Dr. McCarty is FRAI / Professor of Humanities Computing and Director of the Doctoral Programme, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London; Professor, School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics, University of Western Sydney; Editor,
Dr. Julianne Nyhan is a Lecturer in Digital Information Studies in the Department of Information Studies UCL and European Liaison Manager of UCL's Centre for Digital Humanities. Her research interests include the design and use of metadata languages in the humanities and the history of computing in the humanities. She is co-Editor of the forthcoming
Ms. Anne Welsh is Lecturer in Library and Information Studies at University College London and Digital Identity Manager at UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. Facet Publishing has published her co-authored book,
Ms. Jessica Salmon is a freelance project manager and consultant specialising in the education and cultural sector. She has a BA (Hons) in German Studies from Warwick University and an MSc in Information Science from UCL. Her particular research interest lies in the application of learning technologies.
This is the source
This interview was carried out with Willard McCarty on Tuesday 27th March, 2012 in University College London.
He recounts that his earliest encounter with computing was in the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkley where he worked with semi-automated
scanning equipment for the Alvarez high-energy physics projects. After his dreams of becoming a physicist were thwarted he transferred to Reed College.
There he did not have the opportunity to take formal training in computing; for the most part, Computer Science departments did not exist then.
So, he learned to programme on the job
with help from a talented physicist turned computer programmer named Bill Gates (no association with Microsoft).
His first encounter with what we now call digital humanities was at the University of Toronto where he worked on the Records of Early English Drama project
whilst undertaking a PhD on 17th century non-dramatic poetry. In 1984/5, as he was finishing his PhD, he accepted an academic support role at the Centre for
Computing in the Humanities at Toronto, where he remained until 1996 when he accepted an academic post in King's College London. In Toronto he was keenly
aware of the staff-faculty divide and the marginalised position of those who used computers in Humanities research. Nevertheless, the opportunities that
the role brought to meet with a range of scholars interested in computing had a lasting influence on him. So too, with funding from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada he was able to undertake a research project on Ovid's
An interview carried out as part of the Hidden Histories project that explores aspects of Willard McCarty's personal, social and intellectual history at the intersection of computing and the humanities.
Dr. McCarty is FRAI / Professor of Humanities Computing and Director of the Doctoral Programme, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London; Professor, School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics, University of Western Sydney; Editor,
This interview contains a wealth of information about McCarty's interdisciplinary
background and how it was that he came to learn computer programming. From this interview emerges a very strong sense of
McCarty's critical and questioning attitude towards the computer and the culture that
surrounded it in the 1980s, and later. Indeed, up to his appointment
at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at Toronto in 1984/5 he recalls that he tended to
drop in and out of contact with computing because he liked neither computers nor, for the most part, computer programmers.
He recalls that [t]here was a huge amount of conformity and the love of mechanisation, the reduction
of life to what can be programmed, which was reflected in the kind of people that I met, with some exceptions,
some brilliant exceptions. It was partly, it wasn't what I wanted to do — I didn't want to be a slave in a
society that had really no respect for the workers who did the work for them.
This is a
fascinating insight into some of the conditions from which our discipline emerged and a topic that
deserves more exploration. It also has resonances for modern day digital humanists — to what extent
does conformity and the love of mechanisation still manifest itself in our discipline? And what steps might we take
to avoid it?
Click for the accompanying audio interview.
Willard, can you reflect on your earliest memory of encountering computing technology?
It was at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley where I got a job in my second year of university at UC Berkeley.
At first, not dealing with computers but rather with semi-automated scanning equipment for the Alvarez high-energy physics projects.
We slaves were employed to scan bubble chamber film for nuclear interactions and to classify them. It sounds very exotic but actually it was quite dull,
the equivalent of being in a typing pool, really, and Alvarez then — his group — had these photographs of nuclear interactions digitised by custom equipment
that had been made for the project. Then these were processed by computer to reconstruct the events in three-space and calculate the angular momentum of the paths
and infer, calculate from that the particles that were involved and from that look for unknown particles and golden events, one in two or three hundred thousand
photographs. So, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, because they had an intimate connection with the Federal Government and with their bomb-making counterparts in
Livermore, had a direct line to computer manufacturers. They got all kinds of state-of-the-art mainframe things, and running computers was a big deal there so
perceiving that those who dealt with computers got paid more and had more independence, I eventually — the story is long and complex, and pretty much boring — I
eventually got a job, first as a computer operator of IBM's 7094 and worked with an IBM 704, which was a drum-based machine that had 6000 valves in it. (The engineer,
when he came to repair the machine, would turn the lights in the room off so that he could check to see which tubes weren't glowing and that usually identified the problem.)
