I did something similar while working for the IT department at the University of Chicago -- we helped a humanities prof build what was essentially a plagiarism

I did something similar while working for the IT department at the University of Chicago -- we helped a humanities prof build what was essentially a plagiarism detector, with the twist that it was designed to be applied to "great texts" in order to examine plagiarism, which wasn't considered a bad thing back in the day. Spoilers: Rousseau copied like 25% of most of his texts from earlier authors. At the same job, I also helped some linguistics grad students use python to do something involving linguistics that I didn't completely understand. They were pleased as punch to be able to automate a tedious manual process, and expand their throughput to entire texts instead of a few sentences. So there is a lot of potential for using code to help the humanities, but it takes active involvement from hackers who are willing to work with humanities folks. Props to NSIT at the U of C for attempting this.