Andrew Flinn | University College London (original) (raw)

Papers by Andrew Flinn

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Jun 1, 2023

Springer eBooks, 2016

This interview took place on 9 July 2014 at dh2014, the Digital Humanities Conference that was he... more This interview took place on 9 July 2014 at dh2014, the Digital Humanities Conference that was held in Lausanne, Switzerland that year. In it Thaller recalls that his earliest memory of encountering computing in the Humanities dates to c. 1973 when he attended a presentation on the use of computational techniques to map the spatial distribution of medieval coins. The diffi culties of handling large, paper-based datasets was impressed upon him as he compiled some 32,000 index cards of excerpts for use in his PhD thesis. When he later encountered statistical standard software at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna he found that such software could not be benefi cially applied to historical data without fi rst transforming in some way the historical data under study (indeed, the formalisation of historical and cultural heritage data is an issue that reoccurs in this interview, much as it did in Thaller's research). In light of his experience of the problems of using such software 'out of the box' to work with historical data he went on to teach himself the programming language SNOBOL. Within a few weeks he had joined a project on daily life in the middle ages and was building software to manage the descriptions of images that the project compiled and stored on punched cards. Having contributed to various other projects with computational elements, in 1978 he took up a post at the Max Planck Institut for History in Göttingen. As well as discussing the research he carried out there, for example, CLIO/kλειω a databased programming system for History with a command language in Latin, he discusses the immense freedom and access to resources that he benefi tted from. He also goes on to discuss some of the later projects he worked on, including those in the wider context of digital libraries, infrastructure and cultural heritage.

Springer eBooks, 2016

This interview took place in Bradley's offi ce in Drury Lane, King's College London on 9 Septembe... more This interview took place in Bradley's offi ce in Drury Lane, King's College London on 9 September 2014 around 11:30. Bradley was provided with the interview questions in advance. He recalls that his interest in computing started in the early 1960s. As computer time was not then available to him he sometimes wrote out in longhand the FORTRAN code he was beginning to learn from books. One of his earliest encounters with Humanities Computing was the concordance to Diodorus Siculus that he programmed in the late 1970s. The printed concordance that resulted fi lled the back of a station wagon. The burgeoning Humanities Computing community in Toronto at that time collaborated both with the University of Toronto Computer Services Department (where Bradley was based) and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, founded by Ian Lancashire. Aware of the small but signifi cant interest in text analysis that existed in Toronto at that time and pondering the implications of the shift from batch to interactive computing he began work as a developer of Text Analysis Computing Tools (TACT). He also recalls his later work on Pliny , a personal note management system, and how it was at least partly undertaken in response to the lack of engagement with computational text analysis he noted among Humanists. In addition to other themes, he refl ects at various points during the interview on models of partnership between Academic and Technical experts. Biography John Bradley was born in 1950 in Bracebridge, Ontario, Canada. He completed a Bachelor of Mathematics degree at the University of Waterloo, Canada in 1974 and a Bachelor of Music at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada in 1977. Between 1977 and 1997 he held various positions in the Computer Centre at the University of Toronto and was lead developer of the infl uential TACT. In 1997 he joined what is now known as the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London and was eventually moved from a non-academic post to the academic post of Senior Lecturer in 2011. His work on Pliny , a personal note management system, was awarded a Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration (MATC) prize in 2008. Interview Julianne Nyhan [JN] My fi rst question is about your earliest memories of encountering the computer or computing technology? John Bradley [JB] I thought I was going to be involved in computing from what was, for me, pretty darn early days actually. In the early 1960s, when I was in my early teens, I was already buying the few books on computing that were available to people like me. I started off with an interest in circuitry. So my earliest books about computing had little diagrams with transistors connecting together to make OR and AND gates. At one point I found a book about FORTRAN in what was then called 'programmed learning' style. 1 I was absolutely captivated by it; I was absolutely fascinated. I remember reading it on the bus on the 100 mile trip going from Toronto to my home, which was in Gravenhurst Ontario. I was absolutely deeply engrossed. I became so excited that I started writing code on a piece of paper because there was no possibility (this was in the early 1960s) for someone like me to have access to a computer. Relatively early on, let's say about 1965 or so, I was sent by my high school to the University of Waterloo, which was very active in the early days of Computer Science. Computer Science was part of their Mathematics Faculty and so I got my hands on these large machines, like the 1000 other students who were sent to do some programming on cards. I was just over the top and desperately excited. I knew I wanted to go to the University of Waterloo and, at that time, I was quite convinced that that was going make my career. I began to fantasise about computing, even at that time. I remember walking home one night in the dead of winter, cold, cold, cold, and thinking about personal computing. I had this vision of a little suitcase-like box that the computer would be. You'd open it up and the screen would be there and I was thinking at the time about animation on it. I had absolutely no idea how it would be done-in almost every level I had no conception of it. But I was excited about the potential for that kind of thing. JN What was it about FORTRAN that excited you so much? JB Now that's an interesting question. I've stayed interested in programming as an expression of my interest in computing. So, I think the ability to make the machine run to a certain extent independently of me, you know, the automaton side of it,

