Moderate expectations, tolerable disappointments

Has Interviewer

Julianne Nyhan

Has Interviewee

Claus Huitfeldt

Date

2016

Location

Lausanne, Switzerland

Language

English

Part of Series

Computation and the Humanities interviews

fileFormat

mp3

Title

Moderate expectations, tolerable disappointments

Interview Summary

This interview was conducted on 11 July at the 2014 Digital Humanities Conference, Lausanne, Switzerland. Huitfeldt recounts that he first encountered computing at the beginning of the 1980s via the Institute of Continental Shelf Research when he was a philosophy student at the University of Trondheim. However, it was in connection with a Humanities project on the writings of Wittgenstein that he learned to programme. When that project closed he worked as a computing consultant in the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities and in 1990 he established a new project called the 'Wittgenstein Archives', which aimed to prepare and publish a machine-readable version of Wittgenstein's Nachlass. Here he discusses the context in which he began working on the encoding scheme (A Multi-Element Code System (MECS)) that he developed for that project. In addition to discussing matters like the trajectory of DH research and his early encounters with the conference community he also discusses some of the fundamental issues that interest him like the role of technology in relation to the written word and the lack of engagement of the Philosophy community with such questions. Ultimately he concludes that he does not view DH as a discipline, but rather as a reconfiguration of the academic landscape as a result of the convergence of tools and methods within and between the humanities and other disciplines.

Subject

N/A

Processed Derivative Material

Full text: in Chapter 15 of Computation and the Humanities

Rights

Interview audio files are made available under a creative commons licence “by-nc-nd” with the following characteristics:• by: the content must be attributed to me and the interviewer.• non-commercial: commercial use of the content is not allowed.• no derivative works: the material is to be allocated in its original form and may not beedited.See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/3.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode.

Related Resource

Julianne Nyhan and Andrew Flinn 2016. Computation and the Humanities: towards an oral history of Digital Humanities. Springer.

Bibliographic Citation

Julianne Nyhan and respective interviewees, “Moderate expectations, tolerable disappointments,”Hidden Histories: Digital Humanities 1949 - Present, accessed October 21, 2024, https://hiddenhistories.net/s/medorah/item/77.

Creator

Julianne Nyhan and respective interviewees

Type

Oral History interview

identifier

N/A