The role of the computer in humanistic scholarship
Pages 269 - 276
Abstract
Within the past dozen years or so, the computer has made itself felt in every aspect of our society. One hundred years ago, it was the Industrial Revolution which wrought profound changes in the economic and social fabric of the western world. Today there is an upheaval of comparable force and significance in the so-called Computer Revolution. Indeed, Isaac Auerbach has characterized the invention of the computer as being comparable to that of the steam engine in its effects upon mankind. He predicted that the computer and its application to information processing "will have a far greater constructive impact on mankind during the remainder of the 20th Century than any other technological development of the past two decades."
References
[1]
Isaac Auerbach, "Information: A Prime Resource," in The Information Revolution, New York Times, May 23, 1965, p. 4.
[2]
Paul Tasman, "Literary Data Processing," IBM Journal of Research and Development, vol. I, pp. 249--56 (1960).
[3]
See the preface to Nelson's Complete Concordance to the Revised Standard Version Bible, New York, 1957.
[4]
Felix Shirokov, "Computer Deciphers Maya Hieroglyphs," UNESCO Courier, vol. XV, pp. 26--32, (1962).
[5]
Jesse D. Jennings, "Computers and Culture History: A Glen Canyon Study," Paper delivered at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco (Nov. 21, 1963).
[6]
See for example J. A. Brown and L. G. Freeman, Jr., "A UNIVAC Analysis of Shard Frequencies from the Carter Ranch, Pueblo, Eastern Arizona," American Antiquity, vol. XXX, pp. 162--167, (1964); and Paul S. Martin, "Archeological Investigations in East Central Arizona," Science, vol. CXXXVIII, pp. 825--27 (1962).
[7]
Bernard Bailyn, Massachusetts Shipping 1697--1714: A Statistical Study, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1959, esp. pp. 137--141 ("A Note on Procedure").
[8]
Ole R. Holsti, "Computer Content Analysis as a Tool in International Relations Research," in Proceedings of the Conference on Computers for the Humanities, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., 1965.
[9]
William O. Aydelotte, "Voting Patterns in the British House of Commons in the 1840's," Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. V, pp. 134--163 (1963).
[10]
Stephen M. Parrish, A Concordance to the Poems of Matthew Arnold, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N. Y., 1959; see also his "Problems in the Making of Computer Concordances," Studies in Biography, vol. XV, pp. 1--14 (1962).
[11]
See Alan Markman, "Litterae ex Machina: Man and Machine in Literary Criticism," Journal of Higher Education, vol. XXXVI, esp. pp. 70--72 (1965).
[12]
Alice M. Pollin and Raquel Kersten, Guia para la Consulta de la Revista de Filología Española, New York University Press, New York, 1964.
[13]
Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace, "Inference in an Authorship Problem," Journal of the American Statistical Association, vol. LVIII, pp. 275--309 (1963).
[14]
On methodology, see Vinton A. Dearing, Methods of Textual Editing, University of California Pres, Los Angeles, Calif., 1962.
[15]
James T. McDonough, Jr., "Homer, the Humanities, and IBM," in Proceedings of the Literary Data Processing Conference, IBM Corporation Yorktown Heights, N. Y., 1964, pp. 25--36.
[16]
Sally Y. Sedelow, "Some Parameters for Computational Stylistics: Computer Aids to the Use of Traditional Categories in Stylistic Analysis," ibid., pp. 211--229.
[17]
Bertrand H. Bronson, "Mechanical Help in the Study of Folk Song," Journal of American Folklore, vol. LXII, pp. 81--86 (1949).
[18]
See Michael Kassler, "A Simple Programming Language for Musical Information Retrieval," (Project 295D, Technical Report No. 3), Princeton University, Princeton, N. J. (1964).
[19]
"Computerized Research in the Humanities: A Survey," ACLS Newsletter, vol. XVI, no. 5, pp. 7--31 (May 1965).
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- AFIPS: American Federation of Information Processing Societies
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Association for Computing Machinery
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Published: 30 November 1965
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