ABSTRACT
The question facing digital humanities is twofold: what can we do to make NLP tools and assets better suited to humanists, and, at the same time, how can the humanistic perspective help overcome the Anglocentric status quo of NLP more generally? This chapter describes how we addressed these two questions at once through the pedagogical design of a series of workshops under the banner of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, ‘New Languages for NLP: Building Linguistic Diversity in the Digital Humanities’. Our approach was based on the concept of Humanistic NLP, which we define as an area of applied, translational research aimed at developing theories, tools, and processes that enable the meaningful use of NLP methods by humanities scholars in specific research scenarios.
