Humanities Computing in Oxford: a Retrospective Lou Burnard Recent visitors to OUCS or the HCU web pages may have noticed that there has been major reorganization of the structure of OUCS, as a part of which it has been decided to close the Humanities Computing Unit as a distinct division within OUCS; HCU staff are all however very much still present and (in several cases) playing major roles in the newly reorganized OUCS structure. The beginnings of something we might call "humanities computing" at Oxford go back a very long way. As early as 1965, the Computing Laboratory's annual report includes reference to research undertaken into "computer techniques for the analysis of Shakespearian texts" [1]. In 1974, the University appointed a teaching officer with specific responsibility for introducing the use of computers to non-scientific students and staff. Over the next six years Susan Hockey developed programming courses (in a language called Snobol) appropriate to arts graduates, and promoted an awareness of a wide range of research applications for "computing in the arts" (see for example her book [2]), for the most part focussing on the abilities which the mainframes of that distant era offered for searching and "analysing" textual data. In 1976, I invented the Oxford Text Archive as a means of collecting such machine-readable texts as could be found, transferring them from punched cards or paper tape to magnetic tape, and redistributing them to the research community. During the eighties, Oxford's growing reputation as a national home for these esoteric activities was further consolidated by a series of substantial grants. In 1978, the Computer Board funded development of a new computer program for textual analysis, to be called the Oxford Concordance Program. Shortly afterwards, the Board also funded the purchase and installation of a Kurzweil Data Entry Machine, on which OUCS provided the first of many national services. The Kurzweil ("KDEM") was an ingenious optical character reader, which could recognize Latin and non-Latin fonts with an acceptable level of accuracy. This technology, now commonplace, was remarkable enough at the time to get coverage in the Oxford Times [3]. The Computer Board also funded the installation of another Oxford first, the Monotype Lasercomp typesetter, which enabled OUCS to offer a high quality digital typesetting service to the whole academic community, at a time when the notion of desktop publishing was still only nascent. The Lasercomp and KDEM services kept going until the early nineties, by which time they seemed oddly anachronistic. During the nineties, humanities computing, along with every other kind, changed out of all recognition. This was not simply a matter of the replacement of the central mainframe by the distributed desktop machine, or the vast increase in computer literacy and usage in the general population, but also of a transformation im the kinds of specialist support services required. Indications of the transformation are clearly to be found in Oxford's activities at the end of the eighties. The OUCS 1986/7 Annual Report records Oxford's participation in an experimental humanities computing bulletin board set up by the British Library's "Office for Humanities Communication" at Leicester (this was a very early version of what we now know as a Humanities Portal), while the following year's Annual report remarks presciently that "many research workers in the humanities now doubtless prefer to carry out their work on microcomputers, provided that the necessary software tools can be obtained." During the nineties, "humanities computing" became more institutionalised, with major government initiatives increasingly funding large scale programmes such as the Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI) designed to increase the uptake of IT in academic teaching and learning, whether as a substitute for human teachers (as some feared in those Thatcherite days) or as a means of improving its quality. In 1989, Oxford was awarded three year's funding to set up a CTI Centre in Literary and Linguistic Studies, which (like the six other centres set up at the same time) would "act as a repository for computer-based teaching materials in specific subject areas, and a source of advice and information to working academics". For the best part of a decade thereafter Oxford's CTI Centre staff produced newsletters and reports, organized conferences and workshops, and above all went on the road, visiting almost every humanities department in British Universities in the cause of computer-consciousness-raising. Local interest and support also blossomed in the enthusiasm of the early nineties. By 1994, a Centre for Humanities Computing had been created within OUCS to provide specialist support and training on "software and hardware which has particular relevance to scholars and students in the humanities faculties". The CHC had its own resources room, ran courses and workshops, notably graduate training days; -- and also produced a newsletter each term called "Humanities Computing in Oxford". Affiliated with it and the CTI Centre were a number of other R&D projects, which over the next decade were to produce an impressive portfolio of activities, ranging from software products such as the Poetry Shell for teaching hypermedia, to exemplary resources such as the Wilfred Owen digital archive, reports and publications such as the CTI Centre's "Resource Guide", conferences and workshops of all kinds, and a national and international reputation as a centre of excellence and expertise. On the world stage, the academic year 1994/95 saw the publication of the first edition of the TEI Guidelines, possibly the most influential of the research activities associated with humanities computing at Oxford. It also saw the publication of the British National Corpus, a 100 million word corpus of British English which still sets the standard for such resources, and, at the end of the year, publication of the feasibility study which eventually lead to the establishment of a national Arts and Humanities Data Service. In October 1995, all the humanities-related projects and activities at OUCS were integrated, to form the Humanities Computing Unit (HCU). Over the next six years, the HCU built up its various constituent parts, maintaining a balance between the needs of increasingly demanding IT-aware faculties and departments at Oxford, and the University's obligations to external funding bodies. Computing technologies change at such a rate that today's leading-edge research is often tomorrow's consumer product. Remaining in touch with that research is correspondingly important to provision of IT support for researchers and teachers. In teaching and learning, Oxford's IT strategy favoured the decentralization of IT support, yet there was at that time no obvious place in the Humanities to which such activities could be devolved, without massive expansion in the level of IT support at college and departmental level. With the help of an interfaculty Committee for Computing in the Arts, the HCU lobbied successfully for additional funding of IT support staff located within the departments, while at the same time contributing the expertise of its own staff to teaching departmental introductory courses. The HCU also established a new "Humanities Computing Development Team" to work collaboratively with academic staff to develop new applications of ITC in teaching and research on a project by project basis. As with other locally funded services, the success of the HCDT soon lead to an expansion of its brief beyond the Humanities, and it was rebranded as the Academic Computing Development Team in 2000. At the start of the new millenium, the HCU employed over 20 people, half of them on external grants and contracts valued at over 350,000 annually. With the advent of divisionalization, however, it faced a new challenge and a new environment, in which OUCS, as a centrally-funded service, must take particular care to meet the needs of the whole University, in a way which complements the support activities funded by individual divisions, rather than competing with or supplanting them. Our strategy has been to focus on areas where the HCU's long experience in promoting better usage of IT within one discipline can be generalized. In 2001, we set up a new Learning Technologies Group, to act as a cross-disciplinary advocacy and development focus for the integration of IT into traditional teaching and learning. This new LTG is now one of four key divisions within the new OUCS, additionally responsible for the full range of OUCS training activities. In 2002, as part of the same reorganization, we are setting up a complementary Research Technologies Service which will bring together three nationally-funded research support services: the Text Archive, the Humbul Humanities Hub, and the Oxford eScience Centre. Intrinsically interdisciplinary, and methodologically focussed, the "Humanities computing" spirit will thus surely continue to thrive at Oxford as well as it has for the last three decades, in whatever institutional structures makes its home. [1] Annual Report of the Computing Laboratory, 1964-1965; available from http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/internal/annrep/annrep64-65.html [2] Susan Hockey "A guide to computer applications in the Humanities" London: Duckworth, 1980. (Reviewed in the TLS by L D Burnard, 9 May 1980, p 533) [3] "Jane Austen on the computer" Oxford Times article.