Anyway, the sort of equipment that you see in books: that filled rooms and made a lot of noise because of the under-floor cooling systems. From being a computer operator,
then I got a job as a computer programmer, working in IBM assembly language — IBM 7094 assembly language — and then when the first computer that they had, which ran more
than one program simultaneously — the CDC 6600 — came in, I wrote assembly language programs for this computer, which marked quite a change in my relationship with computers.
Before then when you stopped telling the computer what to do, you stopped feeding it stuff, it would stop, and as we say, wait for more
, but the 6600 which ran, at first,
eight programs simultaneously and then 64, would manage itself and the operator was more or less reduced to the role of somebody who observed what was going on and occasionally
fixed things. That was in Berkeley in the early 1960s.
You said when you began work there you were an undergraduate, in the Humanities or?
In the physics department, which I had wanted to be all my previous life, a physicist, but there was kind of administrative cock-up, as a result of which I got a C in second year physics, which was an experimental programme in relativistic physics devised by Harvard and Berkeley and taught for the first time that year — very exciting, very exciting — no text books, everything mimeographed, problem sets — we'd get 10 problems a week and were told that if we solved any of them we'd be eligible for a Nobel prize — they were really difficult problems and we had all kinds of ... it was really exciting stuff. But due to an administrative cock-up I got a C in the second year course and my advisor, and the faculty advisors at Berkeley cared next to nothing about the students, about undergraduates. Undergraduates were dirt there, or were then. So, not knowing me much or caring about the circumstances he told me to change my major subject because clearly I wasn't destined to be a physicist. So I changed to German for a while and had a great time — very inspiring — and then mathematics, I think, and then English eventually, which is when I transferred to Reed College, where I worked on an IBM 1401, which is what they had in their so-called computer centre.
And what about your training in programming? Was that formal?
There was no formal training in programming. There was no computer science, at least not on the West Coast. I forget when Cornell's Computer Science
Department started, I think that was the first, but there was no Computer Science, there was no formal training. At one point I was apprenticed to a young
whiz kid, well I was young too then, I guess, but a whiz kid who had been a physics student and fell in love with computers and thereafter just worked as
a computer programmer, his name was, oddly enough, Bill Gates, though not
here's a task
,
here's a core dump
,
translate this core dump back into assembly language
, that sort of thing.
Very much learning by doing.
Oh absolutely learning by doing, there was no other way. There were no principles of programming, I mean, there was assembly language, assembly language for the individual machines, of course, and Fortran. Fortran was actually quite a good language by then and we used to do all sorts of very clever things with Fortran, including crashing the machine periodically. Whenever the machine crashed it was either Bill or me who was responsible for this so…it was fun.
What about the first time you encountered what we now tend to refer to as digital humanities?
Well, I dropped in and out of contact with computers because I didn't like computers very much and
I hated the people that were computer programmers, mostly. Mostly, I found them to be very boring and uninteresting people
so ... being a student from a not wealthy family I occasionally needed to make money and having knowledge of programming
was handy for that; so I drifted in and out of having to do with computers but I ended up at the University of Toronto to
do a PhD in 17th century non-dramatic poetry. I got a job with the Records of Early English Drama project, which is still
going and with which we at King's have now an intimate association, oddly enough, as a programmer for Ian Lancashire, basically
working for him, although later on for other people in the project and working on a DECsystem-10, with an acoustic coupler modem,
300-baud acoustic coupler modem, programming various things for a compilation that he was putting together on English dramatic
records. That was implicitly digital humanities, I suppose, but not explicitly until Ian formed a computing centre for the
humanities — it was called Centre for Computing in the Humanities at Toronto — I then was working for the computing centre
itself, in the micro-computer support group, which mostly dealt with people in the Humanities, so again implicitly
digital humanities but hardware-focused — Osbornes and Apple 2s, that sort of thing. And when I heard Ian was forming this
centre, I went to him and I said you need me, offer me a job
— right at that time I was just finishing up my PhD so I
went to work for his centre in 1984/85. Got my PhD in '84, went to work in '85. There were no academic jobs in Milton studies,
which was my area so again, by that time I had a family and two children to support so I really needed money.
I worked in Ian's centre, mostly going around and talking to researchers at Toronto, at the University, who were for
some reason or other, for whatever reason, interested in doing things with computers because Ian was building interest
around this centre of his. This was, I mean, it was a non-academic job, it was nine to five, it was all those things and
I was very unhappy about that, of course — a PhD does that to you — but it was extremely valuable training because
I essentially talked to people about their research across all departments and then began to see common patterns across
departments. We had a centre but we had no glue other than Ian's passion for computers and conviction that one could do
things with them, but there was no theoretical glue, there was no disciplinary sense, in fact, Ian was very much against
the notion that, as I recall, that there was anything to a field which might have computing in the humanities in it.
