The History of Humanities Computing

Introduction

Computers and the Humanities

Unlike many other interdisciplinary experiments, humanities computing has a very well-known beginning. In 1949, an Italian Jesuit priest, Father Roberto Busa, began what even to this day is a monumental task

in my view it must be the TEI

The introduction of academic programs is another indication of the acceptance of a subject area by the larger academic community. For humanities computing this began to happen by the later 1990s although it is perhaps interesting to note that very few of these include the words "Humanities Computing" in the program title. King's College London offers a BA Minor in Applied Computing with a number of humanities disciplines, and its new MA, based in the Centre for Humanities Computing, is also called MA in Applied Computing. McMaster University in Canada offers a BA in Multimedia. The MA that the University of Virginia is soon to start is called Digital Humanities and is under the auspices of the Media Studies Program. The University of Alberta is, as far as I am aware, the first to start a program with Humanities Computing in its title, although the University of Glasgow has had an MPhil in History and Computing for many years.

The expansion of access to electronic resources fostered by the Web led to other areas of theoretical interest in humanities computing. Electronic resources became objects of study in themselves and were subjected to analysis by a new group of scholars, some of whom had little experience of the technical aspects of the resources. Hypertext in particular attracted a good many theorists. This helped to broaden the range of interest in, and discussion about, humanities computing but it also perhaps contributed to misapprehensions about what is actually involved in building and using such a resource. Problems with the two cultures emerged again, with one that was actually doing it and another that preferred talking about doing it.

Computational linguistics had always developed independently of humanities computing and, despite the efforts of Don Walker on the TEI Steering Committee, continued to be a separate discipline. Walker and Antonio Zampolli of the Institute for Computational Linguistics in Pisa worked hard to bring the two communities of humanities computing and computational linguistics together but with perhaps only limited success.

Participants at the meeting agreed on a set of principles ("the Poughkeepsie Principles") as a basis for building a new encoding scheme and entrusted the management of the project to a Steering Committee with representatives from ACH, ALLC, and the Association for Computational Linguistics (Text Encoding Initiative 2001). Subsequently, this group raised over a million dollars in North America and oversaw the development of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. The work was initially organized into four areas, each served by a committee. Output from the committees was put together by two editors into a first draft version, which was distributed for public comment in 1990. A further cycle of work involved a number of work groups that looked at specific application areas in detail. The first full version of the TEI Guidelines was published in May 1994 and distributed in print form and electronically.

Humanist was born (McCarty 1992). The first message was sent out on May 7, 1987. McCarty launched himself into the role of editing what he prefers to call an "electronic seminar" and, except for a hiatus in the early 1990s when Humanist was edited from Brown University, has continued in this role ever since.

Increasingly complex mathematics were brought to bear on vocabulary counts, leaving some more humanities-oriented conference participants out in the cold.

This period also saw the introduction of courses on various aspects of humanities computing. Some courses were given by staff within academic computing centers and concentrated mostly on the mechanics of using specific software programs. Others looked more broadly at application areas. Those given by academics tended to concentrate on their own interests giving rise to student projects in the same application areas. A debate about whether or not students should learn computer programming was ongoing. Some felt that it replaced Latin as a "mental discipline" (Hockey 1986). Others thought that it was too difficult and took too much time away from the core work in the humanities. The string handling language SNOBOL was in vogue for some time as it was easier for humanities students than other computer languages, of which the major one was still Fortran.

Thesaurus Linguae Graecae

The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) grew out of this conference and was founded in 1978.

Literary and Linguistic Computing

rom both sides of the Atlantic as well as from Australia

Representation problems extended far beyond specific characters. For concordance and retrieval programs there was a need to identify citations by their location

haracter-set representation was soon recognized as a substantial problem and one that has only just begun to be solved now with the advent of Unicode, although not for every kind of humanities material. Various methods were devised to represent upper- and lower-case letters on punched cards, most often by inserting an asterisk or similar character before a true upper-case letter. Accents and other non-standard characters had to be treated in a similar way and non-Roman alphabets were represented entirely in transliteration.

paper tape

punched cards

quantitative study of vocabulary as a means of investigating the authorship of the Pauline Epistles

A CD-ROM of the Aquinas material appeared in 1992 that incorporated some hypertextual features ("cum hypertextibus") (Busa 1992) and was accompanied by a user guide in Latin, English, and Italian

Where instruction and rhetoric failed, punishment began.

erhaps more important, though, was the orderliness of the public which in spite of the thousand extra constables and ten thousand troops kept on stand-by, proved duly appreciative, decorous in its bearing and entirely a-political. More than that, the exhibition transformed the many-headed mob into an ordered crowd, a part of the spectacle and a sight of pleasure in itself.

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When, shortly after the museum's establishment, it was proposed that there be public days on which unrestricted access would be allowed, the proposal was scuttled on the grounds, as one trustee put it, that some of the visitors from the streets would inevitably be 'in liquor' and 'will never be kept in order'.

Great Exhibition of 1851

Exhibitions thus located their preferred audiences at the very pinnacle of the exhibitionary order of things they constructed. They also installed them at the threshold of greater things to come.

