for computers to manipulate. Unlike images, audio, video, and so on, there is a long tradition of text-based data processing that was within the capabilities of even some of the earliest computer systems and that has for decades fed research in fields like stylistics, linguistics, and author attribution studies, all heavily associated with English departments.
What on earth do computers have to do with English literature? A lot, actually.
Let's think this through. The study of literature is all about texts, right? And texts are made up of thousands, hundreds of thousands, thousands of millions of words. So far, so good. Well, computers are really good at analyzing text: they can zip through all of those millions of words and find patterns in the blink of an eye. It would take our little brains decades to do that.
In a nutshell: digital research methods can help us analyze and understand literary texts more efficiently and more deeply.