In the precomputing era you could (legitimately!) get a PhD for building a table of constants (e.g. log tables early on, later CRC data like steam tables and curves). In the humanities you could get one for writing a concordance of all the words in Shakespear or some other corpus, or all metaphors, and the like. It's obvious how computation killed them.

But in a few years some enterprising grad student or post doc will earn accolades by re-scanning some old sources, taking into account some important metadata which right now is irrelevant. Perhaps labeling or annotating the result in some novel way.