. Public museums instituted an order of things that was meant to last. In doing so, they provided the modern state with a deep and continuous ideological backdrop but one which, if it was to play this role, could not he adjusted to respond to shorter-term ideological requirements. Exhibitions met this need, injecting new life into the exhibitionary complex and rendering its ideological configurations more pliable in bending them to serve the conjuncturally specific hegemonic strategies of different national bourgeoisies. They made the order of things dynamic, mobilizing it strategically in relation to the more immediate ideological and political exigencies of the particular moment.

This was particularly true for the remains of Australian Aborigines. In the early years of Australian settlement, the colony's museums had displayed little or no interest in Aboriginal remains.40 The triumph of evolutionary theory transformed this situation, leading to a systematic rape of Aboriginal sacred sites - by the representatives of British, European, and American as well as Australian museums - for materials to provide a representational foundation for the story of evolution within, tellingly enough, natural history displays.41

Museums of science and technology, heirs to the rhetorics of progress developed in national and international exhibitions, completed the evolutionary picture in representing the history of industry and manufacture as a series of progressive innovations leading up to the contemporary triumphs of industrial capitalism.

he second development, however, led to these universal histories being annexed to national histories as, within the rhetorics of each national museum complex, collections of national materials were represented as the outcome and culmination of the universal story of civilization's development. Nor had displays of natur

Between them, these constituted a new space of representation concerned to depict the development of peoples, states, and civilizations through time conceived as a progressive series of developmental stages.

As Benedict goes on to note, the resulting tension between unofficial fair and official exposition led to 'exposition organisers frequently attempting to turn the amusement zone into an educational enterprise or at least to regulate the type of exhibit shown'.

The significance of the formation of the exhibitionary complex, viewed in this perspective, was that of providing new instruments for the moral and cultural regulation of the working classes.

The exhibitionary complex, by contrast, perfected a self-monitoring system of looks in which the subject and object positions can be exchanged, in which the crowd comes to commune with and regulate itself through interiorizing the ideal and ordered view of itself as seen from the controlling vision of power - a site of sight accessible to all.

Rather, it consists in its incorporation of aspects of those principles together with those of the panorama, forming a technology of vision which served not to atomize and disperse the crowd but to regulate it, and to do so by rendering it visible to itself, by making the crowd itself the ultimate spectacle.

directions during the early modern period. As punishment was withdrawn from the public gaze and transferred to the enclosed space of the penitentiary, so the procedures of trial and sentencing - which, except for England, had hitherto been mostly conducted in secret, 'opaque not only to the public but also to the accused himself (p. 35) - were made public as part of a new system of judicial truth which, in order to function as truth, needed to be made known to all. If the asymmetry of these movements is compelling, it is no more so than the symmetry of the movement traced by the trial and the museum in the transition they make from closed and restricted to open and public contexts. And, as a part of a profound transformation in their social functioning, it was ultimately to these institutions - and not by witnessing punishment enacted in the streets nor, as Bentham had envisaged, by making the penitentiaries open to public inspection - that children, and their parents, were invited to attend their lessons in civics. Moreover, such lessons consisted not in a display of power which, in seeking to terrorize, positioned the people on the other side of power as its potential recipients but sought rather to place the people - conceived as a nationalized citizenry - on this side of power, both its subject and its beneficiary.

And for a power which was not reduced to periodic effects but which, to the contrary, manifested itself precisely in continually displaying its ability to command, order, and control objects and bodies, living or dead.

Museums, galleries, and, more intermittently, exhibitions played a pivotal role in the formation of the modern state and are fundamental to its conception as, among other things, a set of educative and civilizing agencies.

Even a cursory glance through Richard Altick's The Shows of London convinces that the nineteenth century was quite unprecedented in the social effort it devoted to the organization of spectacles arranged for increasingly large and undifferentiated publics.6 Several aspects of these developments merit a preliminary consideration.

These new systems of surveillance, mapping the social body so as to render it knowable and amenable to social regulation, mean, Foucault argues, that 'one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society . . . that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social "quarantine", to an indefinitely generalisable mechanism of "panopticism'" (p. 216). A society, according to Foucault in his approving quotation of Julius, that 'is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance':

these

It is, then, as a set of cultural technologies concerned to organize a voluntarily self-regulating citizenry that I propose to examine the formation of the exhibitionary complex.

Yet, ideally, they sought also to allow the people to know and thence to regulate themselves; to become, in seeing themselves from the side of power, both the subjects and the objects of knowledge, knowing power and what power knows, and knowing themselves as (ideally) known by power, interiorizing its gaze as a principle of self-surveillance and, hence, self-regulation.

Institutions, then, not of confinement but of exhibition, forming a complex of disciplinary and power relations whose development might more fruitfully be juxtaposed to, rather than aligned with, the formation of Foucault's 'carceral archipelago'.

Furthermore, while these comprised an intersecting set of institutional and disciplinary relations which might be productively analysed as particular articulations of power and knowledge, the suggestion that they should be construed as institutions of confinement

Tony Bennett THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX In reviewing Foucault on the asylum, the clinic, and the prison as institutional

In doing so, it translated these into exhibitionary forms which, in simultaneously ordering objects for public inspection and ordering the public that inspected, were to have a profound and lasting influence on the subsequent development of museums, art galleries, expositions, and department stores.