Daniel Defoe’s works, including The Storm (1704), the Review (1704–13), and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), display his interest in new media forms and his role as a generic pioneer. Defoe’s simultaneous embrace of and scepticism towards these innovations anticipate the digital turn in recent studies of his corpus, which can be interpreted alongside the rise of the digital humanities. Digital methodologies and tools have shaped Defoe scholarship in a variety of ways. Digital collections and repositories have made Defoe’s texts accessible and searchable. Quantitative stylistic analysis has been used to address questions of Defoe’s authorship. Digital tools have afforded new and diverse approaches to Robinson Crusoe (1719), his most famous and enduring novel. And Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year has inspired numerous digital curatorial responses to the coronavirus pandemic.