Where is the humanities in digital humanities?

Lecture of the ZGW Lecture series at February 29, 2016

Of the novelties introduced by the »digital« in the »humanities«, sheer numbers are probably the most dramatic: we used to work on a couple of hundred nineteenth-century novels, and we can now analyze thousands of them, tomorrow hundreds of thousands. It's a moment of euphoria, for those working in this field: like having a telescope, that makes you see entirely new galaxies. And it's a moment of truth: so, have the digital skies revealed anything that changes our idea of the humanities? Or have they simply abolished the humanities?