Springer eBooks, 2016

This interview took place on 9 July 2014 at dh2014, the Digital Humanities Conference that was he... more This interview took place on 9 July 2014 at dh2014, the Digital Humanities Conference that was held in Lausanne, Switzerland that year. In it Sperberg-McQueen recalls having had some exposure to programming in 1967, as a 13 year-old. His next notable encounter with computing was as a graduate student when he set about using computers to make a bibliography of secondary literature on the Elder Edda. His earliest encounters with Humanities Computing were via books, and he mentions the proceedings of the 'Concordances and the Dictionary of Old English' conference and a book by Susan Hockey (see below) as especially infl uential on him. In 1985 a position in the Princeton University Computer Center that required an advanced degree in Humanities and knowledge of computing became available; he took on the post while fi nishing his PhD dissertation and continuing to apply for tenure-track positions. Around this time he also began attending the 'International Conference on Computers and the Humanities' series and in this interview he describes some of the encounters that took place at those conferences and contributed to the formation of projects like TEI. As well as refl ecting on his role in TEI he also compares and contrasts this experience with his work in W3C. On the whole, a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards his career emerges from the interview: he evokes Dorothy Sayers to communicate how the application of computers to the Humanities 'overmastered' him. Yet, he poignantly recalls how his fi rst love was German Medieval languages and literature and the profound sense of loss he felt at not securing an academic post related to this.

Springer eBooks, 2016

This interview was carried out via Skype on 21 June 2013. Hockey was provided with the core quest... more This interview was carried out via Skype on 21 June 2013. Hockey was provided with the core questions in advance of the interview. Here she recalls how her interest in Humanities Computing was piqued by the articles that Andrew Morton published in the Observer in the 1960s about his work on the authorship of the Pauline Epistles. She went on to secure a position in the Atlas Computer Laboratory where she was an advisor on COCOA version 2 and wrote software for the electronic display of Arabic and other non-ASCII characters. The Atlas Computer Laboratory was funded by the Science Research Council and provided computing support for universities and researchers across the UK. While there she benefi tted from access to the journal CHum and built connections with the emerging Humanities Computing community through events she attended starting with the 'Symposium on Uses of the Computer in Literary Research' organised by Roy Wisbey in Cambridge in 1970 (probably the earliest such meeting in the UK). Indeed, she emphasises the importance that such gatherings played in the formation of the discipline. As well as discussing her contribution to organisations like ALLC and TEI she recalls those who particularly infl uenced her such as, inter alia , Roberto Busa and Antonio Zampolli.

