Digital Humanities Overview
From digitalhumanities
[edit] What are the humanities?
"The humanities are those academic disciplines which study the human condition using methods that are largely analytic, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences. Conventionally the humanities include the classics, languages, literature, music, philosophy, history, religion, and the visual and performing arts. Additional subjects sometimes included in the humanities are anthropology, area studies, communications and cultural studies, although these are often regarded as social sciences." from Wikipedia
Work in the humanities has historically incorporated whatever technology was available at the time. The advent of the computer age, however, has created entirely new forms and venues of expression and provided new ways to “study the human condition.” The digital humanities are the field where computers and the humanities intersect. Internet art, e-poetry, musician's websites, and internet ethnography are all examples of digital humanities.
Computers have impacted the humanities in several different ways. Digitization of materials makes them more widely accessible, but it can be costly. Experiencing digitized materials is convenient, but scholars must rely on faithful reproduction of originals and hope that nothing relevant is omitted.
Materials created digitally, such as hypertext and internet art, have the advantage of being created for use with computers. There is minimal risk of losing content or meaning when experiencing digital materials firsthand. Easy accessibility also means that one may experience digital art and poetry as the author or artist intended.
The shift toward digitization of the humanities has been gradual and inevitable as convenience and convention dictate that more and more of our academic work is computer-assisted. The study of digital humanities begins with awareness of the impact that computers have had in traditional humanities disciplines.
[edit] Humanities Computing Timeline
[edit] Further Reading
History of the internet, good explanation of internet vs WWW, from Center for Scientific Computing
Internet Public Library history of computers and the internet
History of Computing Information with a focus on military roots
What are considered humanities?
National Endowment for the Humanities
Dan Cohen's digital humanities blog
Alliance of Digital Humanities
Companion to Digital Humanities
Wikipedia on Digital Humanities
[edit] A Digital Humanities Timeline
- Early Origins - 1959
- 1960
- 1970
- 1980
- 1990 - 92
- 1993
- 1994 - 97
- 1998 - 99
- 2000 - Present
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[edit] 1st Mechanical Digital computer 1837
[edit] John Walker: The Analytical Engine
- Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine
- Analytical Engine, a mechanical digital computer which, viewed with the benefit of a century and a half's hindsight, anticipated virtually every aspect of present-day computers.
- It was only after the first electromechanical and later, electronic computers had been built in the twentieth century, that designers of those machines discovered the extent to which Babbage had anticipated almost every aspect of their work.
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[edit] Humanities Computing Began 1949
A Companion to Digital Humanities
- In 1949, an Italian Jesuit priest, Father Roberto Busa, began what even to this day is a monumental task: to make an index verborum of all the words in the works of St Thomas Aquinas and related authors, totaling some 11 million words of medieval Latin. Father Busa imagined that a machine might be able to help him, and, having heard of computers, went to visit Thomas J. Watson at IBM in the United States in search of support (Busa 1980). Some assistance was forthcoming and Busa began his work. The entire texts were gradually transferred to punched cards and a concordance program written for the project. The intention was to produce printed volumes, of which the first was published in 1974 (Busa 1974).
- Cited from: A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
from 'A Companion to Digital Humanities,' ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004 -
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[edit] 1st Mechanical Analog computer100-150 BC
[edit] Wikipedia: Analog computer
- The Antikythera mechanism is the earliest known mechanical analog computer. It was designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in 1901 in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, and has been dated to about 100-150 BC. The findings suggest that Greek technology was far more advanced than previously thought. No other civilisation is known to have created anything as complicated for over thousand years.
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[edit] Internet Starts 1969
[edit] Wikipedia: History of the Internet
- After much work, the first node went live at UCLA on October 29, 1969 on what would be called the ARPANET, one of the "eve" networks of today's Internet.
source - This grew into the NSFNet backbone, established in 1986, and intended to connect and provide access to a number of supercomputing centers established by the NSF.
- The first ARPANet connection outside the US was established to NORSAR in Norway in 1973, just ahead of the connection to Great Britain. These links were all converted to TCP/IP in 1982, at the same time as the rest of the Arpanet.
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- After much work, the first node went live at UCLA on October 29, 1969 on what would be called the ARPANET, one of the "eve" networks of today's Internet.
