Marrying Computer Science and the Humanities

If you haven’t worked with the digital humanities (DH), it can often appear like a city covered in fog—beautiful, ethereal, and untouchable. At a recent colloquium, guest lecturers Jessica Tebo and T. J. McLemore, both PhD candidates at the University of Colorado Boulder, demystified DH by sharing how it encompasses humanities and computer science research. The two have spent the last few years working together on Romantic Circles, a scholarly website once considered the cutting edge of DH. Their efforts to completely rebuild the website exemplify how DH collaborates with and improves both computer science and the humanities.

Romantic Circles began in 1996 as a way for humanities scholars to post their Romantic literature research on a digital format. The project required computer science workers to create the backend of the website without seeing or interacting with the frontend material. At first Romantic Circles offered fascinating features such as a search bar for Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s journals. But when Tebo and McLemore joined the project in 2018, they discovered that this approach was not a sustainable way to create content because when older workers left the project, their files and records left too. In other words, features of the website were redesigned or lost completely.

Tebo quickly realized that keeping the website alive would require changes. She said, “There will always be maintenance costs for libraries, whether they are physical or digital.” She began revamping the website to keep it up to date with changing technologies. McLemore experienced similar problems with the site. He found that when updates came out for popular search engines and design tools, they could crash the entire program. The two of them recognized that they needed to get help from colleagues in computer science.

Undergraduate computer science majors were recruited to help rebuild the website, and Tebo made sure to include them not only in the backend but in creating the material presented on the website. As the students rebuilt the website, they updated the flow of information, ensured that the button placement made sense, and even updated the logo. Along the way they developed a love for the humanities as well. Tebo recalled students telling her that they had needed a way to interact with the humanities but prioritized their computer science skills. The project filled that very need by sharing the humanities responsibilities of the website with them.

McLemore commented that DH requires humanities and science scholars to converse with one another from the outset of a project in order to create something wonderful. Such collaboration increases creativity on both sides. It facilitates the combination of powerful written research with user-friendly interfacing to create both visually stunning and enlightening resources. Computer science and the humanities benefit from shared DH projects like Romantic Circles.