The possible benefits of computing in humanities research are often wasted because of the psychological barriers that computers evoke in non-specialists. This paper examines the underlying causes and suggests some ways of alleviating the problem. One approach in particular, i.e. ease through familiarity, is discussed in more detail. It is illustrated by means of a description of a database system that uses this approach: the Linguistic DataBase, which contains syntactic analysis trees of natural language data.