History
Digital humanities descends from the field of humanities computing, of computationally enabled "formal representations of the human record," whose origins reach back to the late 1940s in the pioneering work of Roberto Busa.
The Text Encoding Initiative, born from the desire to create a standard encoding scheme for humanities electronic texts, is the outstanding achievement of early humanities computing. The project was launched in 1987 and published the first full version of the TEI Guidelines in May 1994.
In the nineties, major digital text and image archives emerged at centers of humanities computing in the U.S. (e.g. the Women Writers Project, the Rossetti Archive, and the William Blake Archive), which demonstrated the sophistication and robustness of text-encoding for literature.
The terminological change from "humanities computing" to "digital humanities" has been attributed to John Unsworth and Ray Siemens who, as editors of the monograph A Companion to Digital Humanities (2001), tried to prevent the field from being viewed as "mere digitization." Consequently, the hybrid term has created an overlap between fields like rhetoric and composition, which use "the methods of contemporary humanities in studying digital objects," and digital humanities, which uses "digital technology in studying traditional humanities objects". The use of computational systems and the study of computational media within the arts and humanities more generally has been termed the 'computational turn'.
In 2006 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the federal granting agency for scholarships in the humanities, launched the Digital Humanities Initiative (renamed Office of Digital Humanities in 2008), which made widespread adoption of the term "digital humanities" all but irreversible in the United States.
Digital humanities emerged from its former niche status and became "big news" at the 2009 MLA convention in Philadelphia, where digital humanists made "some of the liveliest and most visible contributions" and had their field hailed as "the first 'next big thing' in a long time."
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