Springer eBooks, 2016

This interview was carried out between London and Washington via skype on 18 September 2013, begi... more This interview was carried out between London and Washington via skype on 18 September 2013, beginning at 17:05 GMT. Agüera was provided with the core questions in advance of the interview. She recalls that her fi rst encounters with computing and DH came about through her post in National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), where she had joined a division that funded the preparation of research tools, reference works and scholarly editions. Thus, she administered grants to a large number of projects that worked, at a relatively early stage, at the interface of Humanities and Computing, for example, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. In this interview she recalls some of the changes that the division where she worked made to its operating procedures in order to incorporate digital projects. For example, in 1979, a section that was added to application materials asking relevant projects to provide a rationale for their proposed use of computing or word processing. She also discusses issues like sustainability that became apparent over the longer term and refl ects on some of the wider trends she saw during her career. Computing was initially taken up by fi elds like Classics and lexicography that needed to manage and interrogate masses of data and thus had a clear application for it. She contrasts this with the more experimental and exploratory use of computing that characterises much of DH today.

Springer eBooks, 2016

This oral history interview was conducted between Hans Rutimann and Julianne Nyhan via Skype on 1... more 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 fi rst 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 infl uence that Joseph Raben had on him and mentions some of the projects and conferences that he found particularly memorable.

Springer eBooks, 2016

This oral history interview was conducted on 3 June 2015 via Skype. Harris was provided with the ... more 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 Artifi cial Intelligence and especially Natural Language Processing projects. Her interview is a wide-ranging one. She refl ects 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?"

Springer eBooks, 2016

This interview took place at the AHRC-organised Digital Transformations Moot held in London, UK o... more This interview took place at the AHRC-organised Digital Transformations Moot held in London, UK on 19 November 2012. In it Egan recalls his earliest encounters with computing when he was a schoolboy along with some memories of how computers were represented in science fi ction novels, TV programmes and advertising. His fi rst job, at the age of 17, was as a Mainframe Computer Operator. He continued to work in this sector throughout the 1980s but by the end of the decade he recognised that such roles would inevitably disappear. In 1990 he returned to university where he completed a BA, MA and PhD over the next 7 years. He recalls his shock upon returning to university as he realised how little use was then made of computers in English Studies. Nevertheless, he bought a relatively cheap, secondhand Sinclair Z88 and took all his notes on it. Later he also digitised his library of 3000 books, destroying their hard copy versions in the process. The interview contains a host of refl ections about the differences that computing techniques and resources have made to Shakespeare Studies over the past years, along with insightful observations about the contributions and limitations of DH. In this interview Egan describes himself as a 'would be Digital Humanist'; indeed, it is the landscape that he describes from this vantage point that makes his interview so interesting and useful.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2022

Douglas A. Boyd currently serves as the director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at ... more Douglas A. Boyd currently serves as the director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries and is a recognized leader in the integration of oral history, archives, and digital technologies. Boyd leads the team that envisioned and designed the open-source and free OHMS system that synchronizes text with audio and video online. He recently managed Oral History in the Digital Age (http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu) and is the author of the book Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community. He has served on the Executive Council for the Oral History Association (OHA), as the digital initiatives editor for the Oral History Review, and recently as chair for the Oral History Section of the Society of American Archivists (SAA). Previously, Boyd managed the Digital Program for the University of Alabama Libraries, served as the director of the Kentucky Oral History Commission, and was senior archivist at the Kentucky Historical Society. Douglas A. Boyd received his MA and PhD in Folklore from Indiana University. Sherna Berger Gluck writes: "Originally trained in the "Chicago School" of sociology at UCLA, my transition in 1972 from research sociologist to feminist oral historian was natural, although unplanned. It was not only a perfect way for me to forge my social activism with my research interests, but with the founding of the community-based Feminist Research Project, I was able to contribute to the growing number of alternative feminist institutions in Los Angeles. However, to resume earning an income, I re-entered academia in 1974, first introducing a women's oral history course at UCLA, and in 1977 joining the women's studies program at California State University, Long Beach. The following year, in 1978, I founded what became the Oral History Program in the Department of History and remained the director until my retirement in 2005. Since 1977, I have been writing about women's oral history, and have published numerous oral history related articles and four books, including: From

This oral history interview between Wilhelm Ott and Julianne Nyhan was carried out on 14 July 201... more 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...

