and there was perhaps less critical appraisal of methodologies than might be desirable. The important developments during this period lay more in support systems generated by the presence of more outlets for dissemination (conferences and journals) and the recognition of the need for standard software and for archiving and maintaining texts. Dissemination was concentrated in outlets for humanities computing and much less in mainstream humanities publications. It seems that we were still at a stage where academic respectability for computer-based work in the humanities was questionable and scholars preferred to publish in outlets where they were more likely to be accepted.
New Developments: Mid-1980s to Early 1990s
This period saw some significant developments in humanities computing. Some of these can be attributed to two new technologies, the personal computer and electronic mail. Others happened simply because of the increase of usage and the need to reduce duplication of effort.
At first there were several different and competing brands of personal computers. Some were developed for games, some were standalone word processors and could not be used for anything else, and others were specifically aimed at the educational market rather than for general use. Gradually IBM PCs and models based on the IBM architecture began to dominate, with Apple Macintoshes also attracting plenty of use, especially for graphics.
The personal computer is now a necessity of scholarly life, but in its early days it was considerably more expensive in relation to now and early purchasers were enthusiasts and those in the know about computing. The initial impact in humanities computing was that it was no longer necessary to register at the computer center in order to use a computer. Users of personal computers could do whatever they wanted and did not necessarily benefit from expertise that already existed. This encouraged duplication of effort, but it also fostered innovation where users were not conditioned by what was already available.
By the end of the 1980s, there were three DOS-based text analysis programs: Word-Cruncher, TACT, and MicroOCP, all of which had very good functionality. Owners of personal computers would work with these at home and, in the case of WordCruncher and TACT, obtain instantaneous results from searches. MicroOCP was developed from the mainframe program using a batch concordance technique rather than interactive searching. However, the main application of personal computers was that shared with all other disciplines, namely word processing. This attracted many more users who knew very little about other applications and tended to assume that the functions within word processing programs might be all that computers could do for them.
The Apple Macintosh was attractive for humanities users for two reasons. Firstly, it had a graphical user interface long before Windows on PCs. This meant that it was much better at displaying non-standard characters. At last it was possible to see Old English characters, Greek, Cyrillic, and almost any other alphabet, on the screen and to manipulate text containing these characters easily. Secondly, the Macintosh also came with a program that made it possible to build some primitive hypertexts easily. HyperCard provided a model of file cards with ways of linking between them. It also incorporated a simple programming tool making it possible for the first time for humanities scholars to write computer programs easily. The benefits of hypertext for teaching were soon recognized and various examples soon appeared. A good example of these was the Beowulf Workstation created by Patrick Conner (Conner 1991). This presents a text to the user with links to a modern English version and linguistic and contextual annotations of various kinds. The first version of the Perseus Project was also delivered to the end user in HyperCard.
Networking, at least for electronic mail, was previously confined to groups of computer scientists and research institutes. By the mid-1980s, facilities for sending and receiving electronic mail across international boundaries were provided by most academic computing services. At the 1985 ALLC conference in Nice, electronic mail addresses were exchanged avidly and a new era of immediate communication began. Soon e-mail was being sent to groups of users and the ListServ software for electronic discussion lists was established. Ansaxnet, the oldest electronic discussion list for the humanities, was founded by Patrick Conner in 1986 (Conner 1992).
At the ICCH conference in Columbia, South Carolina, in spring 1987 a group of people mostly working in support roles in humanities computing got together and agreed that they needed to find a way of keeping in touch on a regular basis. Willard McCarty, who was then at the University of Toronto, agreed to look into how they might do this. On his return from the conference he discovered the existence of ListServ, and Humanist was born (McCarty 1992). The first message was sent out on May 7, 1987. McCarty launched himself into the role of editing what he prefers to call an “electronic seminar” and, except for a hiatus in the early 1990s when Humanist was edited from Brown University, has continued in this role ever since.
Humanist has become something of a model for electronic discussion lists. McCarty has maintained excellent standards of editing and the level of discussion is generally high. For those of us in Europe the regular early morning diet of three to six Humanistdigests is a welcome start to the day. Humanist has become central to the maintenance and development of a community and it has made a significant contribution to the definition of humanities computing. Its archives going back to 1987 are a vast source of information on developments and concerns during this period and it was taken as an exemplar by the founders of the Linguist List, the key electronic forum for linguistics.
This period also saw the publication in print form of the only large-scale attempt to produce a bibliography of projects, software, and publications. Two volumes of the Humanities Computing Yearbook (HCY) were published. The first, edited by Ian Lancashire and Willard McCarty appeared in 1988 with some 400 pages. The second volume, for 1989–90, has almost 700 pages with a much better index. For several years, until it began to get out of date, the HCY was an extremely valuable resource, fulfilling the role originally taken by the Computers and the Humanities Directory of Scholars Active, which had ceased to appear by the early 1970s. Preparing the HCY was a truly enormous undertaking and no further volumes appeared. By the early 1990s, the general consensus was that in future an online database would be a more effective resource. Although there have been various attempts to start something similar, nothing on a serious scale has emerged, and the picture of overall activity in terms of projects and publications is once again incomplete.
