This book addresses the problem of “which aspects of computing need to be taught to non-scientific people,” and how it can be done.

The book falls into three parts: firstly, it deals with essential issues such as the place of computing in tertiary education and reveals past experience of teaching computing for the arts. Secondly, it considers the tools, techniques and technological aids now available for computers, such as database design and text processing; whilst the third section investigates real-life studies which place computers in a variety of disciplines. The text highlights areas of interest and study such as art and design, and archaeology, which have hitherto lacked attention.

--From Inside Front Cover

The 14 papers in this book mostly share the following characteristics: they are shallow, and thus accessible to the naive reader; they are comprehensive with respect to work in Great Britain but largely ignore work in the rest of the world; and they guide one further through bibliographic references.

In the first substantive chapter, “Humanities and Computing,” Ennals deals with the basic nature of humanistic computing. It is a lofty and unspecific piece, drawing interestingly from the ideas of Levi-Strauss, Gödel, and Wittgenstein. S. Hockey’s “An Historical Perspective” takes us right up to the present in a very useful sketch. R. Trainor gives a sensible and insightful overview of computer-based education in “The Role of the Computer in University Teaching.” These three papers compose the introductory issues section.

Section 2 leads off with Heather’s paper, “New Technological Aids for CAL.” The emphasis here is on storage devices, from videotape to CD-ROM. Surprisingly, there is no corresponding paper on new aids for CAR (computer-aided research), which might deal with optical character recognition--the single greatest remaining need in humanistic computing. The three final papers in this section--“Principles of Database Design” by L. Burnard, “The Processing of Words” by S. Rahtz, and “The Art of Programming” by W. Hall--deal with database design, word processing and desktop publishing, respectively, as well as programming. Hall’s paper discusses computer literacy, Prolog, and database languages.

Section 3 is comprised of the remaining six papers:

• “Computers and History” by P. Adman

• “Literature” by T. N. Corns and M. E. Smith

• “Music Teaching and Computing” by A. Pearce

• “Art and Design” by A. Dyer, G. Howard, and C. Richards

• “Text-based Language Learning” by J. McGregor

• “Archaeologists and the Computer” by J. Richards.

Some sense of the superficiality of this book is signaled by the fact that it is only 188 pages long. All in all, this work is a useful but quite parochial glance at computing in the humanities.