It’s a little mind-boggling: Helen Agüera and Julianne Nyhan

Title

It’s a little mind-boggling: Helen Agüera and Julianne Nyhan

Subject

An oral history interview for the Hidden Histories project

Description

This interview was carried out between London and Washington via skype on the 18 September 2013, beginning at 17:05 GMT. Agüera was provided with the core questions in advance of the interview. She recalls that her first encounters with computing and Digital Humanities came about through her post in NEH, where she had joined a division that funded the preparation of research tools, reference works and scholarly editions. Thus, she administered grants to a large number of projects that worked, at a relatively early stage, at the interface of Humanities and Computing, for example, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. In this interview she recalls some of the changes that the division where she worked made to its operating procedures in order to incorporate digital projects. For example, in 1979, a section that was added to application materials asking relevant projects to provide a rationale for their proposed use of computing or word processing. She also discusses issues like sustainability that became apparent over the longer term and reflects on some of the wider trends she saw during her career. Computing was initially taken up by fields like Classics and Lexicography that needed to manage and interrogate masses of data and thus had a clear application for it. She contrasts this with the more experimental and exploratory use of computing that characterises much of DH today.

Creator

Julianne Nyhan and Helen Agüera

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

Transcription

Interviewer

Julianne Nyhan

Interviewee

Helen Agüera

Location

Skype interview

Files

Citation

Julianne Nyhan and Helen Agüera, “It’s a little mind-boggling: Helen Agüera and Julianne Nyhan,” Hidden Histories: Digital Humanities 1949 – Present, accessed March 29, 2024, https://hiddenhistories.omeka.net/items/show/45.