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

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

An oral history interview for the Hidden Histories project

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.

Julianne Nyhan and Helen Agüera

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

2016

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.
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• no derivative works: the material is to be allocated in its original form and may not be
edited.
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MP3

English

Oral History

Full text: in Chapter 10 of Computation and the Humanities

Julianne Nyhan

Helen Agüera

Skype interview