aus der Introduction of the Busa Award Lecture bei der "Digital Humanities 2007" Konferenz
Urbana, 5 June 2007
...
In the Foreword to the volume on Book VI of the Aeneid,
there appears a sentence which seems to sum up, programmatically,
both the capabilities and the potential limits of digital
processing:
Electronic data processing can be
put into service whenever data of any kind — notably
including texts — must be processed according
to rules which are unambiguously formulatable and completely
formalizable.
What more compact formulation could we find of the fundamental program
of our field? And what more matter of fact reminder that this is a
description of those places where computers can successfully be
deployed, without any suggestion of belief that they can be
deployed absolutely everywhere.
...
In due course, these efforts produced a suite of programs for
scholarly work with text, which at some point acquired the name Tustep,
the Tübingen System of Text Processing tools.
Tustep embodied a number of important ideas:
completeness: It can be used for all parts of a
project's normal work. There is an editor for data capture and
revision, there are copy commands and tape utilities for archiving and
moving data, there are a variety of general and specialized
proceessing tools for manipulating documents, for sorting things, for
extracting relevant items from lists, for laying documents out on the
page, for photocomposition of the resulting pages, and so on.)
verifiability: Every action undertaken with
Tustep will be logged, unless you take very active steps to avoid
having it logged.
stability: Since projects may live for years or
decades, the stability of the program and of Tustep files is
critically important.
consistency: Years before anyone outside of
Bell Labs had heard of Unix, Tustep adopted the principle that every
tool would have one primary input and one primary output, and that the
output of every tool would be usable as the input to any other tool.
In practice, this means that the primary input and the primary output
of each tool use the Tustep file format.
This principle of ensuring that other Tustep programs can read the
primary output of any Tustep program is consistently implemented, even
in cases where one might have expected a different choice. When I
learned that the typesetting program of Tustep also produces a Tustep
file as its output — the PDF or photocomposer file is, formally
speaking, a side effect — I admired the consistent application
of the design principle but privately thought that it bordered on the
academic. Since for practical purposes the main output of a
typesetting program is typeset pages, producing a Tustep file seems
likely to be an anticlimax. What useful output can it produce?
Perhaps just a copy of its input?
In fact, typesetting programs do produce information: before you
run them, you don't know where the page and line breaks of the typeset
pages will fall; afterwards, you do. So the primary output of the
Tustep Satz program is a Tustep file showing the page and line breaks
of the typeset version. This is why the production of a
back-of-the-book index, in a project using Tustep, is mostly a routine
matter of processing, rather than the eight-week crisis experienced by
some editorial projects I have visited, who receive page proofs back
from their publishers and must then hire every available graduate
student to spend weeks translating the preliminary index from the
working preliminary page numbering to the final page numbering of the
volume. Consistent design decisions can have dramatic practical
advantages.
The most important idea of Tustep, though, is that it is the
responsibility of the software to serve the needs of scholarship, and
not vice versa, and that the responsibility of the scholar is to
respect the significant particularities of the material and the
demands of his discipline (not any standards of practice imposed from
outside, and least of all any limitations imposed by the
software.)
Tustep developed over thirty years of listening to the needs of
scholarship, consulting with projects and adding to Tustep the
functionality they needed to enable them to do their work. Hundreds of
editions have been prepared with it, some all the way from beginning
to end, from data capture through typeset pages, others just
translated into Tustep for the typesetting — apparatus criticus
is not easy to set!
If we are to take responsibility, as humanists, for our use of
machines, then it is necessarily now a part of humanities scholarship
to understand and develop ways to make machines adapt to the
requirements of our work, and (while remaining open to the
exploitation of new and unforeseen opportunities) to resist the
temptation to adjust our practices to suit the convenience of the
machine. ...