Project 01 · The foundational corpus
Recovering the early voices of computing in the humanities — from the scholars and practitioners who were there.
Hidden Histories investigates the application of computational methods to the humanities from 1949 — when Roberto Busa imagined an index variorum of some 11 million words of medieval Latin — through to the present day. Conducting, collecting, and disseminating interviews with the scholars and practitioners active across that period, the project recovers what print sources leave out.
Interdisciplinary in method, drawing on oral history, digital humanities, and cultural studies, it gathers the memories, observations, and insights rarely admitted into the scholarly literature — and makes them available as a foundation for the lab's later projects.
For the most part, such information cannot be gleaned from extant documentation — these are the hidden histories of computing in the humanities, accessible only through the testimony of those who lived them.
