Why Linguists Should Care about Digital Humanities (and Epidemiology)

Where there is any perception of digital humanities (DH) within the field of English linguistics, it may be seen as a technical practice preoccupied with digitizing texts and producing digital editions. The one occurrence of digital humanities in JEngL’s archival content is a passing reference to digital editions and the role of editors—in an interview rather than a research article (Grant 2014). Within DH, there is a more vigorous conversation about what DH fundamentally is, alongside creative methodological questions about what it can be. That is because DH—from within—is largely viewed as a methodological challenge, driven by meaningful, even urgent research questions originating not only in the humanities but also in the social sciences which can be most effectively addressed via the development of new digital methods and tools. If DH is a methodological practice, it is in the sense of methods and epistemology: asking and debating how it is that we can know what we need to know, and testing the efficacy of selected digital methods in the service of specific research questions. As a corpus linguist based in a DH center, I present here a view of DH and English linguistics from within both disciplines. My discussion begins with a focus on corpus linguistics, but also includes English linguistics more generally, and linguistics as a whole. I argue that we as linguists should care about DH, not only because much of what we do is DH (even if we do not always recognize it as such), but also because collaborations between English linguistics and DH will be fruitful for all of us. Research questions in DH are wide-ranging; recent major DH projects that encompass humanities and social sciences include: