Roy Wisbey 1929-2020

Roy Wisbey 1929-2020

It is with great sadness that we inform our community of the death of Roy Wisbey, who has passed away aged 91 (13.6.1929 - 21.10.2020). Prof. Wisbey has been a founder member and first Chair of the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing (now EADH), as much as founder of our journal "Literary and Linguistic Computing" (now "DSH"). 

Prof. Harold Short wrote a few words to remember his outstanding activity as scholar, and we are honored to publish them hereafter.

Roy Wisbey 1929-2020 

Roy Wisbey, who has passed away aged 91 (13.6.1929 - 21.10.2020), was one of the pioneers of humanities computing in Europe and indeed internationally, although this was only part, albeit an integral part, of a distinguished academic career whose principal focus was medieval German literature.

His engagement with the application of computation in literary scholarship went back to 1960, when he attended a colloquium on the mechanization of literary analysis and lexicography at the University of Tübingen, led by Roberto Busa SJ, another of the pioneers in the field. By this time Roy held a post in German at the University of Cambridge, where he founded the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre in 1964.

In 1971 he moved to King's College London, where he stayed for the remainder of his professional career.  While he did not seek to establish a similar centre there, he not only continued using computational methods in his own research, but also encouraged and facilitated the work of others. The result was that the Computing Centre at King's developed considerable interest and expertise in supporting such work.  In 1986 an institutional merger gave him the opportunity to propose the formation of a 'Humanities and Information Management' group in the restructured Computing Centre.  This group became increasingly engaged in collaborative research projects with leading academics in humanities disciplines - always a key strength at King's - and this led in 1996 to the establishment of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities. CCH became an academic department in 2002, eventually changing its name to Department of Digital Humanities in 2011. 

Roy was a key supporter in all these developments, providing not only moral support but also a great deal of practical help and advice. He was also active in generating interest in computational methods with colleagues across the University of London, co-organising for many years the intercollegiate Seminar in Humanities Computing.

The primary focus of his pioneering work in the application of computational methods was literary and linguistic research. One of his priorities at Cambridge was the creation of an archive of machine-readable texts of medieval German literature.  The texts were entered on paper tape, among them the Lachmann edition of the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach. Roy’s wife Erni was one of his main collaborators, spending endless hours in data entry.  

His archive of Middle High German texts was used by numerous researchers and accessioned by such institutions as the Oxford Text Archive, established by Lou Burnard. In 1990 Manfred Thaller brought a copy of the complete archive to the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen, where the data was converted by Astrid Reinecke into a standardized ASCII-format and made generally available. Subsequently a copy of this archive made its way to Trier, where it was incorporated in the text archive of the new Middle High German dictionary and where its 15 texts can still be accessed (http://www.mhdwb-online.de/quellenverzeichnis.php?).

Roy, along with other pioneers such as Roberto Busa, insisted that correct machine-readable texts, including diacritics, were an indispensable prerequisite for all further work, particularly in lexicography and textual editing. He also believed that the source texts should always be the best and most reliable editions. Based on the texts in his archive, Roy was the first in his discipline to publish a series of computer generated indices and concordances.

From the beginning, however, Roy had a larger conception, working with like-minded European and international colleagues to push boundaries and explore new possibilities. He was interested not only in how the new methods could benefit his own research, but also in how they might transform humanities scholarship more broadly.  As early as 1962 he was articulating his far-sighted vision in a paper published in Modern Language Review 57.2:161-172:

The really exciting vistas however, begin to open up when one considers that once texts have been put on tape they constitute a permanent archive for linguistic research.

At Cambridge in 1970 he organised, with Michael Farringdon, a ‘Symposium on Uses of the Computer in Literary Research’, which attracted over 60 participants from Europe and