The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing was founded in 1973 with the purpose of supporting the application of computing in the study of language and literature. As the range of available and relevant computing techniques in the humanities has increased, the interests of the Association's members have necessarily broadened, to encompass not only text analysis and language corpora, but also history, art history, music, manuscript studies, image processing, electronic editions and much else besides. The ALLC's membership is international, is drawn from across the humanities disciplines, and includes students and established scholars alike.

The ALLC is a founding chapter - or 'constituent organisation' - of an international umbrella organisation that has been established, the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). ADHO now includes ALLC, the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Canadian digital humanities association SDH/SEMI (Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs). ADHO has adopted ALLC's journal LLC, The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, published by Oxford University Press, as its main print publication.

Membership of ALLC - and thereby of ADHO - is by subscription to LLC. Note that subscribers are asked to select which of the ADHO associations they wish to belong to. For a small premium, subscribers may choose to belong to all three ADHO associations as a joint subscriber.

Each year the Association supports the international Digital Humanities (DH) conference, sponsored by ADHO. DH 2010 will take place at King's College London.