Will Digital Destroy the Humanities?

The short answer is no, but arriving at that answer requires a bit of a journey, and there are quite a few caveats along the way. In the long run, the advent of quantitative methodologies in traditional humanistic disciplines will forever and irreversibly change scholarship, but whether this will be a net loss or gain depends on digital and traditional humanists working together with common values, a shared understanding of the risks, and a willingness to recognize one another’s distinct but interconnected contribution to scholarship.

Celebrating New Technology

This essay was inspired by my experience teaching Measuring Manuscripts, a computational philology course at the European Summer University in Digital Humanities in Besançon, France in July of 2026. In that environment, composed of present and future digital humanists, the mood was exuberant. Finally among allies, we could celebrate our favorite questions and indulge in our favorite methods. Many there shared the experience of moving in more traditional academic circles, where the overall vibe is that we “computer people” have come to spoil the party. At ESU, that feeling was conspicuously absent. In a wide-ranging talk on her experience as a digital humanist beginning in the 1990s, Elisabeth Burr, the founder of the ESU, referred to the digital humanities as a “new epistemology”, a thought-provoking statement, which reflected a shared feeling. We were doing something new and exciting that promises to change our fields for the better. But in our exuberance, we could inadvertently underestimate the risks.

New technologies often replace what came before. In fact, they are routinely designed to do exactly this. Horseless carriages and cordless phones were both (once) named for what they were supposed to eliminate: horses and cords. The iPhone was designed to replace cell phones, iPods, and eventually digital cameras in a single package. In some cases, bad actors are not content to let their ideas win in the marketplace, but instead aim to take by force, as exemplified in the famous antitrust case against General Motors, Firestone, Standard Oil of California, and Phillips Petroleum, which alleged that they had deliberately stifled competition from other modes of transportation. (They were acquitted, but everyone knows what really happened.) Or they impose their views on the public through a claim to authority, without even needing direct control over the process. German architects in the early twentieth century, frothing with modernist zeal, actively tried to reeducate the public out of their love for Gründerzeit ornament by popularizing Entstuckung—literally tearing the facades off of existing buildings—resulting in an antihuman urban landscape scarred by dystopian wastelands of shabby boxes. This is not to say that innovations in transport or architecture are bad things, but destroying what already exists in a manic pursuit of novelty impoverishes and uglifies the whole world to the harm of those who never had any say in the decision. History justifies our worry.

But the worry can easily be misplaced. Such outcomes are not inevitable, and treating them as a given can distract from the real danger. Video did not kill the radio star. Streaming (arguably an updated version of radio) did. Fledgling artists struggle to survive on the royalties from streaming services like Spotify. While MTV as a source for music was only a short-lived fad, audio-only formats were destined to change the industry to one in which only those of independent means can hope to survive, where the working-class hero is no longer something to be. Worrying about the wrong problem is just as dangerous as not worrying at all. The crucial question is: where do the real risks lie?

A Dubious Denial

When speaking publicly on this topic, digital humanists often say that their methods are not meant to replace traditional ones. Perhaps they mean this sincerely, but the claim is ultimately disingenuous. Nearly every computational method I taught in Besançon is meant to replicate, and therefore possibly replace, an existing non-digital one. One of the motivations for creating new methods is to improve upon old ones, and often the only way to sell a new method to the public is to demonstrate its improvement on an existing task. If that improvement is successful, the new method will inevitably supplant the old, because its advantages will outweigh its disadvantages, making it on the whole better. Better might mean more efficient, more reliable, easier to scale, easier to evaluate, or any number of other things, but better is the explicit goal. Importantly, better does not mean free of negative consequences, many of them unintended and unexpected. It means more likely to be selected as the standard approach. The difference is crucial.

Source: Martin Howard via Wikimedia

Typewriters

Here it might be useful to step outside of our immediate surroundings and lean on the power of metaphor. Imagine a PC salesman in the early 1990s who claims that PCs are not intended to replace typewriters. Such a claim would naturally be met with skepticism. Isn’t desktop publishing one of the promises of home computers? How then could they not replace an existing technology that performs the same task less effectively? Of course PCs replaced typewriters, and for many good reasons, but with some tradeoffs. We gained speed and capability: non-sequential editing, free choice of layouts, fonts, and colors, the ability to store and transmit documents digitally. We got to dispense with jams and correcting fluid and bulky machines. We lost the tactile experience of a mechanical keyboard and the pleasant thump of the typebar on paper and the satisfying ping of a real physical carriage return. Almost everyone took the deal. (Including me. This essay was written on a computer.) They weren’t forced to. Anyone can write on a typewriter today if they want, but most people make the same choice. And that was the point. PCs were deliberately designed to replace typewriters, and claiming otherwise would have been dishonest.

