In the fall of 1991 the University of Michigan Library quietly introduced a novel experiment to its online catalog. Included in the  user interface it added the option to search a dictionary, the sonorous “OED” or Oxford English Dictionary to be exact. Using a sophisticated full-text search software for linguistic analysis, the intent was to provide researchers with access to the  database for their historical and linguistic work on the English language. A month after going online the library staff was stunned, in looking over the usage statistics, to find that over 50,000 searches had already been carried out on the OED. For those who have used the OED, the massive twenty-volume dictionary is decidedly not a tool intended for quick reference when writing papers or doing homework. There was virtually no publicity surrounding the new service, and the search interface was everything but user friendly. What was going on, who was using the dictionary?

What library staff learned was that the students themselves took to using the OED on an unimagined scale, and not just for looking up the meaning of words. Additional investigation made it clear that the students had recognized the value of exploring the usage and word origins of the

In the late 1980s and early 1990s digital publishing and “ebooks” were barely in their infancy, but the foundations were quickly being laid within an emerging field known as “humanities computing”. Soon after the large-scale introduction of the personal computer in the mid 1980s, humanities scholars recognized the potential of the computer for the study of historical and linguistic texts.

Humanities scholars had of course been using computers in their work long before the more formal organization of humanities scholars through email listservs and associations. As an undergraduate at Pomona College in the late 1970s, I assisted my history advisor Robert Woods in his research by preparing Tudor-Stuart biographical entries from the Dictionary of National Biography for data analysis on a mainframe computer. A couple of years later as a graduate student at UCLA, I was engaged for three years as the university’s bibliographer for the monumental Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalog, the international database that formed the basis of the full-text Early English Books Online (or EEBO).