There are perhaps not many fields in the humanities that can trace their roots to certain individuals, collaborations, and innovative new approaches. But within the application of computing to humanities problems one name looms large. Roberto Busa, one of the pioneers of humanities computing, died in Italy on Tuesday (August 9, 2011).
Roberto Busa is considered by many to be the founder of the scholarly application of computing in the humanities and is most well-known for his collaborations with Thomas Watson, the founder IBM. This resulted in the Index Thomisticus, a complete lemmatization of the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the immensely influential 13th Century philosopher and theologian. The Index Thomisticus is a tool for doing sophisticated searches within the large corpus that eventually allowed the printed publication of the 56 Volumes of the Index in the 1970s; work that took almost 30 years to complete. An online version was released in 2005.
In 1956, Time Magazine wrote this about his collaboration with IBM.
“But in seven years IBM technicians in the U.S. and in Italy, working with Busa, devised a way to do the job. The complete works of Aquinas will be typed onto punch cards; the machines will then work through the words and produce a systematic index of every word St. Thomas used, together with the number of times it appears, where it appears, and the six words immediately preceding and following each appearance (to give the context). This will take the machines 8,125 hours; the same job would be likely to take one man a lifetime”…Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,867529,00.html#ixzz1Ug8KDNnn
The major prize in Digital Humanities field, the Roberto Busa award, is awarded every three years; the first was awarded to Roberto Busa himself in 1998; the next was awarded to the Australian, John Burrows for his groundbreaking work on stylometrics.
The next Roberto Busa prize, the highest honour in Digital Humanities, will be awarded at the Digital Humanities Conference in the US in 2013.
Also, see the History of Humanities Computing by Susan Hockey, in ‘A Companion to Digital Humanities’, 2004
Frontiers in Spatial Humanities from Scholars’ Lab on Vimeo.
Bethany Nowvisky talks in ‘the final event of our NEH-funded Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship.
The Scholars’ Lab/NEH Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship was held at the University of Virginia Library May 25-27, 2010 and concluded with a set of two-minute, three-slide lightning talks by Institute attendees on their own spatial humanities projects and works-in-progress.
Digital Humanities Conference, Stanford University, June 2011
Conal Tuohy and myself recently attended the Digital Humanities conference 2011 at Stanford University in California (19-22 June). In its 23rd year, the conference is the peak conference for the application of computing to humanities research with the numerous digital humanities associations holding their annual general meetings at the event. Papers range from encyclopaedias in the study of Egyptology, to the computational study of linguistic-style in medieval texts, to the creation of digital editions of early modern texts. Many of the panels and papers at the conference also included a ‘community building’ aspect such as teaching digital humanities, the digital humanities and alternative academic careers, and funding the digital humanities. The keynotes at the conference were particularly impressive and included Dr Chad Gaffield, President of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada on Re-Imaging Scholarship in the Digital Age, David Rumsey on Reading Historical Maps Digitally, and JB Michel and Erez Liberman-Aiden, the developers of Google’s N-Gram viewer, on the quantitative analysis of millions of digitised books.
Chad Gafffield, President of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada delivering the annual Zampoli Prize Lecture on 'Re-imagining Scholarship in the Digital Age
And as the conference has its roots in literary and linguistic computing, it is perhaps not surprising that there is a strong representation of papers dealing with issues of encoding and computational analysis of text. Geoffrey Rockwell, from the University of Alberta in Canada, discussed corpus linguistics; or the study of the entire collection of works on any given subject using computational techniques. Rather that enter a digital corpus by a facsimile, as is lamentably the case with many digitisation projects in the humanities, Rockwell discussed ways to enter a corpus using ‘corpus interfaces’ and search and analysis tools that are better placed to impart multifaceted understandings of the nature of the human record as it interfaces with the computer.
The next Digital Humanities conference is to be held at the University of Hamburg in July 2012. http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de
Here is a interview with Gabriel Bodard of King’s College London (my old drinking buddy) by Elton Barker (one of my new drinking buddies). Gabriel is particulary good at articulating where computing fits within classical studies. Well worth a look…
Stefan Sinclair produced these videos for the recent Centrenet/CNHI meeting that I attended at the Jackman Institute at the University of Toronto. There are a whole bunch of them and they give a pretty good outline of some of the work in the field. I have embedded one here and links to the rest can be found on the 4Humanities web site.
After almost a month of Digital Humanities events, I am finally back at my desk and am able to address the mounting pile of information in front of me that I must cognate and make sense of and then send out again to a further pile of information that will probably again come back at me some day in another form that I need to again make sense of. I feel like the salary man in the 1964 Japanese movie ‘Woman in the Dunes‘…keep shovelling or it will all cave in.
Still, what a wonderful time I have had over the past month; capped off last week by a symposium in Newcastle, Australia to honour the work of John Burrows; one of the pioneers of ‘stylometrics’ or the statistical study of authorship in text. This was possible one of the best DH events I have been to in recents years; certainly because it sits within one of my core understadings of the field (and arguably is the foundation of the field). Computing in the humanities is a form of method and analysis and through this analysis we may learn something new about authorship; disputed text, intellectual health, death, murder, love, plagiarism, and class war. I will pursue these last claims in a following blog post as I am more concerned at this juncture about why Firefox 5 killed my Google tool bar and now my spell-checker doesn’t work and everyone will be able to tell I went to a State School.
...this blog is obsessively directed at profiling digital humanities developments in a cultural, social, and technical sense and in terms of books and applications...it is an aggregation or 'meta' style blog with the occasional commentary
Hi, my name is Dr Craig Bellamy and I am a digital humanities analyst for the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative, a consortium based at the University of Melbourne, however, the views expressed in this blog are the responsibility of the author alone.
Twitter