This interview was conducted on 11 July at the 2014 Digital Humanities Conference, Lausanne, Swit... more 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 ...

This oral history conversation was carried out via Skype on 17 October 2013 at 18:00 GMT. Nitti w... more 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 ...

This interview was carried out in Rome, Italy on 17 October 2014 at about 09:00. Orlandi recounts... more This interview was carried out in Rome, Italy on 17 October 2014 at about 09:00. Orlandi recounts that his earliest memory of a computer dates to the 1950s when he saw an IBM machine in the window of an IBM shop in Milan. Around 1960, together with his PhD supervisor Ignazio Cazzaniga, he engaged in some brief exploratory work to see what role punched card technology might play in the making of a critical edition of Augustine’s City of God. His sustained take up of computing in the 1970s arose from the practical problem of managing the wealth of information that he had amassed about Coptic manuscripts. He was aware from an early stage of the possible limitations of computational approaches: his early encounters with the work of Silvio Ceccato left him wary of approaches to cybernetics. He identifies the work of the applied mathematician Luigi Cerofolini who taught him UNIX, among other things, as having been central to his understanding of methodological issues. In relation to theor...

This interview took place in Bradley’s office in Drury Lane, King’s College London on 9 September... more This interview took place in Bradley’s office in Drury Lane, King’s College London on 9 September 2014 around 11:30. Bradley was provided with the interview questions in advance. He recalls that his interest in computing started in the early 1960s. As computer time was not then available to him he sometimes wrote out in longhand the FORTRAN code he was beginning to learn from books. One of his earliest encounters with Humanities Computing was the concordance to Diodorus Siculus that he programmed in the late 1970s. The printed concordance that resulted filled the back of a station wagon. The burgeoning Humanities Computing community in Toronto at that time collaborated both with the University of Toronto Computer Services Department (where Bradley was based) and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, founded by Ian Lancashire. Aware of the small but significant interest in text analysis that existed in Toronto at that time and pondering the implications of the shift from batch ...

Taking the work of Passerini (1979) and Portelli (1981) as a theoretical backdrop, this chapter w... more Taking the work of Passerini (1979) and Portelli (1981) as a theoretical backdrop, this chapter will describe, contextualise and interpret a narrative (or ‘story’) that was recalled in a number, but not all, of the oral history interviews. This narrative concerns interviewees’ experiences of having been ignored, undermined or marginalised by the mainstream academic community. For the purposes of discussion we will refer to this as the ‘motif of the underdog’. We will complement this analysis of the oral history interviews by looking to the scholarly literature of the field and examining a theme that often occurs there, namely DH’s supposedly revolutionary status (referred to below as the ‘motif of the revolutionary’). Our analysis will raise the question of how DH managed to move from the margins towards the mainstream while continuing to portray itself as both underdog and revolutionary? Drawing on literature from social psychology, the history of disciplinarity and the wider backd...

This interview was carried out via skype on 11 August 2015 at 20:30 GMT. Malloy was provided with... more This interview was carried out via skype on 11 August 2015 at 20:30 GMT. Malloy was provided with the core interview questions in advance. Here she recalls that after graduating from university she took a job as a searcher/editor for the National Union Catalog of the Library of Congress. About a year after she arrived Henriette D. Avram began work on the process of devising a way to make the library’s cataloguing information machine readable (work that would ultimately lead to the development of the MARC format (Schudel 2006)). Malloy recalls this wider context as her first encounter, of sorts, with computing technology: though she did not participate in that work it made a clear impression on her. She had learned to programme in FORTRAN in the 1960s when working as a technical librarian at the Ball Brothers Research Corporation. She had also held other technical roles at Electromagnetic Research Corp and with a contractor for the Goddard Space Flight Center, which was computerising...

This oral history interview between Willard McCarty (on behalf of Julianne Nyhan), John Burrows a... more 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 inv...

