Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 458.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2025-04-13 00:11:50+00:00
From: Gabriel Egan <mail@gabrielegan.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.457: what sources of fascination?
Dear Willard
The students on my final-year undergraduate
course 'Textual Studies Using Computers'
start with binary encoding, ASCII, making
logic gates (with mechanical relays), and
programming in hand-assembled Intel 8080
processor machine code. I do this because
I think the underpinnings of all the modern
digital miracles students have around them
need to be grounded in some basic facts about
what it means for a representation, especially
of text, to be digital. For me the founding
miracle of all is that we have a way to
represent language inside a machine. It
still boggles my mind that our predecessors
figured out a way to do that.
One thing I cannot settle on is whether,
as a shorthand for expressing binary numbers,
students should learn octal or hexadecimal. The
former was big until the mid-1970s, when the
latter began to be preferred. For my students,
who are Humanities students -- English, Creative
Writing, Journalism, History, Drama -- the octal
system has the benefit of their needing to
memorize only 8 patterns (000b to 111b) instead
of 16 (0000b to 1111b). But it has the drawback
that I can't find any assemblers that will
output octal machine code, so if we use octal
they cannot progress from hand-assembly to
machine-assembly. Any Humantists' thoughts
on that would be of interest to me.
Regards
Gabriel Egan
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