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These materials range from ancient inscriptions on stone, through a wealth of written and printed materials, works of art in many different media, cultural artefacts, sound recordings, live performance and digital moving images. Scholars in these disciplines are working with source materials that have been produced by human hand and mind in a huge variety of ways. What do we mean by the humanities? Well, a brief list of humanities disciplines might include (among other things), American studies, Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, Art History, Byzantine and modern Greek Studies, Classics, Comparative Literature, Cultural and Creative Industries, English Language and Literature, Film studies, French, German, History, Medieval studies, Music, Palaeography, Philosophy, Theology, Visual and Performing Arts.
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The reason for this is almost certainly that it has taken a long time for computing techniques and technology to advance to a state where they can process the myriad and complex data sources of the humanities and begin to answer the manifold questions asked by researchers. Despite this long association of applied computing with humanities research it is only in recent years that the application of computing techniques has become widespread among humanities scholars. Many followed his lead, including Antonio Zampolli who pioneered the application of computational techniques in literary and linguistic research from the 1960s. One of the acknowledged pioneers in this area, Father Robert Busa, began his work on the Index Thomisticus (an index to the works of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas) in the late 1040s, very soon after the first stored-program computer was developed. The application of computing to research problems in the humanities is not new.