Experimental Humanities: An Adventure with Lovelace and Babbage

The development and innovative application of digital research methods in humanities disciplines, characterised as Digital Humanities or e-Humanities, is an established feature of the e-Science and e-Research landscape. Typically these digital methods enable existing research questions to be tackled in new ways, at a scale and speed that transcend manual methods. In this paper we present a different approach to the application of digital techniques to humanities research, a branch of experimental humanities in which digital experiments bring insight and engagement with historical scenarios and in turn influence our understanding and our thinking today. We illustrate this through a series of experiments and demonstrations inspired by the work of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, including simulation of the Analytical Engine, use of a web-based music application, construction of hardware, and reproduction of earlier mathematical results using contemporary computational methods.