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Jun 1, 2023

Springer eBooks, 2016

This interview took place on 9 July 2014 at dh2014, the Digital Humanities Conference that was he... more This interview took place on 9 July 2014 at dh2014, the Digital Humanities Conference that was held in Lausanne, Switzerland that year. In it Thaller recalls that his earliest memory of encountering computing in the Humanities dates to c. 1973 when he attended a presentation on the use of computational techniques to map the spatial distribution of medieval coins. The diffi culties of handling large, paper-based datasets was impressed upon him as he compiled some 32,000 index cards of excerpts for use in his PhD thesis. When he later encountered statistical standard software at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna he found that such software could not be benefi cially applied to historical data without fi rst transforming in some way the historical data under study (indeed, the formalisation of historical and cultural heritage data is an issue that reoccurs in this interview, much as it did in Thaller's research). In light of his experience of the problems of using such software 'out of the box' to work with historical data he went on to teach himself the programming language SNOBOL. Within a few weeks he had joined a project on daily life in the middle ages and was building software to manage the descriptions of images that the project compiled and stored on punched cards. Having contributed to various other projects with computational elements, in 1978 he took up a post at the Max Planck Institut for History in Göttingen. As well as discussing the research he carried out there, for example, CLIO/kλειω a databased programming system for History with a command language in Latin, he discusses the immense freedom and access to resources that he benefi tted from. He also goes on to discuss some of the later projects he worked on, including those in the wider context of digital libraries, infrastructure and cultural heritage.

Springer eBooks, 2016

This interview took place in Bradley's offi ce in Drury Lane, King's College London on 9 Septembe... more This interview took place in Bradley's offi ce in Drury Lane, King's College London on 9 September 2014 around 11:30. Bradley was provided with the interview questions in advance. He recalls that his interest in computing started in the early 1960s. As computer time was not then available to him he sometimes wrote out in longhand the FORTRAN code he was beginning to learn from books. One of his earliest encounters with Humanities Computing was the concordance to Diodorus Siculus that he programmed in the late 1970s. The printed concordance that resulted fi lled the back of a station wagon. The burgeoning Humanities Computing community in Toronto at that time collaborated both with the University of Toronto Computer Services Department (where Bradley was based) and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, founded by Ian Lancashire. Aware of the small but signifi cant interest in text analysis that existed in Toronto at that time and pondering the implications of the shift from batch to interactive computing he began work as a developer of Text Analysis Computing Tools (TACT). He also recalls his later work on Pliny , a personal note management system, and how it was at least partly undertaken in response to the lack of engagement with computational text analysis he noted among Humanists. In addition to other themes, he refl ects at various points during the interview on models of partnership between Academic and Technical experts. Biography John Bradley was born in 1950 in Bracebridge, Ontario, Canada. He completed a Bachelor of Mathematics degree at the University of Waterloo, Canada in 1974 and a Bachelor of Music at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada in 1977. Between 1977 and 1997 he held various positions in the Computer Centre at the University of Toronto and was lead developer of the infl uential TACT. In 1997 he joined what is now known as the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London and was eventually moved from a non-academic post to the academic post of Senior Lecturer in 2011. His work on Pliny , a personal note management system, was awarded a Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration (MATC) prize in 2008. Interview Julianne Nyhan [JN] My fi rst question is about your earliest memories of encountering the computer or computing technology? John Bradley [JB] I thought I was going to be involved in computing from what was, for me, pretty darn early days actually. In the early 1960s, when I was in my early teens, I was already buying the few books on computing that were available to people like me. I started off with an interest in circuitry. So my earliest books about computing had little diagrams with transistors connecting together to make OR and AND gates. At one point I found a book about FORTRAN in what was then called 'programmed learning' style. 1 I was absolutely captivated by it; I was absolutely fascinated. I remember reading it on the bus on the 100 mile trip going from Toronto to my home, which was in Gravenhurst Ontario. I was absolutely deeply engrossed. I became so excited that I started writing code on a piece of paper because there was no possibility (this was in the early 1960s) for someone like me to have access to a computer. Relatively early on, let's say about 1965 or so, I was sent by my high school to the University of Waterloo, which was very active in the early days of Computer Science. Computer Science was part of their Mathematics Faculty and so I got my hands on these large machines, like the 1000 other students who were sent to do some programming on cards. I was just over the top and desperately excited. I knew I wanted to go to the University of Waterloo and, at that time, I was quite convinced that that was going make my career. I began to fantasise about computing, even at that time. I remember walking home one night in the dead of winter, cold, cold, cold, and thinking about personal computing. I had this vision of a little suitcase-like box that the computer would be. You'd open it up and the screen would be there and I was thinking at the time about animation on it. I had absolutely no idea how it would be done-in almost every level I had no conception of it. But I was excited about the potential for that kind of thing. JN What was it about FORTRAN that excited you so much? JB Now that's an interesting question. I've stayed interested in programming as an expression of my interest in computing. So, I think the ability to make the machine run to a certain extent independently of me, you know, the automaton side of it,