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[edit] Start of Text Based Network Communications 1965
[edit] Wikipedia: History of the Internet
- Email and Usenet—The growth of the text forum
E-mail is often called the killer application of the Internet. However, it actually predates the Internet and was a crucial tool in creating it. E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Although the history is unclear, among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS.
The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the evolution of e-mail. There is one report [21] indicating experimental inter-system e-mail transfers on it shortly after ARPANET's creation. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson created what was to become the standard Internet e-mail address format, using the @ sign to separate user names from host names.
A number of protocols were developed to deliver e-mail among groups of time-sharing computers over alternative transmission systems, such as UUCP and IBM's VNET e-mail system. E-mail could be passed this way between a number of networks, including ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNet, as well as to hosts connected directly to other sites via UUCP.
In addition, UUCP allowed the publication of text files that could be read by many others. The News software developed by Steve Daniel and Tom Truscott in 1979 was used to distribute news and bulletin board-like messages. This quickly grew into discussion groups, known as newsgroups, on a wide range of topics. On ARPANET and NSFNet similar discussion groups would form via mailing lists, discussing both technical issues and more culturally focused topics (such as science fiction, discussed on the sflovers mailing list). - Electronic mail (abbreviated "e-mail" or, often, "email") is a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems.
source
- Email and Usenet—The growth of the text forum
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[edit] "Computers and the Humanities" began publication 1966
[edit] A Companion to Digital Humanities
- Computers and the Humanities began publication in 1966 under the editorship of Joseph Raben. With characteristic energy, Raben nurtured the new journal and during its first years, at least until the regular series of conferences and associations that developed from them got going, it became the main vehicle for dissemination of information about humanities computing. Raben recognized the need just to know what is going on and the journal's Directory of Scholars Active was the first point of call for people who were thinking about starting a project.
- Other informal newsletters also served specific communities, notably Calculi for computers and classics, edited by Stephen Waite.
from A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
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[edit] 1st Centers dedicated to the use of computers in the Humanities 1960s
[edit] A Companion to Digital Humanities
- The 1960s saw the establishment of some centers dedicated to the use of computers in the humanities.
- Wisbey founded the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing in Cambridge in 1963 as support for his work with Early Middle High German Texts.
- In Tübingen, Wilhelm Ott established a group which began to develop the suite of programs for text analysis, particularly for the production of critical editions. The TuStep software modules are in use to this day and set very high standards of scholarship in dealing with all phases from data entry and collation to the production of complex print volumes.
- Cited
from: A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
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[edit] Usenet 1979
[edit] Wikipedia: Usenet
- Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users read and post e-mail-like messages (called "articles") to a number of distributed newsgroups, categories that resemble bulletin board systems in most respects. The medium is distributed among a large number of servers, which store and forward messages to one another. Individual users download and post messages to a single server, usually operated by their ISP or university, and the servers exchange the messages between each other. Usenet has been described as system of online collaboration and interaction similar to today's Web 2.0.
- Usenet is one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It was established in 1980, following experiments from the previous year, over a decade before the World Wide Web was introduced and the general public got access to the Internet.
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[edit] 1st Word Processor 1979
[edit] WordStar - The First Word Processor
- Released in 1979 by Micropro International, WordStar was the first commercially successful word processing software program produced for microcomputers and the best selling software program of the early eighties.
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[edit] 1st Home Computer 1977
[edit] Wikipedia: Home Computer
- The home computer is a consumer-friendly word for the second generation of desktop computers, entering the market in 1977 and becoming common during the 1980s. They are also known as personal computers.
- Introduced at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1977, the Apple II was one of the very first and most successful personal computers.
Wikipedia: Apple II
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[edit] "Humanist" was born 1987
[edit] A Companion to Digital Humanities
- 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.
- from 'A Companion to Digital Humanities,' ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
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[edit] GIF file format introduced 1987
[edit] Wikipedia: GIF
- CompuServe introduced the GIF format in 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas.
- GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is an 8-bit-per-pixel bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.
The format uses a palette of up to 256 distinct colors from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of 256 colors for each frame. The color limitation makes the GIF format unsuitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with continuous color, but it is well-suited for more simple images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.
