By the way @histodons , its probably old news for people who are already engaging with this, but I just learned about two fascinating pioneers of humanities computing, Andrew and Kathleen Booth at Birkbeck College, London, who apparently worked on #NLP (specifically machine translation, but together with students/collabs. on other things) starting in the early 50s (perhaps earlier).
...and I've stumbled across so many great quotes now which could just as well have been written today and not in, like, 1970. I really feel the urge to start sharing some of them, because that groundhog-day experience I keep having is as entertaining as it is lowkey frustrating lol.😅 Also saw it's topical for some people so maybe it'd even be useful?!
Vern L. Bullough, 1967, "The Computer and the Historian: Some Tentative Beginnings" in: Computers and the Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 61-64. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30199211
@histodons This is a great and interesting read for the history of digital hisory in general, lots more quotable bits. Also one of the early and few genuine historians mentioning simulations, albeit a bit misguiding as "predictive history".