Lit&Ling 17/1 103-125 FINAL 23/7/02 3:41 pm Page 103 Humanities Computing: Essential Problems, Experimental Practice1 Willard McCarty King’s College London, London, UK For John Burrows, experimenter Abstract The application of computing to the disciplines of the humanities has two principal outcomes: useful results for the field of application and failures com- pletely to demonstrate what is known. These failures, an inevitable feature of modelling, point to the key question for humanities computing, how we know what we know, and so to the beginning of its own scholarly enquiry. This, I argue, proceeds along three branches, the algorithmic, the metatextual, and the representational. Examining the first of these here I argue for research toward an open-ended, interoperable set of primitives based on previous work in the field and designed for the emerging digital library environment. To set the stage for their further development I argue that the field as a whole does not wait on a theoretical formulation of what humanists do, rather should look to the tradition of experimental knowledge-making as this has been illuminated in recent years by historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science. Correspondence: Willard McCarty, 1 Introduction Centre for Computing in the Although computing has been applied to research in the arts and letters Humanities, King’s College London, 2 Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK for more than 50 years, systematic effort to understand the consequences E-mail: and implications from an interdisciplinary perspective is quite recent.
[email protected] Especially within the last decade, the growth of academic centres for humanities computing in the UK, Scandinavia, continental Europe, 1 This paper was first given at North America, and Australia has stimulated and supported inter- the humanities computing national debate on the nature, function and institutional role of the new seminar of the Computer scholarly field.3 Science and English Initiative, The following is a contribution to that debate.