Informaticacurs 1

Anca Dinu

LMA, anul I, semestrul I, Universitatea din Bucuresti, 2019

Administrative matters

• presence• course and laboratory 4• final practical exam - laptops in Shakespeare and

computers in lab 4• final grade = average between 2 practical subjects exam

and the project• no project - average with grade 4 for the project

Administrative matters

• Course material at:– my official page Anca Dinu at

http://limbimoderne.lls.unibuc.ro/catedra/– class presentations, books, articles and info

Administrative matters

• Opportunity after graduation:– DH master programme at University of Bucharest, launched in 2019;

– Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program of University of Bucharest, launched in 2019

History of Computer Science

History of CS

• 2700-2300 - the abacus, for trading partners (still counting cows and amphorae by hand).

• 87 B.C - the Greek Antikythera mechanism, the oldest known complex computing device (gear-operated, found in a shipwreck in the Aegean Sea early in the 20th century, though its significance wasn’t realized until 2006); calculates astronomical positions and help them navigate through the seas.

History of CS

• 1843 - English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm,

• 1956 - the modern computing-machine era began with Alan Turing’s conception of the Turing Machine, and three Bell Labs scientists invention of the transistor, which made modern-style computing possible.

• For decades, computing technology was exclusive to the government and the military and later, also to the academic institutions.

History of CS

• Steve Wozniak built the circuit board for Apple-1, making home computing practicable.

• Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web.• Marc Andreessen built the first browser Mosaic, renamed

Netscape.• Hitory of programming languages - too much for you.

Computer Science for Humanists

• We will not learn programming• We will learn how to use tools to deal with and analyse

data coming from Humanities• Fancy term for this: Digital Humanities

What is Digital Humanities?

• No commonly accepted definition;• Note the proper name writing with capital letters!• A hybrid between the humanities and CS? Did humanists

suddenly decided to study physics?• The key word here is still ‘humanities’, with an emphasis

on the fact that the world is becoming digital.• The other word, ‘digital ’ refers to the numerical

representation of objects and quantification.

History of Humanities

• The origins of humanism and the humanities, as seen by historian Paul Oscar Kris teller, appear first in the intellectual culture of late medieval Italy and France.

• The humanism consists of one set of the standard seven liberal arts of the Middle Ages – the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic) plus the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy).

History of Humanities

• Humanism sharply contrasted the practical education of the middle ages Italian business classes (literacy, basic business math, some literature, popular religion, public speaking, legislation,legal documents and private contracts and accounts).

• This was the equivalent of our modern career-oriented, practical college education, which has displaced traditional humanities eduction over the past generation.

History of Humanities

• By the early fourteenth century, however, beginning in the northern and central Italy, a different curriculum began to be emphasized, especially under the influence of Francesco Petrarch, who rejected the contemporary urban professional classes – the doctors, lawyers, etc.

• He was the first to formulate our idea of the period between the fall of Rome and his own time as the “middle ages,” a period of decline and darkness.

• He consciously rediscover and imitate the works and the spirit of his ancient Roman models, especially Cicero.

History of Humanities

• He soon gained a brilliant circle of followers and admirers, including Cola di Rienzo, Giovanni Boccaccio, Coluccio Salutati and, in a later generation, Leonardo Bruni - the first humanists.

• They focused on grammar and rhetoric (philology), poetry, history and moral philosophy, rejecting the logic and dialectic philosophy of the medieval Scholastics.

• While their focus lay in language, they valued the result of proper understanding: public moral action and ethical life.

History of Humanities

• By the death of Leonardo Bruni in 1444, this group of scholars had gained immense influence in their city-states, in the new Renaissance states and princely courts, in the Vatican and then in the universities.

• Within the university their curriculum became known as studia humanitatis.

• The modern word humanism itself derives only from 1808, coined by the German philosopher Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer as “Humanismus.”

History of DH - Beginnings: 1949 to 1970s

• 1949 - Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit and theologian, approached Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM, sought help in indexing the works of Thomas Aquinas (totalling some 11 million words of medieval Latin).

• Busa wanted to produce a "lemma" concordance list where words are listed under their dictionary headings, not under their simple forms.

History of DH - Beginnings: 1949 to 1970s

• In the process, Busa and Watson demonstrated that the storage, retrieval and search-and-sort functions of the computer were compelling tools.

History of DH - Beginnings: 1949 to 1970s

• First quantitative approaches to style and authorship studies were did by hand (1901-1958).

• Augustus de Morgan in a letter written in 1851 proposed a quant i ta t ive s tudy o f vocabulary as a means o f investigating the authorship of the Pauline Epistles.

• T. C. Mendenhall, at the end of the nineteenth century, described his counting machine: two ladies computed the number of words of two letters, three, and so on in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon in an attempt to determine who wrote Shakespeare' texts (Mendenhall 1901).

History of DH - Beginnings: 1949 to 1970s

• But the advent of computers made it possible to record word frequencies in much greater numbers and much more accurately than any human being can.

• In 1963, a Scottish clergyman, Andrew Morton, published an article in a British newspaper claiming that, according to the computer, St Paul only wrote four of his epistles.

• Morton based his claim on word counts of common words in the Greek text, plus some elementary statistics.

History of DH - Beginnings: 1949 to 1970s

• The most inf luent ia l computer-based authorship investigation dates back in 1964. This was the study by Mosteller and Wallace of the Federalist Papers in an attempt to identify the authorship of the twelve disputed.

• They were able to show that Madison was very likely to have been the author of the disputed papers. Their conclusions generally have been accepted, to the extent that the Federalist Papers have been used as a test for new methods of authorship discrimination.

