In this blog post, I would like to argue for critical computational humanities. Computational humanities has many great advantages and promises. One of them is definitely the possibility of unlocking historical sources, using dazzling, cutting-edge new methods to look at really old sources and uncover what’s hidden within them. That’s certainly one of the fascinations the field has always held for me. Computational methods help us see things that would otherwise remain invisible. They allow us to analyse material at scales that would otherwise not be feasible, or so our arguments typically go. Cite as: Sarah Lang, Towards Critical Computational Humanities, in: LaTeX Ninja’ing and the Digital Humanities (blog), October 8th 2026. https://latex-ninja.com/2026/10/08/towards-critical-computational-humanities/ But computation comes with strings attached. And not just computation itself, but also the methods associated with computational humanities and the whole tradition that has developed around them. Recently, in the introduction to our special issue on Computational Methods for Histories of Alchemy and Chemistry, we argued