In terms of intellectual development, one activity stands out over all others during this period. In November 1987 Nancy Ide, assisted by colleagues in ACH, organized an invitational meeting at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, to examine the possibility of creating a standard encoding scheme for humanities electronic texts (Burnard 1988). There had been various previous attempts to address the problem of many different and conflicting encoding schemes, a situation that was described as “chaos” by one of the participants at the Vassar meeting. Now, the time was ripe to proceed. Scholars were increasingly tired of wasting time reformatting texts to suit particular software and had become more frustrated with the inadequacies of existing schemes. In 1986, a new encoding method had appeared on the scene. The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), published by ISO, offered a mechanism for defining a markup scheme that could handle many different types of text, could deal with metadata as well as data, and could represent complex scholarly interpretation as well as the basic structural features of documents.
Participants at the meeting agreed on a set of principles (“the Poughkeepsie Principles”) as a basis for building a new encoding scheme and entrusted the management of the project to a Steering Committee with representatives from ACH, ALLC, and the Association for Computational Linguistics (Text Encoding Initiative 2001). Subsequently, this group raised over a million dollars in North America and oversaw the development of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. The work was initially organized into four areas, each served by a committee. Output from the committees was put together by two editors into a first draft version, which was distributed for public comment in 1990. A further cycle of work involved a number of work groups that looked at specific application areas in detail. The first full version of the TEI Guidelineswas published in May 1994 and distributed in print form and electronically.
The size, scope, and influence of the TEI far exceeded what anyone at the Vassar meeting envisaged. It was the first systematic attempt to categorize and define all the features within humanities texts that might interest scholars. In all, some 400 encoding tags were specified in a structure that was easily extensible for new application areas. The specification of the tags within theGuidelines illustrates some of the issues involved, but many deeper intellectual challenges emerged as the work progressed. Work in the TEI led to an interest in markup theory and the representation of humanities knowledge as a topic in itself. The publication of the TEI Guidelines coincided with full-text digital library developments and it was natural for digital library projects, which had not previously come into contact with humanities computing, to base their work on the TEI rather than inventing a markup scheme from scratch.
Much of the TEI work was done by e-mail using private and public discussion lists, together with a fileserver where drafts of documents were posted. From the outset anyone who served on a TEI group was required to use e-mail regularly and the project became an interesting example of this method of working. However, participants soon realized that it is not easy to reach closure in an e-mail discussion and it was fortunate that funding was available for a regular series of face-to-face technical meetings to ensure that decisions were made and that the markup proposals from the different working groups were rationalized effectively.
Apart from major developments in personal computing, networking, and the TEI, the kind of humanities computing activities which were ongoing in the 1970s continued to develop, with more users and more projects. Gradually, certain application areas spun off from humanities computing and developed their own culture and dissemination routes. “Computers and writing” was one topic that disappeared fairly rapidly. More important for humanities computing was the loss of some aspects of linguistic computing, particularly corpus linguistics, to conferences and meetings of its own. Computational linguistics had always developed independently of humanities computing and, despite the efforts of Don Walker on the TEI Steering Committee, continued to be a separate discipline. Walker and Antonio Zampolli of the Institute for Computational Linguistics in Pisa worked hard to bring the two communities of humanities computing and computational linguistics together but with perhaps only limited success. Just at the time when humanities computing scholars were beginning seriously to need the kinds of tools developed in computational linguistics (morphological analysis, syntactic analysis, and lexical databases), there was an expansion of work in computational and corpus linguistics to meet the needs of the defense and speech analysis community. In spite of a landmark paper on the convergence between computational linguistics and literary and linguistic computing given by Zampolli and his colleague Nicoletta Calzolari at the first joint ACH/ALLC conference in Toronto in June 1989 (Calzolari and Zampolli 1991), there was little communication between these communities, and humanities computing did not benefit as it could have done from computational linguistics techniques.
The Era of the Internet: Early 1990s to the Present
One development far outstripped the impact of any other during the 1990s. This was the arrival of the Internet, but more especially the World Wide Web. The first graphical browser, Mosaic, appeared on the scene in 1993. Now the use of the Internet is a vital part of any academic activity. A generation of students has grown up with it and naturally looks to it as the first source of any information.
