7. Dr Susan Schreibman
Trinity Long Room Hub Associate Professor in Digital Humanities
Three phases of the s Index Thomisticus:
The first one lasted less than 10 years. I began, in 1949, with only electro-countable
machines with punched cards. My goal was to have a file of 13 million of these
cards, one for each word, with a context of 12 lines stamped on the back. The file
would have been 90 meters long, 1.20 m in height, 1 m in depth, and would have
weighed 500 tonnes.
In His mercy, around 1955, God led men to invent magnetic tapes. The first were the
steel ones by Remington, closely followed by the plastic ones of IBM. Until 1980, I
was working on 1,800 tapes, each one 2,400 feet long, and their combined length
was 1,500 km, the distance from Paris to Lisbon, or from Milan to Palermo. I used
all the generations of the dinosaur computers of IBM at that time. I finished in
1980 (before personal computers came in) with 20 final and conclusive tapes, and
with these and the automatic photocompositor of IBM, I prepared for offset the
20 million lines which filled the 65,000 pages of the 56 volumes in encyclopedia
format which make up the Index Thomisticus on paper.
The third phase began in 1987 with the preparations to transfer the data onto CD-
ROM. The first edition came out in 1992, and now we are on the threshold of the
third. The work now consists of 1.36 GB of data, compressed with the Huffman
method, on one single disk.
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/
14. Dr Susan Schreibman
Trinity Long Room Hub Associate Professor in Digital Humanities
I’ve had the pleasure of talking with lots and lots
of people in Digital Humanities from among a
wide range of disciplines . . . . since the mid-
nineties. I’ve discovered that there are lots of
things that distinguish an historian from, say, a
literary critic or a philosopher, and there are a
lot of differences between 1995 and 2011. But
to me, there’s always been a profound — and
profoundly exciting and enabling —
commonality to everyone who finds their way to
dh. And that commonality, I think, involves
moving from reading and critiquing to building
and making.
25. Dr Susan Schreibman
Trinity Long Room Hub Associate Professor in Digital Humanities
D. F. McKenzie
The Sociology of Texts
• The problem is, I think, that the moment we
are required to explain signs in a book, as
distinct from describing or copying them, they
assume a symbolic status. If a medium in any
sense effects a message, then bibliography
cannot exclude from its own proper concerns
the relation between form, function, and
symbolic meaning. If textual bibliography
were merely iconic, it could produce only
facsimiles of different versions.
27. Dr Susan Schreibman
Trinity Long Room Hub Associate Professor in Digital Humanities
They now move front and center inasmuch
as the advent of Digital Humanities implies a
reinterpretation of the humanities as a
generative enterprise: one in which students
and faculty alike are making things as they
study and perform research, generating not
just texts (in the form of analysis,
commentary, narration, critique) but also
images, interactions,
cross-media corpora, software, and
platforms.
28. Dr Susan Schreibman
Trinity Long Room Hub Associate Professor in Digital Humanities
Macroanalysis
Digital Methods & Literary History
Macroeconomics . . . is about the study of the
entire economy. It tends toward enumeration
and quantification and is in this sense similar to
bibliographic studies, biographical studies,
literary history, philology, and the enumerative,
quantitative analysis of text that is the
foundation of computing in the humanities. . . .
29. Dr Susan Schreibman
Trinity Long Room Hub Associate Professor in Digital Humanities
While there is sustained interest in the micro-
level, individual occurrences of some feature or
word, these individual occurrences (of "love," for
example) are either temporarily or permanently
deemphasized in favor of a focus on the larger
system, the overall frequencies of "love" as a
noun verses "love" as a verb. Indeed, the very
object of analysis shifts from looking at the
individual occurrences of a feature in context to
looking at the trends and patterns of that feature
over an entire corpus. It is here that one makes
the move from a study of words in context to a
study of words as data.
46. Dr Susan Schreibman
Trinity Long Room Hub Associate Professor in Digital Humanities
1. De Civitate Hominum
Holy God makes no reply
Yet.
1. Anglo-Irish
Yet how should Theopompus not be tired
By sceptical young Egyptians?
1. Dechtire
And yet
There is no truth but you
1. Exile
I knew if you had died that I should grieve
Yet I found my heart wishing you were dead.
5. Aodh Ruadh O Domhnaill
Yet when
Unhurried ‑‑
Not as at home
Where heroes, hanged, are buried
With non‑commissioned officers' bored maledictions
Quickly in the gaol yard ‑‑
52. Dr Susan Schreibman
Trinity Long Room Hub Associate Professor in Digital Humanities
Looked at from the representational side, a
data structure of--to invoke the ghost of John
Stuart Mill--a chair is just an image… But
looked at from the operational side, that same
encoded chair becomes a set of computational
algorithms that can instruct other digital bodies
below a certain virtual weight to conform to it
and stay aloft in space. The digital chair can
creak or break. It can possess tensile strength,
texture, pliancy, abrasion, any affordance its
joiner might care to give it. Set free to execute,
it becomes an instance of its own description
58. Dr Susan Schreibman
Trinity Long Room Hub Associate Professor in Digital Humanities
The capacity with digital media to create
enhanced forms of curation brings humanistic
values into play in ways that were difficult to
achieve in traditional museum or library
settings. Rather than being viewed as
autonomous or self-evident, artifacts can be
seen being shaped by and
shaping complex networks of influence,
production, dissemination, and reception,
animated by multilayered debates and
historical forces.
