Digital Humanities lives at the intersection of computer technology and humanities research...vague enough that many people have many different definitions.
whatisdigitalhumanities.com (creator, Jason Heppler) humorously provides a new definition of digital humanities upon each refresh (as defined by those in the field).
Clifford Anderson writes "a problem with writing about the influence of digital humanities on theology is that both have definitional ambiguities. To sum up any discipline with a succinct definition is a challenge."
Anderson, Clifford. “Digital Humanities and the Future of Theology.” Cursor: Zeitschrift für explorative Theologie 1 (2018); https://cursor.pubpub.org/pub/anderson-digitalhumanities-2018.
Digital Humanities is an emerging field that fuses traditional humanities disciplines with new digital technologies to provide new insights about a topic. The Digital Theology Lab at the Boston University School of Theology seeks to connect creative innovators in our community with the tools to make their digital humanities projects in theological education a reality, by providing a curated toolkit of valuable resources available to creators (hardware, software, and other) to get projects off the ground.
This research guide is currently under construction and new information is being added frequently. If we are missing a tool available to the School of Theology community that may be of use, please let us know!
According to the foundational myth of the digital humanities, it all began in 1950 or thereabouts when a Jesuit father called Roberto Busa conceived the idea of using a machine to tabulate every occurrence of every word, and the lemmas associated with the words, and the senses of those lemmas, in the works of St Thomas Aquinas. His vision was realized (some years later), with the aid of Thomas Watson of IBM, and you can see it still working today at: www.corpusthomisticum.org/it/index.age.
-Burnard, Lou. "How Modeling Standards Evolve: The Case for TEI." In The Shape of Data in the Digital Humanities: Modeling Texts and Text-Based Resource. Ed. Julia Flanders and Fortis Jannidis. New York: Routledge. 2019. p.104-105.
Roberto Busa wrote about his idea and experiences getting this project off the ground. The article "The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus" is viewable through Boston University Libraries.
The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities by The field of theological research is not immune or separate from digital humanities research; in fact, Fr. Roberto Busa was a pioneer in the digital humanities with his text analysis project diving into the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Clifford Anderson, in exploring the question of how digital humanities will influence theological research, wrote:
"...we should not expect theologians who take up digital humanities to capture the divine presence in 1s and 0s. But the light that computational tools shed on theological texts should help us become more critical readers, as well as more creative writers, of theology..."
Anderson, Clifford. “Digital Humanities and the Future of Theology.” Cursor: Zeitschrift für explorative Theologie 1 (2018); https://cursor.pubpub.org/pub/anderson-digitalhumanities-2018.
Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish and Early Christian Studies by 