Digital Humanities, Computational Linguistics, and Natural Language Processing

I firmly believe that the digital humanities are more than digitizing sources, using digital research infrastructures and tools, and publishing research results online. Their real promise is not the acceleration of research by making it easier to access and analyze analyze larger corpora of sources. Rather, the point of the digital humanities is the introduction of formal modeling into humanities research; only this will actually advance scholarship and realize the full potential of computing in the humanities. There is thus a parallel to the role computational linguistics plays for linguistics. The digital humanities are furthermore connected to natural language processing—applied computational linguistics—through the use of NLP methods and tools in humanities research projects. In this talk, I will discuss some thoughts about the current state of the digital humanities and their relationship to computational linguistics and natural language processing.