The COVID-19 pandemic materialized not only as a historical public health crisis but also as a substantial disruptor of scholarly paradigms, requiring an extraordinary reliance on computing technologies. Within the field of digital humanities (DH), this time accelerated the incorporation of methods and tools that, beforehand, faced skepticism or uneven adoption. Prior to this pandemic, debate within DH often featured concerns about digitization, disparities in material resources, and the epistemological implications of computational methods. The pandemic, however, precipitated new priorities that necessitated a radical reorientation of scholarly discourse and methodological practice.

This paper will examine how the pandemic reshaped DH discourse, with a special focus on its impact on the adoption of intelligence, large-scale data analysis, artificial intelligence, and multimodal platforms. Focusing on a systematic and thematic analysis of scholarship published between 2015 and 2025, this study will reveal important continuities and breaks between pre- and post-pandemic trends. By particular reference to how "distant reading," "distant viewing," and "distant perceiving" were redefined in terms of necessity (the remoteness of infrastructures and pedagogy) and opportunity (LLMs, computer vision, and retrieval-augmented generation), it will show important continuities and breaks between pre- and post-pandemic trends.

The research will reveal that the pandemic amplified systemic gaps of access to infrastructure and literacy to an equal extent, which strained immediate debates about inclusivity, accessibility, and suitable AI ethics. While pre-pandemic DH often framed computation as supplementary to humanist inquiry, post-pandemic research increasingly integrates AI as constitutive of epistemic production, reimagining questions of authorship, authenticity, and interpretive control.

In tracing these discursive trajectories, the paper will highlight the pandemic as a mobilizing agent that links earlier fears to the current AI revolution. It will argue that the field now needs to contemplate DH as something beyond a set of digital methodologies but as a reflexive and responsive field that negotiates cultural, technological, and ethical complexities of the twenty-first century.