The idea that the digital age has revolutionized our day-to-day experience of the world is nothing new, and has been amply recognized by cultural historians. In contrast, Stephen Robertson’s BC: Before Computers is a work which questions the idea that the mid-twentieth century saw a single moment of...

12. Ciphers

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Stephen Robertson (6 avr. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

It is easy to think of computers as giant calculators, and indeed the task of calculation and its mechanisation contributed both to the idea of constructing such a machine and to the conception of the tasks to which it might be addressed. Difficult calculation tasks such as those involved in ballist...

6. Organising information

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Stephen Robertson (6 avr. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Every act of communication involves organising information—choosing what to communicate, and how to express it, whether in speech or writing or some other method. All forms of writing, even writing in order to enhance your own memory (for example, a shopping list), require organisation—of ideas, con...

7. Picture and sound

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Stephen Robertson (6 avr. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

For this chapter and the following two, we leave aside for the moment the world of writing and characters, alphabets and numerical digits, to consider pictures and sound. As we saw in Chapter 1, pictures played an early role in the development of writing systems. However, at that point the paths spl...

1. In the beginning..

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Stephen Robertson (6 avr. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Ever since the dawn of recorded history, and before, we have been trying to learn how to do things with information. This is not at all the grand claim it may seem to be. Rather, it is a tautology. We could not begin recorded history until we had ways and means of recording—and recording information...

9. On perspective—and music

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Stephen Robertson (6 avr. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Apart from brief references to mosaics and weaving, I started Chapter 7 with the beginning of the mechanisation of image-making, the invention of photography. However, just as much as language itself (and probably for longer), the language of images has been developed over thousands of years of huma...

Acknowledgements

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Stephen Robertson (6 avr. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

This book started life many years ago as an occasional series of talks to various different audiences, including students at City University, fellow researchers at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and academics at Girton College, Cambridge. Questions and comments from these audiences were immensely hel...

Prologue

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Stephen Robertson (6 avr. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

I was born in 1946. Somewhere around that time was the beginning of a sea change, often proclaimed as a revolution, one which, in the ensuing three-quarters of a century, has transformed our lives in extraordinary ways. Following the pre-war work by such visionaries as Konrad Zuse and Alan Turing, a...

10. Calculation

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Stephen Robertson (6 avr. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Let us now return to numbers. After the invention of the zero and positional notation by Hindu mathematicians, and the systematisation of the rules of arithmetic by the Arabs, it was only a matter of time before we would turn our attention to calculating by machine. Machines that calculate? In one s...

11. Data processing

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Stephen Robertson (6 avr. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

In the United States, a census of the population is undertaken every decade. The 1880 census took 8 years to analyse fully, and the Census Office badly wanted to be able to complete the analysis of the 1890 census in a very much shorter time. The solution to this problem was developed by Herman Holl...

4. Spreading the word

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Stephen Robertson (6 avr. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

At the beginning of Chapter 2, I talked about writing things down in order to communicate with many other people. We might describe this as broadcasting. For much of recorded history, the notion of broadcasting was strongly distinguished from point-to-point messaging. If the originator (a) wants man...

5. More about the alphabet

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Stephen Robertson (6 avr. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

We have seen how important the alphabet was to many later developments in information technology. Once we have a small alphabet supplying the basic unit from which we can construct text, many other things become much easier or simply possible. Out of the inventions I have discussed so far, the most...

3. Sending messages: electricity

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Stephen Robertson (6 avr. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

A new medium The ideal method of sending messages over a distance would not involve the physical transfer of an object at all. The use of bonfire beacons is an old method suitable for a limited number of tasks; slightly more sophisticated is the smoke signal. Both of these have a venerable history....

8. On physics and physiology

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Stephen Robertson (6 avr. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, written in the 1940s but about the distant future, he describes a device that plays a recording of a 3D moving image with sound. The display device is a glass cube, in which the viewer sees a human figure talking—something like a talking head on television, but...

2. Sending messages: the post

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Stephen Robertson (6 avr. 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Why do we want to write things down? Here are some (not exclusive) reasons: in order to organise our thoughts in order to remember (remind our future selves) in order to communicate with someone else in order to communicate with many other people. The first, organising information, I will discuss la...

The Differences between Digital History and Digital Humanities

Billets de blog

Valérie Schafer (30 mai 2015)

Billets de blog

Découvrir le billet de Stephen Robertson. Voir également l'initiative évoquée à la fin du billet : "The opportunity for a deeper consideration of how historians have used digital media and technology, and of what makes them different from others in the digital humanities community as well as what th...

Historia Digital versus Humanidades Digitales (2)

Billets de blog

Anaclet Pons (13 juin 2014)

Billets de blog

Como lo prometido es deuda, publicamos una de las respuestas a la contribución de Stephen Robertson que tratábamos en la entrada anterior. Corresponde al blog de Scott Paul McGinnis, a su texto "DH vs. DH, and Moretti’s War". Estas son sus palabras: Con "The Differences between Digital History and D...

Parution – Journal of the History of Sexuality

Billets de blog

Nahema Hanafi (17 mai 2010)

Billets de blog

Parution – Journal of the History of Sexuality Journal of the History of Sexuality Volume 19, Number 2, May 2010 Picturing Same-Sex Marriage in the Antebellum United States: The Union of "Two Most Excellent Men" in Longstreet's "A Sage Conversation" Timothy Stewart -Winter et Simon Stern Shifting th...