| Summary: | Within the Digital Humanities, philosophy still plays quite a marginal
role. My investigation into the reasons behind this situation is divided
into two parts. The first addresses the role of the discipline in the
early years of DH, concentrating on a pioneering project that until now
has been ignored in the historiography of early DH research: the Kant
Index. Work on the index started in 1958, only one year after the
publication of the first automated concordance in 1957. The first volume
was published in 1967, seven years before the first publication of a
volume of Busa’s Index Thomisticus. If we look at later developments,
there seems to be a certain asymmetry between trends in the
English-speaking world and German-language philosophy. This may suggest
that philosophy in the German-speaking regions understands itself first
and foremost as a ‘book discipline’, so that electronic forms of
publication – the central venue for DH work – are viewed with suspicion.
Nevertheless, I show in the second part that on a global scale DH work
does play a role in the discipline. I identify five areas of interest:
(1) editions and infrastructure, (2) prosopography, (3) text mining, (4)
Semantic Web technologies, and (5) reflections on method.
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