The imagination of Ada Lovelace: Experimental Humanities and Social Machines

This talk traces some paths the ideas of Ada Lovelace and her imagination of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine might have taken, focussing on music and creativity following Lovelace's idea that 'the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent’. Our work began at a symposium in 2015 to mark the 200th anniversary of Lovelace's birth, which initiated a series of experiments and demonstrations which include simulations of the Analytical Engine, use of a web-based music application, construction of interactive hardware, reproduction of earlier mathematical results using contemporary computational methods, and a musical performance based on crowdsourced algorithmic fragments. Recently we have extended our experiments to include the work of Charles Wheatstone, who deployed an electric telegraph in the same period – a contemporary network. These digital experiments bring insight and engagement with historical scenarios, and raise questions about the roles of algorithm and human. Our designed digital artefacts can be viewed as design fictions, or as critical works explicating our interpretation of Lovelace’s words: digital prototyping as a means of close-reading. We frame this as Experimental Humanities, in which we also apply the lens of Social Machines.

Bio
David De Roure is Professor of e-Research at University of Oxford and a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (the UK national institute for data science and artificial intelligence). He works closely with multiple disciplines including social sciences (studying social machines), humanities (computational musicology and experimental humanities), engineering and computer science (large scale distributed systems and social computing). He has extensive experience in hypertext, Web Science, Linked Data, and Internet of Things. Drawing on this broad interdisciplinary background he is a frequent speaker and writer on the future of digital scholarship. His previous roles include Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre and Strategic Advisor to the UK Economic and Social Research Council.