Digital Humanities and Theatre Studies: New Perspectives on the Early Reception of Ibsen on the German Stage

Abstract

Broadly speaking, digital humanities is the application of computation to the disciplines of the humanities (Berry and Fagerjord 2017, 3). It encompasses a wide range of methods and practices, from text mining, topic modeling, distant reading, data visualization, to digital mapping, cultural analytics, and so forth. Although the term has only been around since the late 1990s, digital humanities has a relatively long prehistory. The roots of computational work in the humanities stretch back to 1949 when the Jesuit scholar Roberto Busa in collaboration with IBM undertook the creation of a computer-generated concordance to the writings of Thomas Aquinas (Burdick et al. 2012, 123). In the 1990s, a shift occurred in the wake of the advent of the Internet and World Wide Web during which what was then known as humanities computing was renamed and reconceptualized. The term “digital humanities” was coined to replace the term “humanities computing,” because the latter was felt to be too closely associated with computing support services. Digital humanities, N. Katherine Hayles notes, “was meant to signal that the field had emerged from the low-prestige status of a support service into a genuinely intellectual endeavor with its own professional practices, rigorous standards, and exciting theoretical explorations” (Hayles 2012, 24). The field of theatre studies has undergone a similar development. Discussion on the use of information technologies in