COMHIS renews intellectual history, advances interdisciplinary humanities research, and develops computational methods for working with large-scale historical data.
We study how ideas acquire meaning, move through society and become authoritative by connecting language, images, books and material evidence across collections.
Computation is most useful when it creates new paths between scale and interpretation. We move from patterns across millions of pages to the exact passages, editions, images and material features that make historical claims possible.
Critical editions give us a demanding model. Work on Hume’s History of England connects witnesses, sources, typography and reception; those tools are designed to scale beyond one author. Related research traces quotation, translation and meaning, publishing networks, title pages and other components across hundreds of thousands of books.
Historians, linguists, computer scientists and infrastructure specialists design and govern this work together. Adaptive Evidence Construction names one part of that programme: evidence is iteratively built, tested and revised as questions, data and methods develop.