Initially, some long-term humanities computing practitioners had problems in grasping the likely impact of the Web in much the same way as Microsoft did. Those involved with the TEI felt very much that HyperText Markup Language (HTML) was a weak markup system that perpetuated all the problems with word processors and appearance-based markup. The Web was viewed with curiosity but this tended to be rather from the outside. It was a means of finding some kinds of information but not really as a serious tool for humanities research. This presented an opportunity for those institutions and organizations that were contemplating getting into humanities computing for the first time. They saw that the Web was a superb means of publication, not only for the results of their scholarly work, but also for promoting their activities among a much larger community of users. A new group of users had emerged.
Anyone can be a publisher on the Web and within a rather short time the focus of a broader base of interest in humanities computing became the delivery of scholarly material over the Internet. The advantages of this are enormous from the producer’s point of view. The format is no longer constrained by that of a printed book. Theoretically there is almost no limit on size, and hypertext links provide a useful way of dealing with annotations, etc. The publication can be built up incrementally as and when bits of it are ready for publication. It can be made available to its audience immediately and it can easily be amended and updated.
In the early to mid-1990s, many new projects were announced, some of which actually succeeded in raising money and getting started. Particularly in the area of electronic scholarly editions, there were several meetings and publications devoted to discussion about what an electronic edition might look like (Finneran 1996; Bornstein and Tinkle 1998). This was just at the time when editorial theorists were focusing on the text as a physical object, which they could represent by digital images. With the notable exception of work carried out by Peter Robinson (Robinson 1996, 1997, 1999) and possibly one or two others, few of these publications saw the light of day except as prototypes or small samples, and by the second half of the decade interest in this had waned somewhat. A good many imaginative ideas had been put forward, but once these reached the stage where theory had to be put into practice and projects were faced with the laborious work of entering and marking up text and developing software, attention began to turn elsewhere.
Debates were held on what to call these collections of electronic resources. The term “archive” was favored by many, notably the Blake Archive and other projects based in the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. “Archive” meant a collection of material where the user would normally have to choose a navigation route. “Edition” implies a good deal of scholarly added value, reflecting the views of one or more editors, which could be implemented by privileging specific navigation routes. SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), mostly in applications based on the TEI, was accepted as a way of providing the hooks on which navigation routes could be built, but significant challenges remained in designing and building an effective user interface. The emphasis was, however, very much on navigation rather than on the analysis tools and techniques that had formed the major application areas within humanities computing in the past. In the early days of the Web, the technology for delivery of SGML-encoded texts was clunky and in many ways presented a less satisfying user interface than what can be delivered with raw HTML. Nevertheless, because of the easy way of viewing them, the impact of many of these publishing projects was substantial. Many more people became familiar with the idea of technology in the humanities, but in a more limited sense of putting material onto the Web.
Although at first most of these publishing projects had been started by groups of academics, it was not long before libraries began to consider putting the content of their collections on the Internet. Several institutions in the United States set up electronic text or digital library collections for humanities primary source material, most usually using the OpenText SGML search engine (Price-Wilkin 1994). While this provides good and fast facilities for searching for words (strings), it really provides little more than a reference tool to look up words. Other projects used the DynaText SGML electronic book system for the delivery of their material. This offered a more structured search but with an interface that is not particularly intuitive.
A completely new idea for an electronic publication was developed by the Orlando Project, which is creating a History of British Women’s Writing at the Universities of Alberta and Guelph. With substantial research funding, new material in the form of short biographies of authors, histories of their writing, and general world events was created as a set of SGML documents (Brown et al. 1997). It was then possible to consider extracting portions of these documents and reconstituting them into new material, for example to generate chronologies for specific periods or topics. This project introduced the idea of a completely new form of scholarly writing and one that is fundamentally different from anything that has been done in the past. It remains to be seen whether it will really be usable on a large scale.
The Internet also made it possible to carry out collaborative projects in a way that was never possible before. The simple ability for people in different places to contribute to the same document collections was a great advance on earlier methods of working. In the Orlando Project, researchers at both institutions add to a document archive developed as a web-based document management system, which makes use of some of the SGML markup for administrative purposes. Ideas have also been floated about collaborative editing of manuscript sources where people in different locations could add layers of annotation, for example for the Peirce Project (Neuman et al. 1992) and the Codex Leningradensis (Leningrad Codex Markup Project 2000). The technical aspects of this are fairly clear. Perhaps less clear is the management of the project, who controls or vets the annotations, and how it might all be maintained for the future.
The TEI’s adoption as a model in digital library projects raised some interesting issues about the whole philosophy of the TEI, which had been designed mostly by scholars who wanted to be as flexible as possible. Any TEI tag can be redefined and tags can be added where appropriate. A rather different philosophy prevails in library and information science where standards are defined and then followed closely – this to ensure that readers can find books easily. It was a pity that there was not more input from library and information science at the time that the TEI was being created, but the TEI project was started long before the term “digital library” came into use. A few people made good contributions, but in the library community there was not the widespread range of many years’ experience of working with electronic texts as in the scholarly community. The TEI was, however, used as a model by the developers of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD), which has had a very wide impact as a standard for finding aids in archives and special collections.
