Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This chapter begins with an introduction to Digital Humanities (DH) and outlines its development since c.1949. It demonstrates that the application of computing to cultural heritage has been ongoing for some 70 years yet the histories of DH have, until recently, remained mostly unwritten. After exploring some of the particular difficulties that attend any attempt to write such histories the approach that we have taken in this book is explained in detail. We close by asking why histories of DH are needed and essential to undertake.

This chapter begins with an overview of the histories of oral history and its use within different branches of academic and public history. Focussing next on the study of communities, it briefly explores the contested, fuzzy and fluid meaning of the term ‘community’ before examining the application of oral history to community histories, including academic and professional communities. It discusses some of the ethical challenges at stake in this type of historical research, including the multifaceted relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee, and the choice of which ‘significant’ lives are privileged to tell the story of the community (and therefore which significant lives and perspectives might be missing). Before outlining some of the issues surfaced by using oral history to document foundational stories of DH as a discipline, this chapter looks briefly at the use of oral history in some other analogous professional and academic settings. In conclusion, the chapter reflects on the suitability of oral history in telling these community stories by asking who owns these histories and how that ownership is manifested.

This oral history interview between Willard McCarty (on behalf of Julianne Nyhan), John Burrows and Hugh Craig took place on 4 June 2013 at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Harold Short (Professor of Humanities Computing at King’s College London and a Visiting Professor at the University of Western Sydney in the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics) was also present for much of the interview. Burrows recounts that his first encounter with computing took place in the late 1970s, via John Lambert, who was then the Director of the University of Newcastle’s Computing Service. Burrows had sought Lambert out when the card-indexes of common words that he had been compiling became too difficult and too numerous to manage. Craig’s first contact was in the mid-1980s, after Burrows put him in charge of a project that used a Remington word processor. At many points in the interview Burrows and Craig reflect on the substantial amount of time, and, indeed, belief, that they invested not only in the preparation of texts for analysis but also in the learning and development of new processes and techniques (often drawn from disciplines outside English Literature). Much is said about the wider social contexts of such processes: Craig, for example, reflects on the sense of possibility and purposefulness that having Burrows as a colleague helped to create for him. Indeed, he wonders whether he would have had the confidence to invest the time and effort that he did had he been elsewhere. Burrows emphasises the network of formal and informal, national and international expertise that he benefitted from, for example, John Dawson in Cambridge and Susan Hockey in Oxford. So too they reflect on the positive results that the scepticism they sometimes encountered had on their work. As central as computing has been to their research lives they emphasise that their main aim was to study literature and continuing to publish in core literature journals (in addition to DH journals) has been an important aspect of this. Though they used techniques and models that are also used by Linguists and Statisticians their focus has remained on questioning rather than answering.

This oral history interview between Wilhelm Ott and Julianne Nyhan was carried out on 14 July 2015, shortly after 10am, in the offices of in Tübingen, Germany. Ott was provided with the core questions in advance of the interview. He recalls that his earliest contact with computing was in 1966 when he took an introductory programming course in the (German Computing Center) in Darmstadt. Having become slightly bored with the exercises that attendees of the course were asked to complete he began working on programmes to aid his metrical analysis of Latin hexameters, a project he would continue to work on for the next 19 years. After completing the course in Darmstadt he approached, among others such as IBM, the Classics Department at Tübingen University to gauge their interest in his emerging expertise. Though there was no tradition in the Department of applying computing to philological problems they quickly grasped the significance and potential of such approaches. Fortunately, this happened just when the computing center, up to then part of the Institute for Mathematics, was transformed into a central service unit for the university. Drawing on initial funding from the Physics department a position was created for Ott in the Tübingen Computing Center. His role was to pursue his Latin hexameters project and, above all, to provide specialised support for computer applications in the Humanities. In this interview Ott recalls a number of the early projects that he supported such as the concordance to the Vulgate that was undertaken by Bonifatius Fischer, along with the assistance they received from Roberto Busa when it came to lemmatisation. He also talks at length about the context in which his TUSTEP programme came about and its subsequent development. The interview strikes a slightly wistful tone as he recalls the University of Tübingen’s embrace of the notion of in the 1960s and contrasts this with the rather more precarious position of the Humanities in many countries today.

This interview was carried out in Rome, Italy on 17 October 2014 at about 09:00. Orlandi recounts that his earliest memory of a computer dates to the 1950s when he saw an IBM machine in the window of an IBM shop in Milan. Around 1960, together with his PhD supervisor Ignazio Cazzaniga, he engaged in some brief exploratory work to see what role punched card technology might play in the making of a critical edition of Augustine’s . His sustained take up of computing in the 1970s arose from the practical problem of managing the wealth of information that he had amassed about Coptic manuscripts. He was aware from an early stage of the possible limitations of computational approaches: his early encounters with the work of Silvio Ceccato left him wary of approaches to cybernetics. He identifies the work of the applied mathematician Luigi Cerofolini who taught him UNIX, among other things, as having been central to his understanding of methodological issues. In relation to theory, he emphasises the impact that understanding Turing’s Universal Computing Machine made on him. Indeed, his work on the significance of modelling to Humanities Computing (see, for example, the discussion in Orlandi, T. (n.d.)) preceded that of McCarty (2005). In addition to questioning inherited beliefs about the origins of DH, particularly in regard to the role of Fr Roberto Busa S.J., in this interview Orlandi argues that DH has not given sufficient attention to the fundamentals of computing theory.

