This epigraph – from an article in the recent series by the New York Times, ‘Humanities 2.0’ – reflects growing interest in the way data and data-mining, and digital tools more broadly, are changing humanities scholarship. In ‘The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanities’, Christine Borgman similarly identifies ‘data- and informationintensive… research’ as a major future direction for the humanities. Just as the ‘availability of large volumes of data has enabled scientists to ask new questions in new ways’, she argues that increased existence and awareness of humanities data – largely in the form of cultural records and ‘especially as more records are digitised and made available to the public’ – will enable new approaches to, and perspectives on, research questions across the humanities. The editors of A Companion to the Digital Humanities agree, identifying data-mining as a common feature of the contributions to that collection, and a central component of future humanities research:

Despite the prognostic tenor of such claims, quantitative and digital methods have a long history in the humanities.