Introduction

Literary history offers a guide to the canon of great books. It matters little whether one picks up a history of literature from the nineteenth century or a modern one; they all tend to more or less salvage a small collection of books from the ocean of those published. For the year 1809, for example, any given history of German literature will highlight Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), as if no other work of literature had been published that year. This is the case regardless of whether one consults Hermann Hettner's literary history from 1870 or R. H. Stephenson's essay on the novel in Weimar classicism from 2005. A brief perusal of a book catalogue from around 1809, however, suggests an alternative to this canonical picture of literary history. Approximately one hundred German novels were published in 1809. Among the widely read novels included in this list are, for example, the third volume of August Lafontaine's Die beiden Bräute (The Two Brides) and August Kotzebue's Philbert oder die Verhältnisse (Philbert or the Circumstances). The canon is one story; the cultural history of read books is another. For those who believe that literary history should be more than the history of great books, a corpus-based approach offers one way of dealing with the thousands of books that actually circulated. And we are not using “thousands” metaphorically in speaking of the literary history of the nineteenth century, even when we limit ourselves to the German-speaking countries.

In a talk given at an National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute (2011) on advanced topics in the digital humanities, philosopher of science Paul Humphreys suggested that as soon as machines could create knowledge, a point in time he traces back to the launch of ENIAC in 1946, the distinction between the humanities and other fields of academic endeavor was rendered tenuous at best and probably even eliminated. One can, of course, quibble with Humphrey's use of the word knowledge when it comes to the data produced by computers. One can even take issue with using ENIAC as a marker for the beginning of the computer age. But even if one argues successfully that Humphreys overstates his case, one must admit that somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, whether it was in 1941 when Konrad Zuse developed the Z3, 1943 when Alan Turing developed Colossus, or 1946 when ENIAC entered the picture, the way we pursue knowledge and the nature of research drastically changed.

It is not an overstatement to claim that information technology (IT) is the first technology in human history that touches everything. Philosopher of science Steven Shaviro polemically points out that IT is to humans what nature was in a bygone era—that is, “the inescapable background against which we live our lives and from which we derive our references and meanings.” If we take Shaviro's suggestion seriously and accept his conflation of nature and machines and the derivation of reference and meaning with regard to machines, we can no longer content ourselves with a strictly outlined traditional understanding of the humanities.