This interview was carried out via Skype on 21 June 2013. Hockey was provided with the core questions in advance of the interview. Here she recalls how her interest in Humanities Computing was piqued by the articles that Andrew Morton published in the in the 1960s about his work on the authorship of the Pauline Epistles. She went on to secure a position in the Atlas Computer Laboratory where she was an advisor on COCOA version 2 and wrote software for the electronic display of Arabic and other non-ASCII characters. The Atlas Computer Laboratory was funded by the Science Research Council and provided computing support for universities and researchers across the UK. While there she benefitted from access to the journal CHum and built connections with the emerging Humanities Computing community through events she attended starting with the ‘Symposium on Uses of the Computer in Literary Research’ organised by Roy Wisbey in Cambridge in 1970 (probably the earliest such meeting in the UK). Indeed, she emphasises the importance that such gatherings played in the formation of the discipline. As well as discussing her contribution to organisations like ALLC and TEI she recalls those who particularly influenced her such as, , Roberto Busa and Antonio Zampolli.

This interview was carried out via skype on 11 August 2015 at 20:30 GMT. Malloy was provided with the core interview questions in advance. Here she recalls that after graduating from university she took a job as a searcher/editor for the National Union Catalog of the Library of Congress. About a year after she arrived Henriette D. Avram began work on the process of devising a way to make the library’s cataloguing information machine readable (work that would ultimately lead to the development of the MARC format (Schudel 2006)). Malloy recalls this wider context as her first encounter, of sorts, with computing technology: though she did not participate in that work it made a clear impression on her. She had learned to programme in FORTRAN in the 1960s when working as a technical librarian at the Ball Brothers Research Corporation. She had also held other technical roles at Electromagnetic Research Corp and with a contractor for the Goddard Space Flight Center, which was computerising its library around the time she worked there. She recalls that she did not use computers in her artistic work until the 1980s (when she bought an Apple II for her son). However, she had been working in an interactive, multimedia and associative mode for some time before then, as evidenced by the card catalog poetry and electronic books that she created in the 1970s and early 1980s. In this interview she traces the importance of card catalogs, Systems Analysis and algorithmic thinking to many aspects of her work. She also reflects on why it was that the idea of combining computing and literature did not occur to her (and also was not practically feasible) until a later stage in her career. Among other topics, she reflects on the kinds of computing and computing environments that she encountered, from the reactions in the 1960s of some male engineers to the presence of a female technical librarian in the mainframe room to the thrill of discovering the community that was connected via the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (The WELL).

This oral history interview was conducted on 3 June 2015 via Skype. Harris was provided with the interview questions in advance. Here she recalls her early encounters with computing, including her work at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. Despite these early encounters with computing she had planned to leave it behind when she returned to graduate school to pursue a PhD; however, the discovery of c.200 pages of a Dylan Thomas manuscript prompted her to rethink this. Her graduate study was based in the English Department of the University of Texas at Austin, which did not have an account with the computer centre, and so it was necessary for her to apply for a graduate student grant in order to buy computer time. Her PhD studies convinced her of the merits of using computers in literary research and she hoped to convince her colleagues of this too. However, her applications for academic jobs were not initially successful. After working in Industry for a time she went on to secure academic positions in Computer Science at various universities. During her career she also held a number of posts in Industry and as a Consultant. In these roles she worked on a wide range of Artificial Intelligence and especially Natural Language Processing projects. Her interview is a wide-ranging one. She reflects on topics like the peripheral position of a number of those who worked in Humanities Computing in the 1970s and her personal reactions to some of the computing systems she used, for example, the IBM 360. She also recalls how she, as a woman, was sometimes treated in what tended to be a male-dominated sector, for example, the Physics Professor who asked “So are you going to be my little girl?”

This oral history conversation was carried out via Skype on 17 October 2013 at 18:00 GMT. Nitti was provided with the core questions in advance of the interview. He recalls that his first encounter with computing came about when a fellow PhD student asked him to visit the campus computing facility of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where a new concordancing programme had recently been made available via the campus mainframe, the UNIVAC. He found the computing that he encountered there rather primitive: input was in uppercase letters only and via a keypunch machine. Nevertheless, the possibility of using computing in research stuck with him and when his mentor Professor Lloyd Kasten agreed that the Old Spanish Dictionary project should be computerised, Nitti set to work. He won his first significant NEH grant c.1972; up to that point (and, where necessary, continuing for some years after) Kasten cheerfully financed out of his own pocket some of the technology that Nitti adapted to the project. In this interview Nitti gives a fascinating insight into his dissatisfaction with both the state and provision of the computing that he encountered, especially during the 1970s and early 1980s. He describes how he circumvented such problems not only via his innovative use of technology but also through the many collaborations he developed with the commercial and professional sectors. As well as describing how he and Kasten set up the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies he also mentions less formal processes of knowledge dissemination, for example, his so-called lecture ‘roadshow’ in the USA and Canada where he demonstrated the technologies used on the dictionary project to colleagues in other universities.

This interview was carried out between London and Washington via skype on 18 September 2013, beginning at 17:05 GMT. Agüera was provided with the core questions in advance of the interview. She recalls that her first encounters with computing and DH came about through her post in National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), where she had joined a division that funded the preparation of research tools, reference works and scholarly editions. Thus, she administered grants to a large number of projects that worked, at a relatively early stage, at the interface of Humanities and Computing, for example, . In this interview she recalls some of the changes that the division where she worked made to its operating procedures in order to incorporate digital projects. For example, in 1979, a section that was added to application materials asking relevant projects to provide a rationale for their proposed use of computing or word processing. She also discusses issues like sustainability that became apparent over the longer term and reflects on some of the wider trends she saw during her career. Computing was initially taken up by fields like Classics and lexicography that needed to manage and interrogate masses of data and thus had a clear application for it. She contrasts this with the more experimental and exploratory use of computing that characterises much of DH today.