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Research Triangle Park, N.C.  The National Humanities Center will present Willard McCarty with the 2006 Richard W. Lyman Award in a ceremony on May 17 at the New York Public Library. The Lyman Award recognizes McCarty's contributions to and leadership within the field of the digital humanities.

McCarty, reader in humanities computing at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, an academic department in the School of Humanities at King's College London, "is a doer, a thinker, and perhaps a wizard," says James O'Donnell, provost of Georgetown University and chair of the Lyman Award selection committee. "His explorations in the practical and theoretical dimensions of the application of information technology to the problems of humanistic learning have made him a widely recognized international leader."

McCarty is best known as a theoretician of the digital humanities. "We tend to construe computing in the humanities in terms we understand, as an efficient helper or mechanical aid to existing fields like history, literature or philosophy," says McCarty. Instead, he hopes that the digital humanities will be recognized as its own field, perhaps unique in kind, with a coherent set of academic problems worth tackling.

In his newest book, Humanities Computing (Palgrave, 2005), McCarty states his case, explaining how and why humanities computing is in itself an intellectual humanistic field of inquiry. Humanities Computing "attempts and, I think, achieves what no one else in the field has attempted—to theorize the new field as a domain of intellectual inquiry rather than as a technological appendage to scholarship," says Stanley Katz, professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University.

Practitioner as Well as Theoretician

McCarty's work in the field began in practice. In the late 1980's, he started working with Ovid's Metamorphoses, encoding the text and working with a series of research assistants to better understand what encoding might contribute to literary theory. The product of that project is a body of work known as The Analytical Onomasticon.

In 1987, McCarty founded "Humanist," a digital medium bringing together scholars working on problems born of the intersection of computing and the humanities. "Humanist" has grown from a small e-mail listserv to an international digital resource for all humanities scholars with interests in humanities computing. McCarty has remained moderator of the list, a role not unlike editor of an online journal, says J. F. Burrows, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Newcastle (Australia).

As moderator, "McCarty opens new lines of inquiry and furthers the ideas of others," says Burrows. Through the list, "he brings together a new generation of scholars from around the world."

McCarty notes that "Humanist" is a springboard for the ideas of others as well as his own. The electronic resource has helped his own theorizing by providing a place to gather the opinions of others in his field.

O'Donnell adds that McCarty's "wizardry depends as well on his role as host of the long-running (now almost twenty years) intellectual salon that its denizens know just as "Humanist"—the e-mail list of all lists, a second home to many of us, a place where we listen and speak and think and ruminate and inform ourselves, and go back out into the world better prepared to make sense of it and to make our own contributions."

"Not everyone realizes that humanities computing is a theoretically coherent or at least cohesible practice in its own right," says McCarty. "Theorizing about the digital humanities is a way of articulating what we can all see happening around us."

Of all the benefits that the Lyman Award confers, McCarty says he is most excited about the new attention that it brings to the field of humanities computing as a whole.

"Overall, my passion has been to deal with some large-scale questions about what we are doing with computing," says McCarty. Winning the Lyman Award, he hopes, will cast new light on both the practical and the theoretical side of the digital humanities.

The Richard W. Lyman Award

The Lyman Award honors Richard W. Lyman, who was president of Stanford University from 1970-80 and of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1980-88, and is made possible through the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation. Recipients receive awards of $25,000.

Past winners of the Lyman Award include: John Unsworth, dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and founding director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia; Jerome McGann, John Stewart Bryan University Professor and editor of The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive, at the University of Virginia; Roy Rosenzweig, College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History and Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for History and New Media, at George Mason University; and Robert K. Englund, professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and principal investigator of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative at the University of California at Los Angeles.

McGann and Rosenzweig also serve with Unsworth on the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure.

The National Humanities Center

The National Humanities Center is the nation's only private, independent institute for advanced study in the humanities. Since 1978, nearly 1,000 scholars from across the United States and around the world have researched and written 900 books during fellowships at the Center's Research Triangle Park facility. The Center also sponsors award-winning programs through which leading scholars work with high school and college teachers to improve teaching in the nation's schools and colleges, and holds conferences, seminars, and other public programs to raise and explore basic issues affecting human beings and their societies.