Homo Calculans

The Computerisation of the Human Sciences, 1950s-1960s

Michael Falk

The University of Melbourne

Niles Zhao

NTU Singapore

Outline

  1. Why the ‘Human Sciences’?
  2. The Corpus
  3. The Virtues of Computation

Why the ‘Human Sciences’?

Digital HASS

The problem of meaning

Dies alles verändert sich grundlegen, sobald wir in den Kreis des menschlichen Handelns eintreten. Dieses ist, selbst in seinen einfachsten und primitivisten Formen, durch eine Art der ‘Mittelbarkeit’ gekennzeichnet, die der Weise, in der das Tier reagiert, scharf entgegengesetzt ist. […] Diese ‘Vorstellung’ des Künftigen charakterisiert alles menschliche Handeln. Wir müssen ein noch nicht Bestehendes im ‘Bilde’ vor uns hinstellen, um sodann von dieser ‘Möglichkeit’ zur ‘Wirklichkeit’, von der Potenz zum Akt überzugehen. (Cassirer 1980, 26)

This all changes fundamentally, as soon as we step into the circle of human action. This is, even in its simplest and most primitive forms, known through a kind of ‘mediation’, which is completely opposed to the way in which an animal reacts. […] This ‘representation’ of the future characterises all human action. We necessarily hold a picture before us of what has not yet happened, in order to move from ‘possibility’ to ‘reality’, from power to act.

The Corpus

Document Types

Table 1
Document Type n
journalArticle 355
bookSection 122
book 8
conferencePaper 8
magazineArticle 2
report 1

Disciplines Represented

Table 2: Musicology is surprisingly well represented.
Discipline n
Psychology 71
Behavioural science 48
Literary Studies 46
Musicology 42
Linguistics 35
Statistics 35
Anthropology 29
Political Science 27
Interdisciplinary 23
History 17
Visual Arts 16
Sociology 15
Humanities 11
Archaeology 10
Economics 10
Machine Translation 10
Geography 9
Religious Studies 9
Natural Language Processing 7
Management Science 5
Art History 4
Cliometrics 4
Education 4
Classics 3
Business 2
Demography 2
Library Studies 2
History 1
Accounting 1
Marketing 1
Museum 1
Organizational behavior 1
Performing Arts 1
Philosophy 1
Simulation??? 1
Taxation 1

Computers Represented

Figure 1: The graph reflects IBM’s market dominance and early sponsorship of Humanities Computing.

The rise of minicomputers

Figure 2: Mainframes dominate the research in this corpus (IBM, Univac), but minicomputers start to become visible near the end.

The Virtues of Computation

The computer and the clerk: metaphorically (1)

As you know by now, if you have been following these lectures, computers are not giant brains at all; they are giant clerks. (Green 1961, 227)

The computer and the clerk: metaphorically (2)

Because the use of electronic computers has been regarded with skepticism, we should say quite clearly here that we regard a computer as a clerk with several virtues but one which is no better than its instructions. To appreciate the way in which this clerk operates, one should realize that a computer is, in principle, nothing more than a desk calculator and a note pad. (Gilbert and Hammel 1966, 71)

The computer and the clerk: metaphorically (3)

It is useful to liken the Inquirer to an energetic, compulsive, but stupid clerk who has been trained in content analysis mechanics. This clerk has no ideas of his own but waits for the specification of categories and scoring procedures supplied by the investigator. Once these instructions are received and not found to be self-contradictory, the clerk is able to apply them systematically to endless amounts of data. (Stone et al. 1966, 68)

The computer and the clerk: literally (1)

We are still not thinking of the computer as anything but a myriad of clerks or assistants in one convenient console. Most of the results I have just described could have been accomplished with the available means of half a century ago. We do not yet understand the true nature of the computer. And we have not yet begun to think in ways appropriate to the nature of this machine.(Milic 1966, 4)

The computer and the clerk: literally (2)

This “feedback” process between the anthropologist and the programmer sometimes goes so far as to leave nothing to the former, in the way of interpretation. The computer then takes up not only the clerical drudgery, but also the more “intelligent” functions of problem-solving, in a very broad sense.(Gardin 1965)

Keywords across the disciplines

Figure 3: Frequency for six possible keywords, in disciplines with >10 documents.

Distinctive Vocabulary

Figure 4: Most distinctive words by discipline, by tf-idf

Changing the object: “intervallic”

Figure 5: The concept of ‘intervallic’ becomes statistical in the Musicology articles.

The meaning of “experiment”: Psychology

Figure 6: Most highly correlated words with “experiment” and its neighbours, in 200-word chunks from the Psychology articles.

The meaning of “experiment”: Literary Studies

Figure 7: Most highly correlated words with “experiment” and its neighbours, in 200-word chunks from the Literary Studies articles.

References

Cassirer, Ernst. 1980. Zur Logik Der Kulturwissenschaften: Fünf Studien. Darmstadt: Wissenschafltiche Buchgesellschaft.
Gardin, J. C. 1965. “Reconstructing an Economic Network in the Ancient East with the Aid of a Computer.” In The Use of Computers in Anthropology, edited by Dell H. Hymes and Wenner-Gren Foundation For Anthropo, 377–92. Berlin, New York: DE GRUYTER MOUTON. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111718101.377.
Gilbert, John P., and E. A. Hammel. 1966. “Computer Simulation and Analysis of Problems in Kinship and Social Structure.” American Anthropologist 68 (1): 71–93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/668063.
Green, Bert F. 1961. “Using Computers to Study Human Perception.” Educational and Psychological Measurement 21 (1): 227–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/001316446102100123.
Milic, Louis T. 1966. “The Next Step.” Computers and the Humanities 1 (1): 3–6. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30199191.
Stone, Philip J., Dexter Dunphy, Daniel M. Ogilvie, and Marshall S. Smith, eds. 1966. The General Inquirer: A Computer Approach to Content Analysis. Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press.