Nyhan, J;
Flinn, A;
(2016)
hic Rhodus, hic salta: Tito Orlandi and Julianne Nyhan.
In: Orlandi, Tito and Nyhan, Julianne, (eds.)
Computation and the Humanities.
(pp. 75-86).
Springer International Publishing: Cham, Switzerland.
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Abstract
This interview was carried out in Rome, Italy on 17 October 2014 at about 09:00. Orlandi recounts that his earliest memory of a computer dates to the 1950s when he saw an IBM machine in the window of an IBM shop in Milan. Around 1960, together with his PhD supervisor Ignazio Cazzaniga, he engaged in some brief exploratory work to see what role punched card technology might play in the making of a critical edition of Augustine’s City of God. His sustained take up of computing in the 1970s arose from the practical problem of managing the wealth of information that he had amassed about Coptic manuscripts. He was aware from an early stage of the possible limitations of computational approaches: his early encounters with the work of Silvio Ceccato left him wary of approaches to cybernetics. He identifies the work of the applied mathematician Luigi Cerofolini who taught him UNIX, among other things, as having been central to his understanding of methodological issues. In relation to theory, he emphasises the impact that understanding Turing’s Universal Computing Machine made on him. Indeed, his work on the significance of modelling to Humanities Computing (see, for example, the discussion in Orlandi, T. (n.d.)) preceded that of McCarty (2005). In addition to questioning inherited beliefs about the origins of DH, particularly in regard to the role of Fr Roberto Busa S.J., in this interview Orlandi argues that DH has not given sufficient attention to the fundamentals of computing theory.
| Type: | Book chapter |
|---|---|
| Title: | hic Rhodus, hic salta: Tito Orlandi and Julianne Nyhan |
| ISBN-13: | 9783319201696 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/978-3-319-20170-2_5 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20170-2_5 |
| 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: | Humanities Computing, Cerofolini, Punch Cards, British National Corpus (BNC), Archaeological Constructs |
| 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/10203866 |
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