ABSTRACT
The digital revolution of the past years has profoundly changed higher education and the academic world in general. Not only has ‘much of the teaching and learning apparatus moved online’, thus effectuating new forms of classroom instruction, but ‘the computational technologies and methodologies’ available today have also ‘transformed research practices in every discipline’. 1 The digital humanities in particular have created exciting new tools, which have attracted a lot of attention within the scholarly community and received positive media coverage. 2 This in turn has boosted public interest in humanities research, especially in relation to new technologies that ‘facilitate insights into history, language, art and culture that human researchers might never have been able to glean on their own’. 3 With considerable grants being awarded to such projects – the sums allotted can range from $50,000 to $250,000 – some even see in them the new frontier that will restore government support of, and funding for the humanities and secure their survival within academia in the current era of ‘cuts’. While it remains to be seen whether this will be the case, it is certainly true that the humanities have been able to reclaim some of their lost territory thanks to digital initiatives, which showed how technology and computational research methods can be fruitfully applied to the study of literature, history, and the arts.
