[en]
Video-gaming, Paradise Lost and TCP/IP: an Oral History Conversation between Ray Siemens and Anne Welsh
Ray Siemens, University of Victoria; Anne Welsh, University College London; Julianne Nyhan, University College London; Jessica Salmon, University of Trier
Abstract
[en]
This extended interview with Ray Siemens was carried out on June 21st at Digital Humanities 2011, Stanford University.
It explores Siemens' early training and involvement in the field that is now known as digital humanities. He recalls that his first
experience with computing was as a video gamer and programmer in high school. He had the opportunity to consolidate this early experience in the mid-1980s, when he
attended the University of Waterloo as an undergraduate in the department of English where he undertook, inter alia, formal training in computing. He communicates strongly
the vibrancy of the field that was already apparent during his graduate years (up to c. 1991) and identifies some of the people in places such as the
University of Alberta, University of Toronto, Oxford, and the University of British Columbia who had a formative influence on him.
He gives a clear sense of some of the factors that attracted him to computing, for example, the alternatives to close reading that he was able to
bring to bear on his literary research from an early stage. So too he reflects on computing developments whose applications were not immediately foreseeable, for example,
when in 1986 he edited IBM's TCP/IP manual he could not have foreseen that by 1989 TCP/IP would be firmly established as the communication protocol of the internet.
He closes by reflecting on the prescience of the advice that his father, also an academic, gave him regarding the use of computing in his research
and on his early encounters with the conference scene.
[en]
Postmodern Culture and More: an Oral History
Conversation between John Unsworth and Anne Welsh John Unsworth, Brandeis University; Anne Welsh, University College London; Julianne Nyhan, University College London; Jessica Salmon, University of Trier
Abstract
[en]
John Unsworth recounts that he first became involved with computing in the Humanities c.
1989 as a new faculty member at North Carolina State University where he was
hired to teach post-World War II American literature. He and his colleagues
wanted to set up a new journal as only one other journal existed in that area.
They were introduced to the recently released LISTSERV software and the first
issue of the journal was circulated on email lists and bulletin boards. It was
called Postmodern Culture and twenty-two years later is still published by Johns
Hopkins University Press. It was the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in
the Humanities; nevertheless, not all senior colleagues were in favour of it
and, as a junior faculty member, his participation in it. He recounts that was
not able to avail of formal training in computing but he did have technical
knowledge of computing, mostly picked up while procrastinating on this PhD. By
the early 1990s he was reading Humanist and attending conferences that focused
on electronic journals where he encountered a range of academic and non-academic
projects. In 1993 he moved to the University of Virginia where he directed the
Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). He reflects on the
wide range of people and projects that he worked with and that it was around
this time that he became involved with the community now known as digital
humanities. He reflects in detail on the first digital humanities conference he
attended in Paris in 1994 and concludes by discussing some of the changes that
the advent of the Web has heralded.
[en]
“Collaboration Must Be Fundamental or It's Not Going to Work”: an Oral
History Conversation between Harold Short and Julianne Nyhan Harold Short, King's College London and University of Western Sydney; Julianne Nyhan, University College London; Anne Welsh, University College London; Jessica Salmon, University of Trier
Abstract
[en]
Harold Short recounts that his interest in Computing and the Humanities goes
back to when he was an undergraduate in English and French at a university in
the former Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). There, whilst undertaking summer work in the
library, he saw first-hand the potential of digital methods. After arriving in
London in 1972 he took an Open University degree in mathematics, computing and
systems. Among his early influences he identifies the reading he did on matters
related to cognitive science whilst undertaking a postgraduate certificated in
education. In the UK he worked at the BBC as programmer, systems analyst and
then systems manager. In 1988 he moved to King's College London to take up the
post of Assistant Director in Computing Services for Humanities and Information
Management. One of his first tasks was to work with the Humanities Faculty to
develop an undergraduate programme in humanities and computing. The first
digital humanities conference he attended was the first joint international
conference of ALLC and ACH, held at the University Toronto in 1989, which c. 450
people attended. He reflects on aspects of the institutional shape of the field
towards the end of the 1980s, including the key Centres that existed then, the
first meeting of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC)
and those who were active in it such as Roy Wisbey, Susan Hockey and the late
Antonio Zampolli. He gives a detailed discussion of the development of what is
now the Department of Digital Humanities in King's College London, both in terms
of the administrative and institutional issues involved, as well as the
intellectual. He also reflects on some of the most successful collaborations
that the Department has been involved in, for example, the AHRC funded Henry III
Fine Rolls project, and the conditions and working practices that characterised
them. He closes by discussing his impressions about the movement of scholars
into and out of the discipline and of the institutional issues that have
had an impact on digital humanities centres.
[en]
Questioning, Asking and Enduring Curiosity: an Oral History Conversation between Julianne Nyhan and Willard McCarty
Willard McCarty, King's College London and University of Western Sydney; Julianne Nyhan, University College London; Anne Welsh, University College London; Jessica Salmon, University of Trier
Abstract
[en]
This interview was carried out with Willard McCarty on Tuesday 27th March, 2012 in University College London.
He recounts that his earliest encounter with computing was in the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkley where he worked with semi-automated
scanning equipment for the Alvarez high-energy physics projects. After his dreams of becoming a physicist were thwarted he transferred to Reed College.
There he did not have the opportunity to take formal training in computing; for the most part, Computer Science departments did not exist then.
So, he learned to programme “on the job” with help from a talented physicist turned computer programmer named Bill Gates (no association with Microsoft).
His first encounter with what we now call digital humanities was at the University of Toronto where he worked on the Records of Early English Drama project
whilst undertaking a PhD on 17th century non-dramatic poetry. In 1984/5, as he was finishing his PhD, he accepted an academic support role at the Centre for
Computing in the Humanities at Toronto, where he remained until 1996 when he accepted an academic post in King's College London. In Toronto he was keenly
aware of the staff-faculty divide and the marginalised position of those who used computers in Humanities research. Nevertheless, the opportunities that
the role brought to meet with a range of scholars interested in computing had a lasting influence on him. So too, with funding from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada he was able to undertake a research project on Ovid's Metamorphosis. He closes the interview by reflecting
on his early involvement with the conference scene and people who have influenced him, from academics to his calligraphy teacher Lloyd Reynolds.
[en] Trading Stories: an Oral History Conversation between
Geoffrey Rockwell and Julianne Nyhan Geoffrey Rockwell, University of Alberta; Julianne Nyhan, University College London; Anne Welsh, University College London; Jessica Salmon, University of Trier
Abstract
[en]
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 Hume's 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.
