This book traces the history of the relationship between Information technology and the Humanities. The start of this relationship may have been in 1949 when Father Roberto Busa created an 'index verborum' which included 11 million words of medieval latin, 1974 saw the first printed version. His achievement was thus recognised when he became the first recipient of the Busa award to signify his achievement in applying IT to humanastic research. The relationship blossomed with the coming about of COCOA which was modeled on a format developed by Paul Bratley, it proved very influential and other schemes derived from it, according to Hockey, its ability to deal with overlapping structures outstrips that of almost all modern markup schemes, which suggests that it was an important step in the relationship of IT and humanistic research. The most important breakthroughs I believe came about from the 1970s to the present day. These included the Oxford Text Archive founded in 1976 which was to ensure that a text a researcher had finished with was not lost, this could be seen as the beginning of a digital library. During the mid 1980s to the early 1990s the PC and Electronic Mail were discovered. 1985 at a ALLC Conference in Nice email addresses were exchanged which saw the beginning of a new era of immediate communications. The early 1990s saw the era of the Internet, which I find extremely important and useful when it comes to researching for history. Academics were the first to recognise its potential while libraries were soon to follow by putting the content of their collections on the Internet. It also allows for collaborative projects which is useful as the Internet is a huge space which can provide one with a wealth of information.
Chapter 5 declares that a culture war existed pitting the 'new' history, which is that of the Internet and is influenced by social science theory and methodology, against the traditional practices of narrative historians. There are many ways in which historians have made use of computing technologies. The 1940s saw the first phase that of quantitative history which used mathematical techniques. 1960s saw the second phase which was an emerging field of social science history in which statistical techniques were used. The third phase is the PC and the rise of the Internet. Not everyone looked upon these developments so favourably, as a British historian said; 'The declining importance of the so-called grand narratives of national and class histories, and the fragmentation and loss of cultural authority of scholarly history in the face of increasingly diffuse popular and political uses of 'history', cannot be separated from the impact of the new technologies.'
I looked at chapter 26 as my proposed thesis topic involves film. It states that 'cinema was a serious form of expression, an art form involved in the production of thought.' Such expression is one of the reasons I would like to research film as I believe it bears a significant impact on its audience and can thus display portrayals that the filmmakers believe and can in turn influence the audience to believe the same. 'the literary scholar, the historian...can literally bring the work under study into her own text to prove a point, illustrate an argument, and provide the text to prove a point, illustrate an argument, and provide the text and context for analysis. The film scholar cannot.' This problem was solved when 'image overlay hardware that put a moving image from a tape or disc directly into a window on the computer screen.' 'He creates an alternative world of the alternative world that the film itself creates...filmmakers make us see what they want us to see.' It is with this final quotation in mind that I wish to explore the portrayal of the IRA in film as it is to distinguish between the different portrayals in the hope to discover the most accurate portrayal of the IRA in relation to the history I aim to achieve, and not to always see what it is that the filmmakers want me to see.
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