GIF images are compressed using the LZW lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality. This compression technique was patented in 1985. The controversy over the patent licensing agreement between the patent proprietor, Unisys, and CompuServe in 1994 led to the development of the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) standard.
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[edit] HyperCard Released1987
[edit] Wikipedia: Hypercard
- HyperCard was originally released with System Software 6 in 1987
- HyperCard was an application program from Apple Computer that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web.
- 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.
from 'A Companion to Digital Humanities,' ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
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[edit] MacPaint arrives 1984
[edit] Evolution
- In early 1983, soon after the Lisa was announced at the 1983 annual shareholders meeting, Bill switched from working on Lisa system software to writing a killer graphics application for the Macintosh. Bill Atkinson began by dusting off his old SketchPad code, and getting it running on the Mac as MacSketch. Around April 1983, Bill changed the name of the program from MacSketch to MacPaint. MacPaint was essentially finished by October 1983.
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[edit] The First Macintosh January 24, 1984
[edit] Wikipedia: Apple Macintosh
- The Macintosh, or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple. Named after the McIntosh variety of apple, the original Macintosh was released on January 24, 1984. It was one of the first commercially successful personal computers to use a graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse instead of the then-standard command line interface.
- 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.
from 'A Companion to Digital Humanities,' ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. - During the Superbowl in 1984 the "Why 1984 won't be like 1984" Commercial ran to introduce the Macintosh
1984 Commercial introducing the Macintosh - Why 1984 won't be like 1984</a>
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[edit] Birth of the World Wide Web Concept 1980
[edit] Wikipedia: World wide web-History
- In 1980, the Englishman Tim Berners-Lee and Jedda Smith, independent contractors at CERN, built ENQUIRE, as a personal database of people and software models, but also as a way to play with hypertext; each new page of information in ENQUIRE had to be linked to an existing page.
In 1983 the standardization of network protocols to TCP/IP helped lay the foundations for the later growth of the World Wide Web.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the first Web browser, WorldWideWeb, (which was also a Web editor), the first Web server (info.cern.ch), and the first Web pages that described the project itself.
- In 1980, the Englishman Tim Berners-Lee and Jedda Smith, independent contractors at CERN, built ENQUIRE, as a personal database of people and software models, but also as a way to play with hypertext; each new page of information in ENQUIRE had to be linked to an existing page.
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[edit] The Internet Reaches Maturity 1992
- The number of networks exceeds 7,500 and the number of computers connected passes 1,000,000.
- The MBONE for the first time carries audio and video.
- The challenge to the telephone network’s dominance as the basis for communicating between people is seen for the first time; the Internet is no longer just for machines to talk to each other.
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[edit] Start of World Wide Web 1991
[edit] Wikipedia: History of the World Wide Web
- The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, as e-mail does. The history of the Internet dates back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.
The origins of the actual World Wide Web can be traced back to 1980 however it is essentially a merger of IBM's Generalized Markup Language with a very limited implementation of Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu hypertext designs both of which predate HTML and the World Wide Web by decades. Since it's implementation in the 1990s as an academic system for sharing papers, the World Wide Web has evolved far beyond what its creators imagined. - On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.
The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere. [...] The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, a,brnd documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!" —from Tim Berners-Lee's first message - When the World Wide Web gained popularity, GIF became one of the two image formats commonly used on Web sites, the other being the black and white XBM.[citation needed] JPEG came later with the Mosaic browser.
Wikipedia: GIF
- The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, as e-mail does. The history of the Internet dates back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.
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[edit] WWW Virtual Library (VL) is the oldest catalogue of the Web 1991
[edit] About the Virtual Library
- The WWW Virtual Library (VL) is the oldest catalogue of the Web, started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of HTML and of the Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva. Unlike commercial catalogues, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert; even though it isn't the biggest index of the Web, the VL pages are widely recognised as being amongst the highest-quality guides to particular sections of the Web.
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[edit] First version of Hypertext 1990
[edit] W3C History
- In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (see the original proposal below). He coined the term "World Wide Web," wrote the first World Wide Web server, "httpd," and the first client program (a browser and editor), "WorldWideWeb," in October 1990.
