Depending on how aware one is regarding the early perils of debugging,
it's not difficult to understand exactly how valuable even a single hour on a computer was for
researchers at the time of the MIT Computation Center Archives. At a time when computers were
the answer to integrals humanly impossible to compute, even an hour was worth over a thousand dollars
in 1956 (that's around $12,000 today!). The great expense of using a computer was further
compounded by scarcity of time. Thus, the continued investment of computers in social and
human studies, from the 1930s until today, spoke volumes about the values of people of
the time.
Because of limited computational resources, projects needed to be thoughtfully done and
formally conceived before scholars even had access to the machines. Beyond that, however,
mathematical inquiries and social investigations were weighted the same, as leaders in
the field of computation understood the inherent worth behind both. In 1957 in
particular, Director Philip M. Morse kept up an extended correspondence with the Social
Science Research Council expressing his interest in the usage of the "high speed digital
computor[sic] for social science research" (Pendleton, source). Morse
himself had noted that the "social sciences are an extremely promising field for machine
utilization." (source)
Today, the idea of Digital Humanities is sometimes thought of as something new. But in
actuality, what we see is not a deviation from the "typical" uses of
computers in the hard sciences, but a return to the traditional uses of computers,
all the way back in the 1950s. The investment of technology in humanism had seemed just
as significant then as it does now, at an age when the promise of artificial intelligence
is at the forefront of human technological advancement.