Since the introduction of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the mid-1900s, several aspects of humanities research have developed, including textual analysis, author attribution studies, academic editing, rhetoric and language studies, and the establishment of electronic text archives. Many of these achievements may be attributed to early humanities scholars who developed the vision of the importance of electronic text for the humanities and the standards that drove the establishment of the WWW. Vannevar Bush, who famously envisaged huge libraries available via new technology in 1945, and Father Roberto Busa, who established the Index Thomisticus, are among the pioneers who accepted computers and advocated for their use in literary and linguistic study.

The web also minimized the difficulties associated with creating, storing, transmitting, and displaying electronic texts, which were significant constraints of earlier technologies such as FTP, listserv, and Gopher. This increased the general public’s access to study and explore human inquiry, such as history, art, literature, and philosophy, helping people to better comprehend their past, interpret their fear of the unknown, understand how they value their existence, and perceive the world. Digital texts offered through the web also enabled general readers, who were previously overlooked by early humanist computing, to have access to works that were otherwise only available in a few libraries or unavailable in their own country. However, copyright restrictions, particularly those imposed on books produced before the twentieth century, have made open access to information a challenge. This makes it nearly impossible for general users to see these works without purchasing a license and is costly for computational humanists to build these archives. Another benefit of digital humanities is the ability to analyze works via textual analysis, which is algorithmic thinking used to discover patterns in text.

While electronic texts have long been the foundation of humanities computing, technological advances have enabled digital humanities to incorporate media in other formats such as digital images, audio, and video. These technologies and mediums have changed how we read and process information and have enabled humanists to develop and imagine new ways of doing humanities research and visualizing our experiences.

Transcription is a type of medium that is the most compact form of electronic text. It allows information to be manipulated for searching and editing and provides benefits for the visually disabled.

Optical character recognition (OCR) software, which also permits keyword searches on unedited, unencoded text files, may be used to produce digital pictures of the original real pages with the uncorrected text hidden.

Another medium is the encoding of text using techniques like the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). In topic modelling, TEI text analysis is often used to build word clouds and illustrate historical themes. This technology allows an author or editor to encode the logical sections of a text such as a title, author, main body and references and a wide range of characteristics. The structural markup and metadata of TEI enable the digital preservation of electronic tests, so it is usually used in data presentation. Digital preservation saves historical literature and history knowledge, therefore, allowing digital humanists to provide insights into the country’s previous history. Markup helps to identify logical or physical sections of a text, whereas metadata helps to identify relevant information in a source.

Hypertext is utilized in narrative digital humanities projects to make the reader an active participant in reading original works that are not reproductions of already published information. Since hypertextual material is closely linked to hypertext software, therefore, products are even more temporary than other types of electronic writing.

Word Count – 588 words

Bibliography

Renear, A. H. (2004). A Companion to Digital Humanities: Text Encoding. Http://Www.Digitalhumanities.Org/Companion/. http://digitalhumanities.org:3030/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-3-5

Schreibman, S., Siemens, R., & Unsworth, J. (204 C.E.). A Companion to Digital Humanities. Http://Digitalhumanities.Org/. http://digitalhumanities.org:3030/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-3-5

Willett, P. (2004). A Companion to Digital Humanities: Electronic Texts: Audiences and Purposes. Http://Www.Digitalhumanities.Org/Companion/. http://digitalhumanities.org:3030/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-3-6&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-3-6&brand=9781405103213_brand