J Nyhan

Webbs on the Web: libraries, digital humanities and collaboration

Purpose – This paper aims to make a contribution to the ongoing debates about the nature, value and potential of closer collaboration between digital humanities (DH) and the library sector by identifying and contextualising the types of new knowledge that were created through such a collaboration on the London School of Economics’s Webbs on the Web project. Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative approach comprising a literature review, a case study of Webbs on the Web, a summary and analysis of the results of user testing and a critical analysis of the collaboration itself. Findings – A deeper understanding of the complementary skills of library professionals and DH researchers and how they may best be utilised in digital library development will lead, ceteris paribus, to richer and more fit-for-purpose digital scholarly resources. This is exemplified by Webbs on the Web, where the unique but complementary perspectives that such groups brought to user testing enhanced the usability of the resource for a wide range of audiences. Furthermore, the kinds of collaborations that characterised this project reflect broader changes in academic communities and digital library development, and a host of mutually beneficial outcomes can be pursued as a result of such changes. Originality/value – We demonstrate the benefits that can flow from breaking down boundaries and hierarchies between the academic library professional and DH researcher. We advance the current literature by providing concrete examples of practice; much of the current literature tends to be more abstract in nature.

Oral History and the Hidden Histories project: towards histories of computing in the humanities

This article demonstrates that the history of computing in the humanities is an almost uncharted research topic. It argues that this oversight must be remedied as a matter of urgency so that the evolutionary model of progress that currently dominates the field can be countered. We describe the ‘Hidden Histories’ pilot project and explore the origins and practice of oral history; in the corresponding issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, five oral history interviews that we carried out during the project are presented. We conclude that the selection of interviews presented here demonstrate that oral history is an important and productive methodology in such research. The five oral history interviews form primary sources, which can be used in the writing of a history of computing in the humanities; furthermore, they contain new information and interpretations, which cannot be gleaned from published scholarly articles, for example, information about the varied entry routes into the field that have existed and the interrelationship between myth and history in the narratives we create about the emergence of digital humanities.

Computation and the humanities: towards an oral history of digital humanities

This book looks at the application of computing to cultural heritage and how it is transforming how the human record can be transmitted and understood.

Trading Stories: an Oral History Conversation between Geoffrey Rockwell and Julianne Nyhan

This extended interview with Geoffrey Rockwell was carried out via Skype on the 28th April 2012. He narrates that he had been aware of computing developments when growing up in Italy but it was in college in the late 1970s that he took formal training in computing. He bought his first computer, an Apple II clone, after graduation when he was working as a teacher in the Middle East. Throughout the interview he reflects on the various computers he has used and how the mouse that he used with an early Macintosh instinctively appealed to him. By the mid-1980s he was attending graduate school in the University of Toronto and was accepted on to the Apple Research Partnership Programme, which enabled him to be embedded in the central University of Toronto Computing Services; he went on to hold a full time position there. Also taking a PhD in Philosophy, he spent many lunch times talking with John Bradley. This resulted in the building of text analysis tools and their application to Humes Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, as well as some of the earliest, if not the earliest, conference paper on visualisation in the digital humanities community. He reflects on the wide range of influences that shaped and inspired his early work in the field, for example, the Research Computing Group at the University of Toronto and their work in visual programming environments. In 1994 he applied, and was hired at McMaster University to what he believes was the first job openly advertised as a humanities computing position in Canada. After exploring the opposition to computing that he encountered he reflects that the image of the underdog has perhaps become a foundational myth of digital humanities and questions whether it is still a useful one.

I Would Think of Myself as Sitting Inside the Computer: Mary Dee Harris and Julianne Nyhan

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?”

I Heard About the Arrival of the Computer: Hans Rutimann and Julianne Nyhan

This oral history interview was conducted between Hans Rutimann and Julianne Nyhan via Skype on 15 November 2012. Rutimann was provided with the core questions in advance of the interview. Here he recalls that his first encounter with computing was at the Modern Languages Association (MLA), c.1968/9. Following a minor scandal at the organisation, which resulted in the dismissal of staff connected with the newly arrived IBM 360/20, Rutimann was persuaded to take on some of their duties. After training with IBM in operating and programming he set about transferring the membership list (about 30,000 contact details) from an addressograph machine to punched cards. After the computer’s early use to support such administrative tasks the MLA began investigating the feasibility of making the research tool called the MLA International Bibliography (information about accessing the present-day version of the bibliography is available here: https://www.mla.org/bib_electronic) remotely accessible. Rutimann worked with Lockheed to achieve this. It was in Lockheed’s information retrieval lab that the system known as Dialog, an online information retrieval system was developed (see Summit 1967). He vividly recalls how he travelled the 3000 miles to San Francisco to deliver the magnetic tape to Lockheed so that they could make the database available online. He “jumped for joy” when, once back in New York, the data was available to him via the newly acquired terminal of the MLA. While making clear that his roles in MLA, Mellon and the Engineering Information Foundation have primarily been enabling ones (and to this we can add advocacy, strategy and foresight) he also recalls the strong influence that Joseph Raben had on him and mentions some of the projects and conferences that he found particularly memorable.

Individuation Is There in All the Different Strata: John Burrows, Hugh Craig and Willard McCarty

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.

The University Was Still Taking Account of universitas scientiarum : Wilhelm Ott and Julianne Nyhan

This oral history interview between Wilhelm Ott and Julianne Nyhan was carried out on 14 July 2015, shortly after 10am, in the offices of pagina in Tubingen, 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 Deutsches Rechenzentrum (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 Tubingen 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 Tubingen 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 Tubingen’s embrace of the notion of universitas scientiarum in the 1960s and contrasts this with the rather more precarious position of the Humanities in many countries today.

There Had to Be a Better Way: John Nitti and Julianne Nyhan

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.

Moderate Expectations, Tolerable Disappointments: Claus Huitfeldt and Julianne Nyhan

This interview was conducted on 11 July at the 2014 Digital Humanities Conference, Lausanne, Switzerland. Huitfeldt recounts that he first encountered computing at the beginning of the 1980s via the Institute of Continental Shelf Research when he was a Philosophy student at the University of Trondheim. However, it was in connection with a Humanities project on the writings of Wittgenstein that he learned to programme. When that project closed he worked as a computing consultant in the Norwegian Computing Center for the Humanities and in 1990 he established a new project called the ‘Wittgenstein Archives’, which aimed to prepare and publish a machine-readable version of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. Here he discusses the context in which he began working on the encoding scheme (A Multi-Element Code System) that he developed for that project. The influence of MECS went beyond the Wittgenstein Archives. According to Ore (2014) ‘when XML itself was under development, the idea of well-formed documents (as different from documents valid according to a DTD or schema) was taken into XML from MECS’. In addition to discussing matters like the trajectory of DH research and his early encounters with the conference community he also discusses some of the fundamental issues that interest him like the role of technology in relation to the written word and the lack of engagement of the Philosophy community with such questions. Ultimately he concludes that he does not view DH as a discipline, but rather as a reconfiguration of the academic landscape as a result of the convergence of tools and methods within and between the Humanities and other disciplines.