Moderate expectations, tolerable disappointments

Title

Moderate expectations, tolerable disappointments

Description

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.

Creator

Julianne Nyhan and respective interviewees

Source

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

Date

2016

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 be
edited.
See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/
3.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode.

Format

MP3

Language

English

Type

Oral History interview

Coverage

The history of Digital Humanities c. 1949- 2016

Transcription

Interviewer

Julianne Nyhan

Interviewee

Claus Huitfeldt

Location

Lausanne, Switzerland

Files

Citation

Julianne Nyhan and respective interviewees, “Moderate expectations, tolerable disappointments,” Hidden Histories: Digital Humanities 1949 – Present, accessed March 28, 2024, https://hiddenhistories.omeka.net/items/show/42.