DIGITAL HUMANITIES INITIATIVE
Recovering the Christian
Intellectual Tradition.
Christians have always preserved books, recovered writings, read them accurately, and handed them on. Greystone’s Digital Humanities Initiative brings new instruments to that old work, so that more of the Church’s inheritance can reach pastors, teachers, students, scholars, and readers.
The technology is new. The purpose is not.
WHY THIS WORK MATTERS
A rich inheritance, still hard to reach.
Much of the Church’s theology, biblical interpretation, philosophy, and reflection on the arts and sciences remains untranslated, locked in old printed editions, handwritten notebooks, or manuscripts held in distant libraries.
Different copies of the same work sometimes disagree, and old editions sometimes carry mistakes that have simply been repeated. Our aim is to recover these materials, make them trustworthy and usable, and place them in the hands of those who will read, teach, and build upon them.
-
The humanities study the record of human thought and culture: books, languages, history, ideas, art, and the documents people leave behind. Digital humanities brings modern digital tools to that old work.
A scholar still reads a manuscript line by line, but can also use a computer to compare thousands of lines across many copies. She still traces an author’s sources, but can search enormous collections for a quotation. She still prepares an edition or translation, but can organize images, transcriptions, variants, notes, and evidence so that the work remains searchable and useful to others.
The point is not to replace close reading with machines. It is to join close reading, historical knowledge, and human judgment to tools that can handle quantities of material no individual could reasonably process by hand. Digital humanities is not a new subject replacing theology, history, or the study of languages. It is a new way of doing some of their research.
-
Imagine a pastor who learns that an important Christian writer addressed the very question he is studying. The work may never have been translated into English. The best printed edition may be centuries old. Earlier handwritten copies may be scattered among libraries in several countries, and they may not say exactly the same thing. The author may quote earlier writers without attribution, and some pages may be hard to read.
Before anyone can simply sit down and read the book, someone must find the surviving copies, read and compare them, identify mistakes, decipher difficult handwriting, translate, check quotations and sources, and prepare the results in a usable form. That preliminary labor can take years before it reaches a classroom, a pastor’s study, or a reader’s bookshelf.
Digital humanities is old scholarly work with new instruments.