This book addresses the application of computing to cultural heritage and the discipline of Digital Humanities that formed around it. Digital Humanities research is transforming how the Human record can be transmitted, shaped, understood, questioned and imagined and it has been ongoing for more than 70 years. However, we have no comprehensive histories of its research trajectory or its disciplinary development. The authors make a first contribution towards remedying this by uncovering, documenting, and analysing a number of the social, intellectual and creative processes that helped to shape this research from the 1950s until the present day. By taking an oral history approach, this book explores questions like, among others, researchers’ earliest memories of encountering computers and the factors that subsequently prompted them to use the computer in Humanities research. Computation and the Humanities will be an essential read for cultural and computing historians, digital humanists and those interested in developments like the digitisation of cultural heritage and artefacts.

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Why Oral History?
• 3. Individuation Is There in All the Different Strata: John Burrows, Hugh Craig and Willard McCarty
• 4. The University Was Still Taking Account of universitas scientiarum: Wilhelm Ott and Julianne Nyhan
• 5. hic Rhodus, hic salta: Tito Orlandi and Julianne Nyhan
• 6. They Took a Chance: Susan Hockey and Julianne Nyhan
• 7. The Influence of Algorithmic Thinking: Judy Malloy and Julianne Nyhan
• 8. I Would Think of Myself as Sitting Inside the Computer: Mary Dee Harris and Julianne Nyhan
• 9. There Had to Be a Better Way: John Nitti and Julianne Nyhan
• 10. It’s a Little Mind-Boggling: Helen Agüera and Julianne Nyhan
• 11. I Heard About the Arrival of the Computer: Hans Rutimann and Julianne Nyhan
• 12. I Mourned the University for a Long Time: Michael Sperberg-McQueen and Julianne Nyhan
• 13. It’s Probably the only Modestly Widely Used System with a Command Language in Latin: Manfred Thaller and Julianne Nyhan
• 14. Getting Computers into Humanists’ Thinking: John Bradley and Julianne Nyhan
• 15. Moderate Expectations, Tolerable Disappointments: Claus Huitfeldt and Julianne Nyhan
• 16. So, Into the Chopper It Went: Gabriel Egan and Julianne Nyhan
• 17. Revolutionaries and Underdogs
• 18. Conclusion
• Backmatter