{"id":6324,"date":"2016-09-28T00:22:27","date_gmt":"2016-09-28T00:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=6324"},"modified":"2016-09-28T00:25:55","modified_gmt":"2016-09-28T00:25:55","slug":"instant-history-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=6324","title":{"rendered":"Instant History conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

This weekend I gave a talk at a lovely one day conference on Instant History, The Postwar Digital Humanities and Their Legacies<\/a>. My conference notes are here<\/a>. The conference was organized by Paul Eggert, among others. Steve Jones, Ted Underwood and Laura Mandell also talked.<\/p>\n

I gave the first talk on “Tremendous Labour: Busa’s Methods” – a paper coming from the work St\u00e9fan Sinclair and I are doing. I talked about the reconstruction of Busa’s Index project. I claimed that Busa and Tasman made two crucial innovations. The first was figuring out how to represent data on punched cards so that it could be processed (the data structures). The second was figuring out how to use the punched card machines at hand to tokenize unstructured text. I walked through what we know about their actual methods and talked about our attempts to replicate them:<\/p>\n