Hidden Histories.

Hidden Histories investigates the application of computational methods to the humanities from 1949 to the present, conducting, collecting and disseminating interviews with scholars and practitioners who were active during this period.

Combining interviews with archival data, the project recovers the social, intellectual and cultural context shaping what is today called digital humanities — a field whose own history is, for the most part, undocumented.

It is widely accepted that the application of computational methods to the humanities can be traced back to at least 1949, when Roberto Busa envisaged an index variorum of some 11 million words of medieval Latin in the works of Thomas Aquinas and related authors.

Notes and contributions towards a history of computing in the humanities have appeared in recent years; yet our understanding of such developments remains incomplete and largely unexplored — particularly for the formative decades between mainframes and the modern web.

The project gathers and makes available sources that enable the investigation of the social, intellectual and cultural context that shaped the earliest applications of computing to the humanities. It is from this context that the title 'Hidden Histories' derives.

The project is interdisciplinary in its methodology and draws on oral history, digital humanities and cultural studies. With the aim of capturing memories, observations and insights rarely recorded in the scholarly literature, we interview scholars and practitioners who applied computational methods to the humanities from the age of mainframe computing to the present day.