An additional dimension was added to humanities electronic resources in the early 1990s, when it became possible to provide multimedia information in the form of images, audio, and video. In the early days of digital imaging there was much discussion about file formats, pixel depth, and other technical aspects of the imaging process and much less about what people can actually do with these images other than view them. There are of course many advantages in having access to images of source material over the Web, but humanities computing practitioners, having grown used to the flexibility offered by searchable text, again tended to regard imaging projects as not really their thing, unless, like the Beowulf Project (Kiernan 1991), the images could be manipulated and enhanced in some way. Interesting research has been carried out on linking images to text, down to the level of the word (Zweig 1998). When most of this can be done automatically we will be in a position to reconceptualize some aspects of manuscript studies. The potential of other forms of multimedia is now well recognized, but the use of this is only really feasible with high-speed access and the future may well lie in a gradual convergence with television.
The expansion of access to electronic resources fostered by the Web led to other areas of theoretical interest in humanities computing. Electronic resources became objects of study in themselves and were subjected to analysis by a new group of scholars, some of whom had little experience of the technical aspects of the resources. Hypertext in particular attracted a good many theorists. This helped to broaden the range of interest in, and discussion about, humanities computing but it also perhaps contributed to misapprehensions about what is actually involved in building and using such a resource. Problems with the two cultures emerged again, with one that was actually doing it and another that preferred talking about doing it.
The introduction of academic programs is another indication of the acceptance of a subject area by the larger academic community. For humanities computing this began to happen by the later 1990s although it is perhaps interesting to note that very few of these include the words “Humanities Computing” in the program title. King’s College London offers a BA Minor in Applied Computing with a number of humanities disciplines, and its new MA, based in the Centre for Humanities Computing, is also called MA in Applied Computing. McMaster University in Canada offers a BA in Multimedia. The MA that the University of Virginia is soon to start is called Digital Humanities and is under the auspices of the Media Studies Program. The University of Alberta is, as far as I am aware, the first to start a program with Humanities Computing in its title, although the University of Glasgow has had an MPhil in History and Computing for many years.
As the Internet fostered the more widespread use of computers for humanities applications, other organizations began to get involved. This led to some further attempts to define the field or at least to define a research agenda for it. The then Getty Art History Information Program published what is in my view a very interesting Research Agenda for Networked Cultural Heritage in 1996 (Bearman 1996). It contains eight papers tackling specific areas that cover topics which really bridge across digital libraries, and humanities research and teaching. Each of these areas could form a research program in its own right, but the initiative was not taken further. Meanwhile the ALLC and ACH continued to organize a conference every year with a predominance of papers on markup and other technical issues. An attempt to produce a roadmap and new directions for humanities computing for the 2002 conference in Germany produced a useful survey (Robey 2002), but little new, and would perhaps have benefited from more input from a broader community. But how to involve other communities was becoming more of a problem in an era when many more electronic resources for the humanities were being developed outside the humanities computing community.
Conclusion
If one humanities computing activity is to be highlighted above all others, in my view it must be the TEI. It represents the most significant intellectual advances that have been made in our area, and has influenced the markup community as a whole. The TEI attracted the attention of leading practitioners in the SGML community at the time when XML (Extensible Markup Language) was being developed and Michael Sperberg-McQueen, one of the TEI editors, was invited to be co-editor of the new XML markup standard. The work done on hyperlinking within the TEI formed the basis of the linking mechanisms within XML. In many ways the TEI was ahead of its time, as only with the rapid adoption of XML in the last two to three years has the need for descriptive markup been recognized by a wider community. Meanwhile, the community of markup theorists that has developed from the TEI continues to ask challenging questions on the representation of knowledge.
There are still other areas to be researched in depth. Humanities computing can contribute substantially to the growing interest in putting the cultural heritage on the Internet, not only for academic users, but also for lifelong learners and the general public. Tools and techniques developed in humanities computing will facilitate the study of this material and, as the Perseus Project is showing (Rydberg-Cox 2000), the incorporation of computational linguistics techniques can add a new dimension. Our tools and techniques can also assist research in facilitating the digitization and encoding processes, where we need to find ways of reducing the costs of data creation without loss of scholarly value or of functionality. Through the Internet, humanities computing is reaching a much wider audience, and students graduating from the new programs being offered will be in a position to work not only in academia, but also in electronic publishing, educational technologies, and multimedia development. Throughout its history, humanities computing has shown a healthy appetite for imagination and innovation while continuing to maintain high scholarly standards. Now that the Internet is such a dominant feature of everyday life, the opportunity exists for humanities computing to reach out much further than has hitherto been possible.
