Digital Humanities and Research Infrastructures: origins, interconnections and humanities perspectives

The origin of the field now known as Digital Humanities (DH) is usually traced back to 1949, when Fr Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit
priest, began work on an index variorum of some 11 million words of medieval Latin in the works of St Thomas Aquinas and related authors (Hockey 2004).  McCarty has argued "For computing to be of the humanities as well as in them, we must get beyond catalogues, chronologies, and heroic firsts to a genuine history. There are none yet." (McCarty 2008: 255). The  Hidden Histories project has aimed to make a contribution to the writing of such a history by investigating the role of Oral History as a methodology for gathering information about the social, cultural and intellectual conditions that gave rise to the uptake of computing in the Humanities. In this presentation I will give an overview of Oral History and reflect on its appropriateness as a methodology given the marked difficulties of writing a history of Digital Humanities and the contested nature ofmemory.

Hockey, Susan (2004): "The History of Humanities Computing". In Schreibman, S. et al. (eds.), A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/

McCarty, W. (2008). "Whats going on?", Literary and Linguistic Computing, 23 (3): 253-261.