Springer eBooks, 2016

This interview took place on 9 July 2014 at dh2014, the Digital Humanities Conference that was he... more This interview took place on 9 July 2014 at dh2014, the Digital Humanities Conference that was held in Lausanne, Switzerland that year. In it Sperberg-McQueen recalls having had some exposure to programming in 1967, as a 13 year-old. His next notable encounter with computing was as a graduate student when he set about using computers to make a bibliography of secondary literature on the Elder Edda. His earliest encounters with Humanities Computing were via books, and he mentions the proceedings of the 'Concordances and the Dictionary of Old English' conference and a book by Susan Hockey (see below) as especially infl uential on him. In 1985 a position in the Princeton University Computer Center that required an advanced degree in Humanities and knowledge of computing became available; he took on the post while fi nishing his PhD dissertation and continuing to apply for tenure-track positions. Around this time he also began attending the 'International Conference on Computers and the Humanities' series and in this interview he describes some of the encounters that took place at those conferences and contributed to the formation of projects like TEI. As well as refl ecting on his role in TEI he also compares and contrasts this experience with his work in W3C. On the whole, a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards his career emerges from the interview: he evokes Dorothy Sayers to communicate how the application of computers to the Humanities 'overmastered' him. Yet, he poignantly recalls how his fi rst love was German Medieval languages and literature and the profound sense of loss he felt at not securing an academic post related to this.

Springer eBooks, 2016

This interview was carried out via Skype on 21 June 2013. Hockey was provided with the core quest... more This interview was carried out via Skype on 21 June 2013. Hockey was provided with the core questions in advance of the interview. Here she recalls how her interest in Humanities Computing was piqued by the articles that Andrew Morton published in the Observer in the 1960s about his work on the authorship of the Pauline Epistles. She went on to secure a position in the Atlas Computer Laboratory where she was an advisor on COCOA version 2 and wrote software for the electronic display of Arabic and other non-ASCII characters. The Atlas Computer Laboratory was funded by the Science Research Council and provided computing support for universities and researchers across the UK. While there she benefi tted from access to the journal CHum and built connections with the emerging Humanities Computing community through events she attended starting with the 'Symposium on Uses of the Computer in Literary Research' organised by Roy Wisbey in Cambridge in 1970 (probably the earliest such meeting in the UK). Indeed, she emphasises the importance that such gatherings played in the formation of the discipline. As well as discussing her contribution to organisations like ALLC and TEI she recalls those who particularly infl uenced her such as, inter alia , Roberto Busa and Antonio Zampolli.

