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In the literary world, it was an accepted assumption that the 1970s was a time of unprecedented growth in homegrown Australian fiction. And everybody was reading and talking about books by young Australian women.

But it was not until recently that a researcher was able to measure just how many novels were published in that decade, and she found that there had been a decline in novels by Australian writers overall, but confirmed an increase in women's novels.

It is this sort of research - testing ideas about literary history - that is becoming possible with the spread of ‘Digital Humanities.'

The intersection of Humanities and digital technologies is opening up opportunities in the fields of literature, linguistics, history and language that were not possible without computational methods and digitised resources to bring information together in an accessible way.

Winthrop Professor Philip Mead and Dr Toby Burrows have set up a Digital Humanities Reference Group and are working on developing the field at UW A. Late last year Professor Mead visited King's College London which has the world's first university Department of Digital Humanities and has just offered the first PhD in the field.

"It's an emerging, exciting field," Professor Mead said. "For us, 2012 will be a year of talking to leaders in the field and finding out where the important directions are, to help us to develop Digital Humanities here at UWA in a distinctive way."

He said UWA academics were combining traditional research methods with the possibilities offered by computing. Professor Mead offers an Honours unit in English that introduces students to Digital Humanities.

"Inevitably, it will become part of our undergraduate teaching because it's what we will be doing," he said.

One of the world's leading exponents of Digital Humanities, Professor Alan Liu from the University of California Santa Barbara, will be a plenary speaker at the first conference of the Association for Digital Humanities in Australasia at the Australian National University on 23 March. He will present a roundtable discussion at UWA before that.

Professor Liu studies "information culture as a way to close the circuit between the literary or historical imagination and the technological imagination." His presentation at the University Club is part of the Institute of Advanced Studies' program.

Professor Mead said that while it was exciting to combine traditional research skills with the latest technology, proponents shouldn't try to turn literature, for example, into data.

"The increasingly available databases and digital resources are what allow us to expand our research and enhance our methodology. You don't want to get lost in the ‘busy work' of creating databases, but focus on the important research questions you want to answer.

"Digital technology allows us to ask different questions, questions we wouldn't have been able to answer before databases became available," he said.

"For example, having Australian newspapers from the 19th century digitised allows us to ask about people's reading experiences. There were not many books published in Australia then, so people's main reading was newspapers. Without a database, it would be impossible to do this research.

"And having, say, Patrick White's manuscripts digitised means a researcher can access them in one place, instead of several libraries and repositories around the world."

Professor Mead has contributed to the first Australian book on Digital Humanities, Resourceful Reading. It is the first comprehensive account of eResearch as it transforms the field of Australian literary studies in the 21st century.

Transcription software is being developed for turning scans of books and documents into text, as the field of digital humanities really takes off.

"It is changing our work fundamentally, changing the questions we ask, the patterns and links we can find and enabling us to test theories that were previously impossible to test," Professor Mead said.

Published in UWA News , 19 March 2012