University College London's historic Main Building was the venue for ‘Hidden Histories’, a one day international symposium, held on Saturday 17 September 2011, to discuss methodologies for a history of computing in the humanities. Earlier this year, Julianne Nyhan and Anne Welsh of University College London's Department of Information Studies and Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), were awarded funding from the University of Trier’s Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Forschungszentrum (HKFZ) for a project entitled ‘Digital Humanities as Wissensraum: uncovering hidden histories (c. 1949-1980)’. The time scale chosen to frame this project is deeply significant for the history of humanities computing. In a canonical reading of its history this thirty year period covers the scope of Busa’s ‘Index Thomisticus’ project. Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit priest, who died aged 98 on 9 August 2011, is credited with pioneering hypertext and the application of computing to humanities research. In 1949 Busa had proposed a revolutionary idea to IBM: using computers to study texts, in particular the collected works of medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, a task which was to occupy Busa until 1980. In contrast to the established historical narrative the ‘Hidden Histories’ project seeks to uncover alternative histories, across this defining thirty year period, by sifting through the fragmentary evidence from activities of lesser-known pioneering and ‘early adopter’ practitioners and scholars in humanities computing.
At the project’s outset, in February 2011, Nyhan and Welsh, joint principal investigators, had announced their intention to host an international symposium in order to collegially discuss a diversity of approaches to methods underpinning such original and ambitious research. Invited delegates ranged across a veritable transdisciplinary spectrum: information science; computer studies; linguistic studies; historical studies; critical theory; and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Claudine Moulin (University of Trier), pried apart philosophical connotations of ‘Wissensraum’ (spaces of knowledge) for applications to humanities computing. Moulin encourages assembling a ‘typology’ of spatial forms to systematise relationships between the physicality of knowledge space and its knowledge ordering. This process places an emphasis on the centrality of user generation on the production and dissemination of content. Similarly, crowdsourcing makes use of the distributed information flow of the Web, but as Melissa Terras (UCLDH), cautioned, researchers need to ask the right questions if they expect to receive pertinent responses from the ‘hive mind’. In their respective papers, Edward Vanhoutte (Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, Ghent, Belgium) and Ray Siemens (University of Victoria, Canada, who presented virtually), discussed how explorations of the publication histories of humanities computing textbooks may help researchers to better understand the processes involved in shaping perceptions amongst scholars, educators, and the public from ‘Literary and Linguistic Computing’ through ‘Humanities Computing’ to ‘Digital Humanities’.
Is digital humanities a field or a discipline? In his opening keynote, Willard McCarty (Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London and Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney), reminded delegates that digital humanities is ‘imprinted’ with the memory of experiences from the humanities which, in turn, effects perceptions of chronology, narration, and interpretation. The Exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity (London 1968), often considered to be the first major exhibition of computer art, is now nearly forgotten yet it represents the rich seams of connection between the arts and sciences anticipating current interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.
‘Hidden Histories’ will employ oral testimony interpreted through narrative inquiry. Andrew Flinn (UCLDH) who spoke on oral history as a method in historical recovery called attention to the value of listening for the silences in personal stories as an amplification of lived experiences and as a means of shaping generative research questions. I advocated intentional alignment of critical theory to historical studies as an aid to peeling back discursive layers constructing canonical narratives.
The task of capturing processes through the gathering of ephemera was a theme threading through the entire symposium. Vanda Broughton (UCLDH) looked at the lost origins of information science through the nearly forgotten origins of the Classification Research Group, (CRG). Reiterating Flinn, she stressed that losses and lacunae in documentary records can only be fully enriched by experiences articulated through oral statements and witness testimonies. This salient point was stressed in the closing keynote presented by Lou Burnard (Emeritus, Oxford University Computing Services). The thirty year time scale framing the ‘Hidden Histories’ project was significantly underscored by technological transition from main frame to personal computing. Burnard reminded delegates that each phase of humanities computing was culturally mediated by own its technological capabilities. In knitting together an authentic historical critique, Burnard stressed, this determining factor needs due consideration and acknowledgment.
Busa’s life work sought to tease out generative research questions with the aid of computer technology. By systematically probing deeper into forgotten fragments ‘Hidden Histories’ seeks to impart an even more generative story.
This section of the ‘Hidden Histories’ project will run until December 2011.
For further information on the project please visit the project homepage http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/hiddenhistories/
Reviewed by James G.R. Cronin, University College Cork, Ireland
