1 Historians, Supercomputing, and the U.S. Manuscript Census

Though the supercomputing revolution has yet to have a significant impact on the hu-manities, it promises to do so in the near future. Technological improvements now make it possible to convert old records, such as U.S. manuscript census returns, to machine-readable form. This will allow historians and other social scientists to de-velop a better understanding of our nation’s past. The use of supercomputers to further humanistic research will help reintegrate the scientific and humanistic communities, which will be a significant accomplishment in its own right. Hopefully the general public will also be able to participate in the supercomputmg revolution through hu-manistic endeavors like the U.S. census database project. Keywords: manuscript cen-sus, history supercomputmg, optical scanning, database. While writing this paper, one of the authors was reminded of the words of a deacon from his mother’s Baptist church back home in Ninety Six, South Carolina. Since the preacher was unable to attend the choir’s barbecue, the director turned to Bubba Summers and asked that Bubba please give the blessing. In his unmistakable bari-tone, Bubba intoned, &dquo;Since there are no preachers here, let us give thanks.&dquo; Because we are writing for a group of scientists and com-puter specialists, we have not dealt with the subtleties of many of the historical issues discussed in this paper and are therefore thank-ful that no historians are present. Historians work differently from scientists. Both use laboratories, but a historian’s laboratory is the record of the past, and a historian’s creation is the memory of civilization. Historians have traditionally relied on diaries, letters, newspapers, and other written sources that have been preserved. Yet, only a small group of elite and middle class generally left such written records, records which have greatly preju-diced the interpretation of history Partly as a reaction to this bias, beginning in the 196os and continuing today some historians, work-ing on diverse topics and using new methods and approaches, devel-oped a movement that came to be identified as the &dquo;new&dquo; social his