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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 656.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 08:27:26 +0000
From: Elisabeth Burr <elisabeth.burr@uni-bremen.de>
Subject: Re: 17.653 what were they (you) thinking?
Dear Willard,
good question. I remember quite well what attracted me to the computer:
dissatisfaction with linguistic research. We had so many models of language
(system / competence / variation, you name it) but knew nothing about use.
To find out more I had done a "corpus"-based research into the usage of ten-
ses of French and Spanish newspapers. I put corpus between quotation marks
because my corpus consisted in printed editions, my concordance was made up
of phrases copied onto punch cards (do you remember the hand held "computers"
with a long needle to go through the holes?) and my statistics were based
on ex-
haustive but manually conducted counts. The tediousness, the fear of
imprecision,
the none repeatability and, perhaps most important of all, the
impossibility to ask
questions which only turned up once your close look at the material had allowed
for more insight, was one thing I was very unhappy about.
The other was the vagueness of research results as they appeared in scholarly
publications and the impossibility to control them. In those days (I think
they have
not ended yet completely) you could read that at the basis of the research
there
were 100s of newspaper pages, all the editions of a certain year or even of
several
years. Very impressive, also frightening (How could one human count all the
occur-
rencies of a phenomenon in all this material in a relatively short time?).
And it was
not good enough.
Elisabeth
At 11:25 17.02.2004, Willard McCarty wrote:
>What did philologists, historians, musicologists, literary critics,
>linguists and all the rest -- all these and more turned up in the pages of
>the early issues of CHum -- see in the computer that attracted them? What
>was the nature of the ideational baggage they brought that motivated them
>and that shaped the early applications of the tool, indeed defined the tool
>for them? How did those of us who are old enough, and were flogging the use
>of computers at the time, appeal to the curious masses? What did we
>observe at the time?
>
>Yours,
>WM
>
>
>
>
>Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
>Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
>7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
>www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
PD Dr. Elisabeth Burr
Fachbereich 10 - GW 2 B 3430
Frankoromanistik und Italoromanistik
Sprachwissenschaft
Universität Bremen
Bibliothekstraße
28359 Bremen
Tel. +49 421 218-8236
elisabeth.burr@uni-bremen.de
http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/homepages/burr.htm
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