Nyhan, Julianne;
Flinn, Andrew;
(2016)
It's Probably the only Modestly Widely Used System with a Command Language in Latin: Manfred Thaller and Julianne Nyhan.
In:
Computation and the Humanities.
(pp. 195-208).
Springer: Cham, Switzerland.
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Abstract
This interview took place on 9 July 2014 at dh2014, the Digital Humanities Conference that was held in Lausanne, Switzerland that year. In it Thaller recalls that his earliest memory of encountering computing in the Humanities dates to c. 1973 when he attended a presentation on the use of computational techniques to map the spatial distribution of medieval coins. The difficulties of handling large, paper-based datasets was impressed upon him as he compiled some 32,000 index cards of excerpts for use in his PhD thesis. When he later encountered statistical standard software at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna he found that such software could not be beneficially applied to historical data without first transforming in some way the historical data under study (indeed, the formalisation of historical and cultural heritage data is an issue that reoccurs in this interview, much as it did in Thaller’s research). In light of his experience of the problems of using such software ‘out of the box’ to work with historical data he went on to teach himself the programming language SNOBOL. Within a few weeks he had joined a project on daily life in the middle ages and was building software to manage the descriptions of images that the project compiled and stored on punched cards. Having contributed to various other projects with computational elements, in 1978 he took up a post at the Max Planck Institut for History in Göttingen. As well as discussing the research he carried out there, for example, CLIO/kλειω a databased programming system for History with a command language in Latin, he discusses the immense freedom and access to resources that he benefitted from. He also goes on to discuss some of the later projects he worked on, including those in the wider context of digital libraries, infrastructure and cultural heritage.
| Type: | Book chapter |
|---|---|
| Title: | It's Probably the only Modestly Widely Used System with a Command Language in Latin: Manfred Thaller and Julianne Nyhan |
| ISBN-13: | 978-3-319-20169-6 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/978-3-319-20170-2_13 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20170-2_13 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Open Access This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/) which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the work’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if such material is not included in the work’s Creative Commons license and the respective action is not permitted by statutory regulation, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to duplicate, adapt or reproduce the material. |
| Keywords: | Arts & Humanities, Science & Technology, Technology, Humanities, Multidisciplinary, Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Arts & Humanities - Other Topics, Computer Science |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Information Studies |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10203859 |
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