It was a service centre for the humanities, which is where the academic legitimacy came from. But as I say, I got to talk
to a lot of people about their research and ask questions and listen to what people were saying, the claims that were being made,
and also, I got friendly with a professor in the French Department who convinced me that I could apply for funding because
I had been, by this time, working on Ovid's
You mentioned earlier that you had actually disliked the computer, can you talk a little bit more about that and when, presuming those feelings have changed, when did that change come about?
Well, the society of people formed around the computer, first of all they were, in the academic world, a servant class, a lot of them came from business and had a scientific background of some sort. The IBM people and the CDC people all dressed alike and all looked alike, they looked like they were made in the same mould, they all had the same kind of clothing. Until Thomas J Watson Jr, I think, had to appear on colour television all IBM employees had to wear white shirts and then the people in the television studio told Watson that white didn't work well on colour television so he had to wear a light blue shirt and after then all IBM employees could wear light blue shirts instead of white shirts. There was a huge amount of conformity and the love of mechanisation, the reduction of life to what can be programmed, which was reflected in the kind of people that I met, with some exceptions, some brilliant exceptions. It was partly, it wasn't what I wanted to do — I didn't want to be a slave in a society that had really no respect for the workers who did the work for them. If you were a physicist at the lab, or a nuclear chemist, or something like that, you got enormous privileges, there were Nobel Prize winners walking around the place. There was even a club of people who had got Nobel Prizes that ate lunch together and only if you had a Nobel Prize could you eat lunch with them. It was that very hierarchically-structured academic society, very high powered, lots of people wanting to be part of it and so social stratification put computing and everything to do with computers at the very bottom of the heap. I suppose the people that emptied the bins were socially lower, but not by much. So, it's the association of, first of all, a very low social status and just basically in a job of doing what you're told, in a world in which people basically thought that computers did what they were told, that that's what it was about is programming something, making it automatic and that didn't appeal to me at all.
But at some point that began to change, did it?
Well it was true, I think, all this is of course recollection and reconstruction and subject to all of those caveats. When I began to question the claims that people were making in the 1980s, IBM, which had been pouring money into the Humanities since the early 1960s, IBM was very forward thinking, very forward-looking in developing a field that was manifestly not going to do very much of commercial interest but they had lots of money, they were on top of the world, they poured lots of money into the Humanities. So, the University of Toronto was awash with money, in the 1980s, 300,000 Canadian dollars a year budget for this little centre, which was quite a bit of money then. And IBM was interested in hearing about these wonderful things that could be done, so the people around this centre I was part of were proclaiming wonderful things that could be done and these proclamations, these claims were hype, basically, I got very curious about this and began to question and that questioning was really the basis of an enduring interest in what was going on. I've been asking what's going on ever since. It was quite evident that all of these claims were false but it was interesting that people were making them and it was interesting in what sense they were false — what was left out became my primary passion, how these systems fail and the value of failure became the organising principle for all of the investigations that followed.
Just one bit of detail, who funded your
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. At that time, and subsequently I think, it has done a great deal for the digital humanities in Canada. The Canadians have done marvels in convincing the government and setting up structures of funding and so on. Per capita more digital humanists in Canada than anywhere else in the world, I think, likely.
You've talked about the scholars you encountered, who planned to use computing in their research, what about scholars who were not using computing, do you have some sense of what their views of that field of endeavour were?
This is a problem really to talk about because people tended to just turn their backs and walk away. When Steven Parish gave his summary account of the
first conference in our field, sponsored by IBM in 1964, the Literary Data Processing Conference, you have the proceedings of that, I think.
(See
Do you think that this feeling of, on the one hand, isolation and maybe doing something different from the mainstream, do you think that that feeling is one that is commonly held among DH scholars and also something that is important to our identity?
You mean now?
Now and earlier.
The desire to be part of the world for which one is being trained is, I suspect, as strong as ever. You're doing a PhD in a subject like the Digital Humanities, you're wanting to get an academic job and you see that having to do with computers is useful in building an attractive profile. I suspect there is a great desire to identify with something, to identify with the digital humanities, not really knowing much about what it is but wanting to be part of it, that is quite strong at the moment. The desire is to join the club rather than to question it.
Two more questions. When did you first encounter the conference scene? What were the earliest organised meetings that you went to?
The International Conference for Computers in the Humanities in Columbia, South Caroline, Bob Oakman's conference, Professor of English and Computer Science, which is the conference at which the meeting was formed out of which
Can you name a few of the people that you encountered and the people who especially influenced you from that time?
Well, undoubtedly Ian Lancashire, both positively and negatively because he and I in the latter years didn't get along at all. Joe Raben, a bit but it wasn't until much later that I really understood how much he had done, by reading through the first 25 years of
Yeah, and that whole layer of tacit knowledge, that can be so hard to uncover. Willard, this closes the first of our, at least two interviews, that you've agreed to, so thank you very much.