Digital tools in the humanities: Some fundamental provocations?

Man is a Tool-making Animal (Attributed to Benjamin Franklin by Samuel Johnson) Although digital tools built by those outside the Digital Humanities (DH) community (particularly tools for big data analysis or social network analysis) currently take a significant amount of DH attention these days, there has been toolmaking inside the DH for about 70 years. This article’s author has acted as a tool developer from time to time over many years, and this work has been part of his personal experience of DH from the 1970s to the present day (some history of his involvement in DH can be found in Bradley and Nylan, 2016). Text Analysis Computing Tools (TACT) (in the late 1980s) was one of the tools created by the author that fit within the then text-oriented DH mainstream, and at the time, it influenced our community about what an interactive text analysis tool might be like. Most recently, this author built Pliny (Pliny, 2015) which proposed a type of tool aimed at a broad range of tasks involved in humanities scholarship.