Steady, now: one delicate shudder, then to business. Water with the pill? Fine. Here we are in Hanover, N.H., where the Dartmouth College campus quickens to the approach of the fall term and a few of the weaker maple trees are beginning to turn orange. The occasion is the Fourth International Conference on Computers and—what is this?—the Humanities. Is the conference title a self-contradiction, like "fresh-frozen" or "Young Republican"? The observer, a humanist in a dry season, resolutely programs himself to suppress his real attitude toward computers, which is a feeling of smugness and superiority masking a feeling of inferiority and hysteria. This dates from an episode ten years ago when he was living in Salzburg, Austria, and a computer sent all of his Diners' Club bills by surface mail to Salisbury, Australia, but then unaccountably caught its error each month in time to send the subsequent "pay up or die" threats winging directly to Salzburg.
It is not long before preconceptions begin to fall away —some of them to be later picked up, dusted off and restored to use. The assembled scholars are classics professors, archaeologists, Shakespeareans, graphic artists, historians and musicians flown in from Norway, Israel, England, Canada, France, India and West Germany, as well as from the U.S. Most of them no longer consider themselves to be innovators merely because they work with computers. These days money does not invariably fall out of academia's apple trees when the word computer appears in grant proposals. So says Stephen V.F. Waite, a research associate in computing in the humanities at Dartmouth, and an assistant professor of classics.
Waite, who organized this ICCH/4 conference, might be computer-classified in the "skinny, mild-mannered, wears glasses, enthusiastic" subset of the "professor" category. He likes computers so much that he bought an array of Hewlett-Packard hardware (central processing unit, disc drive, digital tape unit, hardcopy printer, typesetter) with his own money. He set the rig up in his house, and he helps pay off the $70,000 cost by running a one-man computer typesetting business on the side. Waite's machines are on display at the conference. A Los Angeles-based colleague named David Packard has been using them to demonstrate a Greek language program. Packard seems to have changed the locks, because when Waite begins noodling with his computer, the thing turns balky and refuses, despite cajoling, to come "up" (awaken and get to work). A computer is either "up" or "down."
Waite, undiscouraged, says that in 1968 he became the second classics student at Harvard to use a computer for Ph.D. thesis research. Now, Waite adds, it is "not outlandish, though still not common" for a Ph.D. candidate in classics to use a computer. There is still resentment though: "I know of humanities departments in which you would not get tenure if you did use computers."