(Re)Writing the History of Humanities Computing

Introduction
On several occasions, Willard McCarty has argued that if
humanities computing wants to be fully of the humanities, it
needs to become historically self-aware (McCarty, 2004, p.161).
Contrary to what the frequently repeated myth of humanities
computing claims (de Tollenaere, 1976; Hockey, 1980, p. 15;
1998, p. 521; 2000, p. 5; 2004, p. 4), humanities computing, like
many other interdisciplinary experiments, has no very wellknown
beginning.
A Common History
Several authors contradict each other when it comes to
naming the founding father of digital humanities. At least four
candidates compete with each other for that honour. Depending
on whether one bases one’s research on ideas transmitted
orally or in writing, on academic publications expressing and
documenting these ideas, or on academic writings publishing
results, Father Roberto Busa s.j., the Reverend John W. Ellison,
Andrew D. Booth, and Warren Weaver are the competitors.
This is not surprising since, when the use of automated digital
techniques were considered to process data in the humanities,
two lines of research were activated: Machine Translation (MT)
and Lexical Text Analysis (LTA). Booth and Weaver belonged to
the MT line of research and were not humanists by training,
whereas Busa and Ellison were LTA scholars and philologists.
As Antonio Zampolli pointed out, the fact that MT was
promoted mainly in ‘hard science’ departments and LTA was
mainly developed in humanities departments did not enhance
frequent contacts between them. (Zampolli, 1989, p. 182)
Although real scholarly collaboration was scarce, contacts
certainly existed between the two on the administrative level.
Since, as Booth (1967, p. VIII) observes, pure linguistic problems
such as problems of linguistic chronology and disputed
authorship, have profi ted from work on MT, the transition from
MT to Computational Linguistics, dictated by the infamous US
National Academy of Sciences ALPAC report (ALPAC, 1966),
was a logical, though highly criticized, step. Moreover, the early
writings on MT mention the essential use of concordances,
frequency lists, and lemmatization – according to Zampolli
(1989) typical products of LTA – in translation methods, which
shows that both Computational Linguistics and Humanities
Computing share a common history. This early history of both
has never been addressed together, but it seems necessary for
a good understanding of what it is that textual studies do with
the computer.
The History of Humanities
Computing
Researching and writing the history of humanities computing
is no less but neither no more problematic than researching
and writing the history of computing, technology in general, or
the history of recent thought. Beverley Southgate considers
the history of thought as an all-embracing subject matter
which can include the history of philosophy, of science, of
religious, political, economic, or aesthetic ideas, ‘and indeed
the history of anything at all that has ever emerged from
the human intellect.’ (Southgate, 2003, p. 243) Attached to
the all-embracing nature of what she then calls ‘intellectual
history/history of ideas’ is the defi ance from the constraints
of disciplinary structures it creates with its practitioners. The
history of humanities computing for instance must consider
the history of the conventional schools of theory and practice
of humanities disciplines, the general histories of computing
and technology, the history of relevant fi elds in computing
science and engineering, and the history of the application of
computational techniques to the humanities.
The History of Recent Things
The history of recent things, however, poses some new and
unique challenges for which, in Willard McCarty’s vision,
a different conception of historiography is needed. As an
illustration for his point, McCarty focuses on the different
qualities of imagination that characterize the research and
writing of the classical historian on the one hand and the
historian of recent things on the other and situates them in
a temporal and a spatial dimension respectively. A successful
classical historian must manage the skill to move into the
mental world of the long dead, whereas the historian of
the recent past, like the anthropologist, must master the
movement away ‘from the mental world we share with our
subjects while remaining engaged with their work’ (McCarty,
2004, p. 163). In a rash moment, this double awareness of
the historian of the recent is fair game to triumphalism, the
historian’s worst fi end. The temptation to search for historical
and quantitative, rather than qualitative, ‘evidence’ to prove
the importance of their own fi eld or discipline is innate in
somewhat ambitious insiders attempting at writing the history
of their own academic fi eld. Also since, as Alun Munslow has
reiterated, it is historians rather than the past that generates
(writes, composes?) history (Munslow, 1999), McCarty’s
astute but non-exhaustive catalogue of the new and unique
challenges presents itself as a warning for the historiographer
of the new, and I endorse this list fully: ‘volume, variety, and
complexity of the evidence, and diffi culty of access to it; biases
and partisanship of living informants; unreliability of memory;
distortions from the historian’s personal engagement with his
or her informants—the ‘Heisenberg effect’, as it is popularly
known; the ‘presentism’ of science and its perceived need for
legitimation through an offi cial, triumphalist account; and so
on.’ (McCarty, 2004, p. 163). All history is inevitably a history for, and can never be
ideologically neutral, as Beverly Southgate has recently
emphasized in a review of Marc Ferro’s The Use and Abuse of
History, or, How the Past is Taught. (Southgate, 2005) Therefore
the question can never be ‘Comment on raconte l’histoire aux
enfants à travers le monde entier’ as the original title of Ferro’s
book reads. Greg Dening would say that writing history is a
performance in which historians should be ‘focused on the
theatre of what they do’. (Dening, 1996, p. 30) According to
McCarty, the different conception of historiography, could profi t
from acknowledging ethnographic theory and ethnography as
a contributory discipline since it entails a poetic of ‘dilatation
beyond the textable past and beyond the ‘scientifi c’ reduction
of evidence in a correct and singular account.’ (McCarty, 2004,
p. 174)
Prolegomena
The current lack of theoretical framework that can defi ne and
study the history of humanities computing echoes what Michael
Mahoney wrote with respect to the history of computing: ‘The
major problem is that we have lots of answers but very few
questions, lots of stories but no history, lots of things to do
but no sense of how to do them or in what order. Simply put,
we don’t yet know what the history of computing is really
about.’ (Mahoney, 1993)
Three possible statements can be deducted from this
observation:
• We don’t know what history is about;
• We don’t know what humanities computing is about;
• We don’t know what the history of humanities computing
is about.
This paper aims at addressing these three basic questions
by sketching out prolegomena to the history of humanities
computing.
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