Springer eBooks, 2016

This interview was carried out between London and Washington via skype on 18 September 2013, begi... more This interview was carried out between London and Washington via skype on 18 September 2013, beginning at 17:05 GMT. Agüera was provided with the core questions in advance of the interview. She recalls that her fi rst encounters with computing and DH came about through her post in National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), where she had joined a division that funded the preparation of research tools, reference works and scholarly editions. Thus, she administered grants to a large number of projects that worked, at a relatively early stage, at the interface of Humanities and Computing, for example, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. In this interview she recalls some of the changes that the division where she worked made to its operating procedures in order to incorporate digital projects. For example, in 1979, a section that was added to application materials asking relevant projects to provide a rationale for their proposed use of computing or word processing. She also discusses issues like sustainability that became apparent over the longer term and refl ects on some of the wider trends she saw during her career. Computing was initially taken up by fi elds like Classics and lexicography that needed to manage and interrogate masses of data and thus had a clear application for it. She contrasts this with the more experimental and exploratory use of computing that characterises much of DH today.

Springer eBooks, 2016

This oral history interview was conducted between Hans Rutimann and Julianne Nyhan via Skype on 1... more 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 fi rst 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 infl uence that Joseph Raben had on him and mentions some of the projects and conferences that he found particularly memorable.

Springer eBooks, 2016

This oral history interview was conducted on 3 June 2015 via Skype. Harris was provided with the ... more 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 Artifi cial Intelligence and especially Natural Language Processing projects. Her interview is a wide-ranging one. She refl ects 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?"

Springer eBooks, 2016

This interview took place at the AHRC-organised Digital Transformations Moot held in London, UK o... more This interview took place at the AHRC-organised Digital Transformations Moot held in London, UK on 19 November 2012. In it Egan recalls his earliest encounters with computing when he was a schoolboy along with some memories of how computers were represented in science fi ction novels, TV programmes and advertising. His fi rst job, at the age of 17, was as a Mainframe Computer Operator. He continued to work in this sector throughout the 1980s but by the end of the decade he recognised that such roles would inevitably disappear. In 1990 he returned to university where he completed a BA, MA and PhD over the next 7 years. He recalls his shock upon returning to university as he realised how little use was then made of computers in English Studies. Nevertheless, he bought a relatively cheap, secondhand Sinclair Z88 and took all his notes on it. Later he also digitised his library of 3000 books, destroying their hard copy versions in the process. The interview contains a host of refl ections about the differences that computing techniques and resources have made to Shakespeare Studies over the past years, along with insightful observations about the contributions and limitations of DH. In this interview Egan describes himself as a 'would be Digital Humanist'; indeed, it is the landscape that he describes from this vantage point that makes his interview so interesting and useful.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2022

Douglas A. Boyd currently serves as the director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at ... more Douglas A. Boyd currently serves as the director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries and is a recognized leader in the integration of oral history, archives, and digital technologies. Boyd leads the team that envisioned and designed the open-source and free OHMS system that synchronizes text with audio and video online. He recently managed Oral History in the Digital Age (http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu) and is the author of the book Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community. He has served on the Executive Council for the Oral History Association (OHA), as the digital initiatives editor for the Oral History Review, and recently as chair for the Oral History Section of the Society of American Archivists (SAA). Previously, Boyd managed the Digital Program for the University of Alabama Libraries, served as the director of the Kentucky Oral History Commission, and was senior archivist at the Kentucky Historical Society. Douglas A. Boyd received his MA and PhD in Folklore from Indiana University. Sherna Berger Gluck writes: "Originally trained in the "Chicago School" of sociology at UCLA, my transition in 1972 from research sociologist to feminist oral historian was natural, although unplanned. It was not only a perfect way for me to forge my social activism with my research interests, but with the founding of the community-based Feminist Research Project, I was able to contribute to the growing number of alternative feminist institutions in Los Angeles. However, to resume earning an income, I re-entered academia in 1974, first introducing a women's oral history course at UCLA, and in 1977 joining the women's studies program at California State University, Long Beach. The following year, in 1978, I founded what became the Oral History Program in the Department of History and remained the director until my retirement in 2005. Since 1977, I have been writing about women's oral history, and have published numerous oral history related articles and four books, including: From

This oral history interview between Wilhelm Ott and Julianne Nyhan was carried out on 14 July 201... more 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...

