Oh, Say Can You See…Through the Eyes of AI

When first-year student Nathan Rieger enrolled in Digital Humanities 101, he worried technology might overshadow the traditional study of history and literature. As Rieger recalls, “I was worried that technology might completely take over our ability to study and appreciate historical and literary texts.”

In reality, Digital Humanities starts with the same core as any humanities course: studying and learning from history, literature and culture. The “digital” part comes in when new tools — like text analysis software, data visualization programs and even large language models — are used to examine these subjects at scale, revealing patterns and connections that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Rieger experienced this firsthand for his class project, which involved analyzing two hundred national anthems — nearly every anthem currently sung worldwide. He began by collecting transcripts (noting that some anthems don’t include lyrics at all, and therefore not relevant to his project), then distinguishing fully sung versions from verses that appear in print, but aren’t actually performed. After sorting and labeling this massive collection (or corpus, in Digital Humanities terminology), he fed it into Voyant Tools, a text analysis platform. This allowed him to count term frequencies, see which words often appear together and compare data across regions.

From there, Rieger used MapChart to create an interactive visualization showing which languages each anthem used, color-coding countries by linguistic groups. He also delved deeper into the historical contexts behind the lyrics. For example, he examined how many nations that emerged from revolution or colonial rule employed words like chains, bondage or freedom.

“Digital Humanities,” says Rieger, “is what happens when English and history meet cutting-edge technology. We don’t have to learn to code, but we do need to understand how these tools can deepen our research. This is the future of historical and literary studies.”

Looking back on his semester, Rieger feels more confident than ever that technology can enhance — not replace — the heart of the humanities. “There’s so much we can learn about people and cultures — past and present — through these methods,” he says. “Even something as brief as a national anthem can reveal an entire country’s values and identity.”