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Digital Humanities is a rapidly growing field of study which combines aspects of information and computing technologies and traditional humanities, and involves using computer-based tools in order to discover new avenues of study within long-established traditional fields, such as Art and Literature. It also aims to discover the educational value and impact these tools might have on studying humanities in both the present and future.

But the emphasis is not only on the future, but also on the past, as Digital Humanities aims to use these technologies to discover new things about the past which we couldn’t have known before. For example, using modern digital mapping techniques, we can create detailed maps of the sites of famous historical battles, and where before we could only imagine what the landscape might have looked like, now we can create accurate 3-dimensional visualisations of exactly how things would have looked.

These techniques can apply to studying all forms of humanities and can help to discover invaluable insights about just about anything we plug into the programmes. However, Digital Humanities tools are not seen as a replacement for traditional technologies (at least not yet) but rather as a supplement to the older techniques which, when used together, can allow us to uncover greater amounts of information and spot patterns we could never have seen without them.


That Summer in Paris is a text written by Morley Callaghan which details the shaping of Callaghan’s identity as a writer coinciding with the development of his relationship with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Having first met at the Toronto Daily Star where they were both employed as reporters, Hemingway and Callaghan struck up a friendship which was cut short by Hemingway’s departure for Paris. Callaghan longs to be in Paris and is soon reunited with Hemingway for a few months in the summer of 1929 and it is this summer which the text is primarily focused on. 

From studying digital humanities this semester, one thing we have certainly learned is its interdisciplinary nature. Whether it be people with a background in literature working with those whose speciality is in computer science or geography or anthropology, the list goes on. This is opposed to the usual solitary close reading which normally takes place in the study of English Literature. Not only is it interdisciplinary, but it also has a tendency to be a field which is often worked on in groups and the project we have undertaken this year is testament to that. As a class, we have studied various digital tools and these digital tools can be employed to analyse texts in a different light.


We learned to use a number of different programmes throughout our Digital Humanities course, such as Manyeyes, Google Ngrams, and Voyant Tools. Our intention was to apply these new skills to our analysis of ‘That Summer in Paris.’

The project looks at a number of different aspects of the texts. Firstly, we consider ‘People’; that is, the characters of the text. We allocated four characters to each person in the class, and attempted to use these programmes to analyse the role each character played in the text, how important they were to the book as a whole, how often each character was alluded to, and more.

We also compiled a ‘Keywords’ section. This involved each class member picking two words we believed to be particularly noteworthy or unusual, and, again, use these programmes to decipher how significant they were, or to discover patterns of language either in this book alone, or in relation to literature as a whole.

Another aspect we worked on was ‘Places.’ For this section, we used a digital mapping tool to actually locate specific places mentioned in the text, and again discuss the roles they played in the text.