MEDIEVALISTS WHO WISH to do research with digital tools may find their options limited because of the incipient nature of the practice. Technological limitations, specifically the difficulty of digitally recognizing and rendering medieval texts due to the limited availability of tools that can accommodate special characters, create constraints, in turn, on discipline development. Another constraint lies in the paucity of work that documents digital methodologies in medieval scholarship, leaving the would-be digital medievalist very little to draw upon in terms of established good practices. This has led to a kind of methodological misunderstanding on the part of certain humanist scholars whose reliance upon digital tools leaves their work open to the critique that because computerassisted analysis can be reductive, undue authority is ascribed to their findings.

I insist here that whenever digital tools are utilized in medieval studies, the methodologies with which they are applied should be paired with and grounded in traditional humanist analysis—that is, a close reading of the text that carefully scrutinizes information produced by computer-aided analysis. In this chapter, I discuss two recent projects that I have worked on that use web-based digital tools to analyze Old and Middle English texts. I will demonstrate that computer-assisted textual analysis works best when paired with traditional humanist analysis, with the former supplementing rather than replacing the latter. I also demonstrate that such projects can be openended, and argue that digital tools are not meant to be end-to-end problem-solving technologies, but can be effectively used to affirm or deny hypotheses, assist in the interpretation of texts, and help discover significant patterns that are undetectable by the unaided eye in order to generate new questions for further investigation using traditional methods.

Finding the correct digital research tool, however, can be a lengthy process of trial and error. The Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) and the Digital Research Tools Directory (DiRT) are good places to start for humanists interested in doing digital research because they provide access to various commercial and open-source digital research tools. DiRT's search options allow users to select digital tools according to research objectives, cost, and platform; while TAPoR provides a curated list of tools organized according to usage, ease of use, and research objectives, providing users with the option of excluding tools that are complex and difficult, time consuming, and of limited use.