This interview was conducted on 11 July at the 2014 Digital Humanities Conference, Lausanne, Swit... more 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 ...

This oral history conversation was carried out via Skype on 17 October 2013 at 18:00 GMT. Nitti w... more 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 ...

This interview was carried out in Rome, Italy on 17 October 2014 at about 09:00. Orlandi recounts... more This interview was carried out in Rome, Italy on 17 October 2014 at about 09:00. Orlandi recounts that his earliest memory of a computer dates to the 1950s when he saw an IBM machine in the window of an IBM shop in Milan. Around 1960, together with his PhD supervisor Ignazio Cazzaniga, he engaged in some brief exploratory work to see what role punched card technology might play in the making of a critical edition of Augustine’s City of God. His sustained take up of computing in the 1970s arose from the practical problem of managing the wealth of information that he had amassed about Coptic manuscripts. He was aware from an early stage of the possible limitations of computational approaches: his early encounters with the work of Silvio Ceccato left him wary of approaches to cybernetics. He identifies the work of the applied mathematician Luigi Cerofolini who taught him UNIX, among other things, as having been central to his understanding of methodological issues. In relation to theor...

This interview took place in Bradley’s office in Drury Lane, King’s College London on 9 September... more This interview took place in Bradley’s office in Drury Lane, King’s College London on 9 September 2014 around 11:30. Bradley was provided with the interview questions in advance. He recalls that his interest in computing started in the early 1960s. As computer time was not then available to him he sometimes wrote out in longhand the FORTRAN code he was beginning to learn from books. One of his earliest encounters with Humanities Computing was the concordance to Diodorus Siculus that he programmed in the late 1970s. The printed concordance that resulted filled the back of a station wagon. The burgeoning Humanities Computing community in Toronto at that time collaborated both with the University of Toronto Computer Services Department (where Bradley was based) and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, founded by Ian Lancashire. Aware of the small but significant interest in text analysis that existed in Toronto at that time and pondering the implications of the shift from batch ...

Taking the work of Passerini (1979) and Portelli (1981) as a theoretical backdrop, this chapter w... more Taking the work of Passerini (1979) and Portelli (1981) as a theoretical backdrop, this chapter will describe, contextualise and interpret a narrative (or ‘story’) that was recalled in a number, but not all, of the oral history interviews. This narrative concerns interviewees’ experiences of having been ignored, undermined or marginalised by the mainstream academic community. For the purposes of discussion we will refer to this as the ‘motif of the underdog’. We will complement this analysis of the oral history interviews by looking to the scholarly literature of the field and examining a theme that often occurs there, namely DH’s supposedly revolutionary status (referred to below as the ‘motif of the revolutionary’). Our analysis will raise the question of how DH managed to move from the margins towards the mainstream while continuing to portray itself as both underdog and revolutionary? Drawing on literature from social psychology, the history of disciplinarity and the wider backd...

This interview was carried out via skype on 11 August 2015 at 20:30 GMT. Malloy was provided with... more This interview was carried out via skype on 11 August 2015 at 20:30 GMT. Malloy was provided with the core interview questions in advance. Here she recalls that after graduating from university she took a job as a searcher/editor for the National Union Catalog of the Library of Congress. About a year after she arrived Henriette D. Avram began work on the process of devising a way to make the library’s cataloguing information machine readable (work that would ultimately lead to the development of the MARC format (Schudel 2006)). Malloy recalls this wider context as her first encounter, of sorts, with computing technology: though she did not participate in that work it made a clear impression on her. She had learned to programme in FORTRAN in the 1960s when working as a technical librarian at the Ball Brothers Research Corporation. She had also held other technical roles at Electromagnetic Research Corp and with a contractor for the Goddard Space Flight Center, which was computerising...

This oral history interview between Willard McCarty (on behalf of Julianne Nyhan), John Burrows a... more 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 inv...