Joseph Raben is a professor emeritus of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, where he taught for 30 years. Before that he was a teaching fellow at Indiana University and an instructor at Princeton University. He was awarded a B.A. with honors at the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. at Indiana University, where he minored in folklore under Stith Thompson. His bachelor's honors thesis was on pronunciation as revealed by rhyme schemes in American folksongs, and his doctoral dissertation studied folk speech in Scott's novels. After graduating from Wisconsin, he worked as an engineering aide on the construction of the Hanford Engineer Works, and then entered the Army, where he was trained in spoken Japanese and served in Tokyo as an editor of translations in the Allied Translator and Interpreter Service, attached to GHQ. In this service he translated documents used in the war crimes trials.
At Queens he developed an interest in using computers in humanities research and in 1966 founded the innovative journal
Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format
This is the introduction to the inaugural issues of
Introduction to the inaugural issues of
The feature we are introducing in this inaugural issue of
That initial effort was reported in September 1964 at what was probably the first conference on computers and humanities research, the so-called Literary Data Processing Conference organized by Harry Arader of IBM and chaired by Stephen M. Parrish of Cornell and Jess B. Bessinger of NYU. Among the other speakers, Roberto Busa expatiated on the problems of managing 15 million words for his magnum opus on Thomas Aquinas. Parrish and Bessinger, along with the majority of other speakers, reported on their efforts to generate concordances with the primitive data processing machines available at that time. In light of the current number of projects to digitize literary works it is ironic to recall Martin Kay’s plea to the audience not to abandon their punch cards and magnetic tapes after their concordances were printed and (hopefully) published.
My discovery of the number of scholars from around the country who were engaged to some extent in using computers for humanistic research inspired the thought that we should keep in touch with one another, and after two years I persuaded IBM to fund what at first I called
By 1975, Bob Dilligan of the University of Southern California, co-editor of a Keats concordance, offered to organize a conference as a sequel to one held two years previously at the University of Minnesota, and being there on sabbatical, I helped with that effort. That involvement led, in turn to my participating in the organization of similar conferences at Dartmouth and Rutgers. Sensing a need to broaden our view of humanities computing and recognizing the growth of databases as a resource in their own right (rather than as simply the raw material of concordances), I began a series of International Conferences on Data Bases in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Darmouth, Grinnell and Auburn at Montgomery. The growing number of attendees at these conferences seemed to require a permanent organization to sponsor them, and in 1978 I convened the session at the annual MLA meeting that created the Association for Computers and the Humanities. After two years as president, I turned that operation over to Mary Dee Harris and then Nancy Ide, so that younger people could gain whatever academic credit they could through that position and so that the operation would have an independent stature.
When New York suffered its financial crisis in 1974, and it was no longer possible to publish under the aegis of Queens College, I entrusted the journal to two commercial publishers, neither of which saw much importance in either humanities or humanities computing and treated this publication with consequent lack of concern. In 1984, therefore, I took early retirement and set up my own small publishing operation in Sarasota, Florida. I was thus able to publish several collections of essays on databases in the humanities and social sciences and to start up two new journals,
In this situation I am now able to concentrate on the encyclopedia project and the “op-ed” page of DHQ. It is our hope that this feature will provide a forum for discussion of the larger issues that confront us as we continue our effort to bring computer technology up to what we consider its proper status in academe and scholarly activity. The initial offering is my own take on the problem of achieving the same respect for online publishing that is held now by print. My hope is to set a tone of serious reflection that will be adopted by those who submit future contributions to this section of the journal.
Rather than brief comments, we are hoping for thought-out and substantially developed opinions on all the aspects of our developing discipline. Responses to these discussions are equally welcome and will be tagged to establish a continuous flow along evolving threads. Of course, publication will depend on the approval of the Editorial Board. A few possible topics are suggested below, but we hope these will prompt contributions on a much wider range of issues and questions.