Welcome to Homo Calculans, a project run by Michael Falk at the University of Melbourne.
The overall aim of the project is to assess how researchers in the Human Sciences adopted computational research methods in the first two decades of electronic computing. To do this, the project will pose three research questions about early Computational Human Sciences (CHS):
RQ1. What were the central methods of study across the different disciplines?
RQ2. How did scholars explain and justify their new methods? What rhetorical or affective devices did they use to obtain acceptance for their results?
RQ3. How can this history help us understand the breadth of CHS today?
These questions have been asked of individual disciplines, but never of the Human Sciences as a whole. Historians have described the ‘quantitative revolution’ in Geography, the ‘cognitive revolution’ in Psychology, the rise of ‘simulation’ in Economics, and the emergence of ‘humanities computing’ in Literature, History and Linguistics (Gyuris, Michel, and Paulus 2022; Smith 1997; Morgan 2004; Jones 2016) – but to date no scholar has attempted a synoptic view of how computer methods affected research across the Human Sciences. Today, CHS has divided into two main fields: Computational Social Sciences (CSS) and Digital Humanities (DH). But this bifurcation fails to capture the full breadth of computational research today, and overlooks the way early practitioners of CHS such as J.C. Gardin, Herb Simon and P.J. Stone straddled the disciplines. A fresh look at this early period will help to reopen the walled gardens of DH and CSS.
To answer the research questions, I will assemble a corpus of early research publications in CHS, and study them using both close reading and corpus analysis. Thus the project is innovative in two respects: (1) in its comparative approach; and (2) in its use of digital methods. While comparative research is not new in the history of the Human Sciences, this project will be the first to compare computational methods across the Human Sciences in the first age of computing; and while it is becoming more common for scholars to digitally analyse corpora of academic articles as evidence in intellectual history (Jordanous and Keller 2016; Sula and Hill 2019; Falk 2024), this remains a young and fast-moving area with ample scope for methodological innovation.
The project will lead to a demonstrable conceptual advance because of its original research question and innovative methods. It will elucidate, for the first time, how the Human Sciences fared in the first two decades of electronic computing, using computational methods to observe how the very language of the Human Sciences changed to register the impact of the computer.
Homo Calculans is funded by an ECR Grant at the University of Melbourne (2025ECRG089).
Image: CSIRAC (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer), Australia’s first digital computer, and the fourth stored program computer in the world. First run in November 1949, it is the only intact first-generation computer in the world. It was used by numerous HASS scholars, and was possibly the first digital computer to produce music. By jjron - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link