Now imagine that same salesman claiming that PCs would replace parks. “After all,” he might argue, “you can visit a virtual park right there on the screen without even needing to put your pants on.” Such a claim smacks of tech-bro hubris, and it would rightfully be met with outright derision. A simulation of a park on a computer screen can’t do what a park does. No reasonable person would claim otherwise. But this example highlights the danger of unintended consequences. What if people start spending all their time at home staring at computer screens? What if cities, seeing a decline in visitors, decide to save money by reducing funding to the parks department? Will competition from a lower-quality substitute diminish the real thing? This is a real danger, not replacement but displacement, about which I will say more later in this essay.

But first, I must state frankly that the humanities are full of typewriters: established methods that can be improved upon, and where the improvement will (at least partially, perhaps completely) replace the old way of doing things. One obvious example is palaeographic dating. Traditionally, palaeographic dating depends purely on expertise and scholarly authority. Though often reliable, the underlying process is a black box. Disagreeing with a date given in an old source simply creates two differing opinions. By contrast, computational approaches to palaeography are replicable—other scholars can rerun the analyses while checking their underlying operations and conclusions. They scale to hundreds of texts and they provide precise measures of their own certainty. The advantage to traditional humanists is undeniable. A scholar studying culture across time benefits from working with an entire corpus of reliably dated texts and doesn’t need to become an expert in palaeography in order to obtain one. Traditional palaeographic methods don’t offer these advantages. Digital text editions are another example. Having hundreds of witnesses aligned in a customizable synoptic view (as in the Kalila wa-Dimna project) fundamentally changes the capability of the philologist. Digital dictionaries are yet another. For Egyptologists, the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae has replaced bulky, incomplete physical dictionaries. Plus, it’s available in English, and it’s free.

Typewriters are not the problem. They don’t replace expertise or humanistic inquiry. In fact, in many cases scientific methods highlight the ongoing need for expertise. A useful case study is found in the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife scandal. In 2012, Karen King, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, announced the discovery of a papyrus fragment with the words: ⲡⲉϫⲉ ⲓ̅ⲥ̅ ⲛⲁⲩ ⲧⲁϩⲓⲙⲉ… “Jesus said to them: ‘my wife…’”. The Coptic is unambiguous, and the news coverage exploded. Numerous Coptologists responded immediately with doubts. Leo Depuydt analyzed the text, identified its resemblance to the Gospel of Thomas, and argued that the likelihood of such similarity occurring by chance is astronomically small. Christian Askeland, comparing another text in the same hand, found that document to be a copy of a modern text edition. The argument raged between the experts, but the truth eventually came out: it’s a forgery. (The full story is covered in Ariel Sabar’s Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, which is a genuine page-turner.) Science seemed to authenticate the fragment, dating the papyrus to the eighth century CE and validating the ink as plausibly genuine. In this case, and in so many others, the accumulated knowledge of experts was needed to evaluate the seemingly straightforward results of scientific tests. The science didn’t fail. It correctly produced the result it was intended to. But such results, without qualified interpretation, are partial at best. The lesson is clear: quantitative results cannot stand on their own, they must be evaluated, discussed, and understood by scholars.

Parks

PCs can replace typewriters, they can’t replace human writers. They also cannot replace parks. And the humanities are full of parks as well. In a recent conversation with a colleague about this topic, I pointed out that quantitative methods can sometimes provide objective answers with a measurable degree of certainty. She countered that, while this may be true, she isn’t interested in such questions. She prefers questions that don’t have simple, straightforward answers. And rightly so. Some of the most interesting questions cannot be answered definitively, with quantitative tools or any other, and one of the most essential roles of the humanist is to engage with such questions.

There is a contrasting claim, sometimes made by those with an inclination towards scientism, that “if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist.” This is nonsense. Plenty of things can’t be measured. Some of the most important aspects of the experience of being human can’t be measured. No amount of MRIs studying love in the brain can ever capture the bitter poignance of Damon’s “Nunc scio quid sit amor” or the quiet yearning in Wesley’s “As you wish.” Quantitative methods will never address the core questions that drive the humanities. They can only provide useful background information that informs those questions. In some sense, they might even be said to help us identify the big questions by reliably excluding those that are easily answerable and therefore less interesting. None of this is to say that measurement isn’t important. In fact, I would emend the absurd: “if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist” with the more reasonable (but surely still controversial): “if it can be measured, it should be.” Measurement, and by extension quantitative methods more broadly, provide a robust foundation that undergirds our reasoning. As we extend that foundation, the number of interesting questions grows as well.

Philology is full of such questions. Why does Sinuhe flee when the pharaoh was assassinated? The text never tells us, as its unknown author presumably intended. (In fact, it never even explicitly calls it an assassination. We’ve had to infer that from other sources.) We are supposed to wonder and discuss, as scholars have done for more than a century, just as ancient Egyptian audiences surely did nearly four millennia ago. Computational methods may tell us when the text was written, but they cannot tell us why. These are the parks. A computer cannot replace them. Nothing can.

