Trading stories: An oral history conversation between Geoffrey Rockwell and Julianne Nyhan

Welsh, Anne; Nyhan, Julianne; Salmon, Jessica; Rockwell, Geoffrey
2012
This extended interview with Geoffrey Rockwell was carried out via Skype on the 28th April 2012. He narrates that he had been aware of computing developments when growing up in Italy but it was in college in the late 1970s that he took formal training in computing. He bought his first computer, an Apple II clone, after graduation when he was working as a teacher in the Middle East. Throughout the interview he reflects on the various computers he has used and how the mouse that he used with an
more » ... rly Macintosh instinctively appealed to him. By the mid1980s he was attending graduate school in the University of Toronto and was accepted on to the Apple Research Partnership Programme, which enabled him to be embedded in the central University of Toronto Computing Services; he went on to hold a full time position there. Also taking a PhD in Philosophy, he spent many lunch times talking with John Bradley. This resulted in the building of text analysis tools and their application to Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, as well as some of the earliest, if not the earliest, conference paper on visualisation in the digital humanities community. He reflects on the wide range of influences that shaped and inspired his early work in the field, for example, the Research Computing Group at the University of Toronto and their work in visual programming environments. In 1994 he applied, and was hired at McMaster University to what he believes was the first job openly advertised as a humanities computing position in Canada. After exploring the opposition to computing that he encountered he reflects that the image of the underdog has perhaps become a foundational myth of digital humanities and questions whether it is still a useful one. he led the development of an undergraduate Multimedia program funded through the Ontario Access To Opportunities Program. He has published and presented papers in the area of philosophical dialogue, textual visualization and analysis, humanities computing, instructional technology, computer games and multimedia. He is the project leader for the CFI (Canada Foundation for Innovation) funded project TAPoR, a Text Analysis Portal for Research, which has developed a text tool portal for researchers who work with electronic texts and he organized a SSHRC funded conference, The Face of Text in 2004. He has published a book "Defining Dialogue: From Socrates to the Internet" with Humanity Books. More information is available at http://geoffreyrockwell.com/. Rockwell closes the interview by discussing the way that some digital humanists have tended to depict themselves as "underdogs"; he asks whether this is necessarily true and whether such narratives continue to serve us well. In the introductory article published in Literary and Linguistic Computing we have discussed this issue a little further and interpreted it in the context of the complex interrelationship that exists between myth and history. In order to explore this issue further we hope to carry out oral history interviews with members of the traditional humanities community who were sceptical about computing and its role in the humanities, in addition to interviewing further members of the digital humanities community. We hope this approach will enable us to gather a rich and wide ranging body of reflections that it may be possible to set within the wider comparative context of the history of disciplinary formation in the twentieth century.
doi:10.7939/r3pk07f52 fatcat:dihnnj37fnf4lmzpwrcmtpurf4