Council on Academic Computing
March 15, 2010
Meeting Summary
Computer-Based
Humanities Scholarship
The Office of the Provost currently is exploring how to
incorporate computer-based analysis into humanities scholarship. Towards this end, Dr. Klinzing invited David
Birnbaum, Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, to speak
before the Council. Dr. Birnbaum uses
computing approaches in his studies of Slavic texts. He discussed several projects in which he
coded manuscripts so that he could compare textual fragments both within and
across manuscripts. Dr. Birnbaum
currently is working with colleagues to determine how watermarks can be used to
date documents. Computer scientists are
using their expertise in image recognition to scan the watermarks, and
philologists will use the images to compare them across a corpus of documents.
Dr. Birnbaum also discussed the status of
computer-intensive, humanities scholarship.
An increasing number of his colleagues use these methods, and their work
is supported by an emerging academic network.
Several academic societies, such as the Association for Computers and
the Humanities, support this type of research.
Drs. Birnbaum and Klinzing have discussed how to encourage
computer-based humanities scholarship at the