History of DH - Beginnings: 1949 to 1970s

• Difficult times with emerging hardware and software...• Logistic problems with punched cards, representation

problems with characters (lower vs. upper-case, diacritics) - solved more or less today by Unicode, tagging citation problems - solved today by XML and TEI standards, etc.

• The key problems identified back then are still with us, notably the need to look at "words" beyond the level of the graphic string, ambiguity, to deal effectively with variant spellings, multiple manuscripts, and lemmatization.

History of DH - Consolidation: 1970s to 1980s

• Most important journal: Computers and the Humanities • A regular series of conferences. • The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing was

founded at a meeting in King's College London in 1973, producing the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing.

• By the mid-1970s, another series of conferences began in North America, called the International Conference on Computing in the Humanities (ICCH)

History of DH - New Developments: 1980s to 1990s

• Significant developments in humanities computing because of:– the personal computer, – new technologies/tools/standards, – electronic mail (networking).

History of DH - New Developments: 1980s to 1990s

• PCs:– IBM PCs began to dominate, – Apple Macintoshes also attracting plenty of use, especially for

graphics.

History of DH - New Developments: 1980s to 1990s

• Technology/Tools/Standards: – The IBM PCs had three text analysis programs: Word-Cruncher,

TACT, and MicroOCP. – The Apple Macintosh was attractive for humanists because it had a

graphical user interface long before Windows on PCs (it was possible to see Old English characters, Greek, Cyrillic) and HyperCard (primitive hypertexts programme) and a simple programming tool.

– However, the main application of PCs was that shared with all other disciplines: word processing. This attracted many more users.

History of DH - New Developments: 1980s to 1990s

– 1986: a new encoding method had appeared - the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), published by ISO, offered a mechanism for defining a markup scheme that could handle many different types of text, could deal with metadata as wel l as data, and could represent complex scholar ly interpretation as well as the basic structural features of documents.

– 1987 Nancy Ide, assisted by colleagues in ACH, organized an meeting at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, to examine the possibil i ty of creating a standard encoding scheme for humanities electronic texts, addressing the problem of many different and conflicting encoding schemes (chaos).

History of DH - New Developments: 1980s to 1990s

• Participants at the meeting agreed on a set of principles ("the Poughkeepsie Principles") for the development of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The first full version was published in 1994.

• The size, scope, and influence of the TEI far exceeded what anyone at the Vassar meeting expected. In all, some 400 encoding tags were specified in a structure that was easily extensible for new application areas.

History of DH - New Developments: 1980s to 1990s

• E-mail and Networking:– Networking, at least for electronic mail, was previously confined

to groups of computer scientists and research institutes. – By the mid-1980s, facilities for sending and receiving electronic

mail across international boundaries were provided by most academic computing services.

– At the 1985 ALLC conference in Nice, electronic mail addresses were exchanged avidly and a new era of immediate communication began.

History of DH - New Developments: 1980s to 1990s

– Soon e-mail was being sent to groups of users and the ListServ software for electronic discussion lists was established.

– 1986: Ansaxnet, the oldest electronic discussion list for the humanities, was founded by Patrick Conner

– 1987: Willard McCarty discovered the existence of ListServ, and Humanist was born - a model for electronic discussion lists, it was taken as an example by the founders of the Linguist List, the key electronic forum for linguistics.

History of DH: 1990s to 2010s

• The World Wide Web boom. • The first graphical browser, Mosaic, appeared on the

scene in 1993. • Now the use of the Internet is a vital part of any academic

activity and the first source of any information.• New projects, collections of data and software were

posted.

History of DH: 1990s to 2010s

• Debates were held on what to call these collections of electronic resources. The term "archive" was favoured by many, followed by “digital library”.

• SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), mostly in applications based on the TEI, was accepted.

• Many more people became familiar with the idea of technology in the humanities, but in a more limited sense of putting material onto the Web.

History of DH - 2010s to 2020s

• Why is DH so fashionable these days?• Humanities always used (manual) quantification methods• But in the last 10 years:

– speed and memory of computers raised unprecedently – computing price plummeted– access to information become universal (cheap) and super-fast

through internet (warning: way too many indiscriminate results)– Data volume generated by Humanities become huge,

impossible to process manually

History of DH - 2010s to the 2020s

Types of digital objects:• most common - text• images (maps, pictures, etc...)• artefacts (representations of physical objects aka

archaeological objects from vases, sculptures, coins to columns and buildings like 3D models of Ancient Rome, etc...)

• sounds (speech, music, beats, vibes)

History of DH - 2010s to the 2020s

• What do we do with all that data from Humanities?• We have tools!

• How Digital Humanities meet:– She: Hi, I have data!– He: Hi, I have tools.

History of DH - 2010s to the 2020s

• Lately, there has been an explosion of tools and applications.

• Before, researchers had at hand dozens, hundreds, and maybe even thousands of books, but today the number is closer to millions.

• Still, researchers nowadays find information in them much faster, because these books are being digitised and equipped with ‘smart mark-up’ and search tools.

History of DH - 2010s to the 2020s

• A decade ago, only programmers could create and maintain a web page. Now, anybody can do it with a user-friendly tool like WordPess.

• Cartography also used to be something only a select few were engaged in, but now anyone can put their coordinates on Google Maps.

• So anybody can use it to learn more about anything like how trade worked in the ancient world, how the plague spread in medieval Europe, etc...

History of DH - 2010s to the 2020s

• All of these questions pushed humanities researchers to master skills and knowledge that are completely uncharacteristic for them:– Buzz words: Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Machine Learning,

Deep Learning, Data Analysis, Data Science, Text Mining, network theory, geoinformatics, etc.

• This is what boosted the DH in the last decade.

Digital Tools

• Huge list -next time

Applications

• also huge list -next time

Thank you!