A Troubling Pattern

And yet, there is a historical pattern in the sciences worth remembering. Humanistic inquiry tends to comprise what is left over after quantitative approaches have done all they can. This relegates the humanities to the remainders, a seemingly shrinking space of scholarship surrounded on all sides by math and science. Many fields began as natural philosophy and became sciences when numbers arrived. Geology is a well-known example. After plate tectonics and radiometric dating, geology became a quantitative discipline, and previous lines of inquiry gradually faded away. Biology was once the purview of naturalists crouching in bushes drawing birds and beetles in notebooks, now the vast majority of biology papers include statistical analyses and would never be published without them. Scholarly disciplines can be and frequently have been taken over by quantitative methodologies. Oversimplifying a bit, the sciences are everything you can do with numbers, and the humanities are everything you can’t. From such examples we might conclude that, as soon as a field gains numeracy, it switches sides.

The field I work in, Egyptology, is fundamentally humanistic. It deals primarily with an ancient culture and its relationship to the human experience. Many of its best questions cannot be quantified. The dilemma is whether those questions will protect the field from crossing the boundary into the realm of science or be swept aside by a tsunami of quantitative methodologies. As a digital humanist, I and my like-minded colleagues have a responsibility to oppose this outcome at every step. Just as parks might suffer neglect when everyone stays home looking at their computers, so too might humanistic questions be relegated to obscurity if my own approach to knowledge creation is carried to a harmful extreme.

But as we all know, funding for scholarship is limited and awarded by competition. As funders promote digital methods, less is left for others. The economics are straightforward. In many ways the shift has already begun. The solution is simple (though not necessarily easy). We, the digital humanists, must insist that our work always support existing humanistic questions or lead to new ones. Presentations of tools, datasets, or methods must continue to be seen as only partial scholarly outputs. Computation for its own sake must never be allowed to dominate the field. Digital and non-digital methods must always be integrated into shared, overlapping modes of inquiry.

There is reason for optimism. Archaeology, fundamentally interested in human societies in the past, has adopted numerous quantitative and scientific tools without abandoning its humanistic core. As a field adjacent to philology and embedded in umbrella fields like Egyptology and classics, it is likely that a similar scenario will unfold naturally. Perhaps what makes a field humanistic is not its methods but its focus on humans.

Source: Joi Ito via Wikimedia

Video Games

Even then, there will be some loss in market share for the traditional humanities. That is, the things I’ve chosen to label typewriters will be replaced. In the Venn diagram of digital and non-digital methods, there is a lemon of intersection occupied by methods that will become digital. Ideally, these things will spawn new humanistic questions, thus taking over some territory but giving back more in exchange. Some questions will remain humanistic, so long as we can manage it—those things that computational methods cannot simulate. The parks must be protected.

But there is a missing piece of this Venn diagram. What of the things computers can do that traditional methods cannot? Abusing the earlier metaphor, we might think of these as video games. These are not simulated parks, which wouldn’t be any fun anyway, because real parks are unbeatable. These are entirely new spaces, which can only exist thanks to computers. In the scholarly realm, no equivalent of video games seems to exist as a category of research. Up till now, digital methods have been focused largely on replicating existing methods. But surely, if there are questions only non-quantitative methods can address, then there are also questions only quantitative methods can address.

There are a few early forerunners worth considering, as they hint at the possibilities that await us. Agent-based modeling, already in use in economics, offers new ways of understanding human behavior in complex interactions. A similar approach has been used to offer new perspectives on complex, otherwise invisible phenomena in prehistoric societies. And it would be negligent to omit the remarkable results from the Vesuvius Challenge, where an ancient papyrus scroll, charred into a lump of coal by the eruption, has been virtually unwrapped and read for the first time in millennia.

At present, the examples of video games are few. What sorts of new and exciting possibilities lie waiting to be discovered? Without much in the way of precedent to start from, how can we even discover such things? This is precisely the sort of question digital humanists need to start thinking about. Until we add something new, we appear only to take away. We need a new approach to finding ideas that goes beyond the recreation of existing methods in computational form.

Will Digital Destroy the Humanities?

My answer at the beginning of this essay was no, but with quite a bit of nuance and caution. In particular, nothing guarantees this outcome. It depends on us. To some extent and in specific cases, new methods can and should replace old ones, and we must address such situations honestly. But replacement in individual cases is not the real danger. Displacement is. The typewriters should go the way of the dodo while leaving the parks unaffected. And the role of expertise should never be handed over to a machine. Digital tools and quantitative measures cannot be relied upon without interpretation. Further, the questions they ask and answer do not cover the full extent of humanistic inquiry. We must not forget this.

We must not become like those greedy robber barons and narcissistic architects who impose their will on others by destroying what has come before. The burden is on the digital humanists to direct their research toward humanistic questions, either by supporting them with new tools that accelerate the work and strengthen the underlying foundation, or by devising new ways of looking that lead to new questions. In both cases, the quantitative results are always partial. Scholarship lies in intelligent interpretation. The traditional humanists will need to trust that we are all on the same team, and that trust must be built through honesty about what we’re here to do and a commitment to keep asking humanistic questions.

---

The text only may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

---

---