- He wrote the first version of the "HyperText Markup Language" (HTML), the document formatting language with the capability for hypertext links that became the primary publishing format for the Web. His initial specifications for URIs, HTTP, and HTML were refined and discussed in larger circles as Web technology spread.
- The original proposal can be found at
here
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[edit] First live internet music performance 1993
[edit] Timeline of computing 1990-forward
- Severe Flat Tire made the first live music performance on the Internet, using MBone technology.
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[edit] First commercial ISP's 1993
[edit] Computer History 1993
- Commercial providers were allowed to sell internet connections to individuals. Its use exploded, especially with the new interface provided by the World-Wide Web (see 1989) and NCSA Mosaic.
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[edit] First web magazine starts 1993
[edit] About the Virtual Library
- First web magazine, The Virtual Journal, is published but fails commercially.
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[edit] Mosaic web browser is released 1993
[edit] source
- The Mosaic web browser is released. Mosaic was the first commercial software that allowed graphical access to content on the internet. Designed by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputer Applications, Mosaic was originally designed for a Unix system running X-windows. By 1994, Mosaic was available for several other operating systems such as the Mac OS, Windows and AmigaOS.
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[edit] Microsoft grows and Amazon debuts 1997
[edit] Timeline of computing 1990-forward
- After 18 months of losses Apple Computer was in serious financial trouble. Microsoft invested in Apple, buying 100,000 non-voting shares worth $150 million — a decision not approved of by many Apple owners. One of the conditions was that Apple was to drop the long running court case — attempting to sue Microsoft for copying the look and feel of their operating system when designing Windows.
- Internet Explorer 4.0 was released.
- Amazon.com has its IPO, signaling the start of the internet commerce bubble.
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[edit] First W3C Recommendation published October 1, 1996
[edit] W3C: PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
- PNG is an extensible file format for the lossless, portable, well-compressed storage of raster images. PNG provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF. Indexed-color, grayscale, and truecolor images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel for transparency. Sample depths range from 1 to 16 bits per component (up to 48bit images for RGB, or 64bit for RGBA).
- The PNG specification was first issued as a W3C Recommendation on 1st October, 1996 (press release) and updated to a second edition incorporating all errata on 10 November 2003. This edition is also an ISO standard, ISO/IEC 15948:2003 (E). This means it is a mature document that is considered to contribute towards realising the full potential of the Web. Viewers for PNG are available on many platforms; there are an increasing number of content creation tools available; and thus modern browsers implement support for it also.
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[edit] Web Browser and E-Mail Advancements 1996
[edit] source
- Netscape Navigator 2.0 released. First browser to support JavaScript.
- Hotmail, founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, is commercially launched on Independence Day in the United States, symbolically representing freedom from Internet service providers. (Hotmail is now owned and operated by Microsoft.)
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[edit] Apple releases the PowerMac G4 1999
[edit] source
- Apple releases the PowerMac G4. It's powered by the PowerPC G4 chip from Motorola. Available in 400 MHz, 450 MHz and 500 MHz versions, Apple claimed it to be the first personal computer to be capable of over one billion floating-point operations per second.
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[edit] Apple announces the iMac 1998
[edit] source
- Apple announces the iMac, an All-in-One with integral 15 inch (381 mm) multiscan monitor, 24x CDROM, 2x available USB ports, 56 kbit/s modem, 2 stereo speakers, and Ethernet but no floppy drive. It was encased in translucent Bondi Blue and Ice plastic.
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[edit] Amazon turns profit 2003
- Amazon.com finally turns a profit, becoming possibly the only Seattle-based internet retailer to survive the .com bust!
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[edit] Cashing in on Technology 2000
[edit] source
- British Telecom (BT) claim the rights to hyperlinks on the basis of a US patent granted in 1989. Similar patents in the rest of the world have now expired. Their claim is widely believed to be absurd since Ted Nelson wrote about hyperlinks in 1965, and this is where Tim Berners Lee says he got the ideas for the World Wide Web from. This is just another in the line of similar incredible cases — for example amazon.com's claim to have patented '1-click ordering'.
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[edit] Further Reading
History of the internet, good explanation of internet vs WWW, from Center for Scientific Computing
