Evidence suggests that their uniquely eclectic approach can be traced back to the Liverpool College of Art. Five decades after the breakup of the Beatles, the music of John Lennon and Paul McCartney continues to fascinate and inspire. Thus does the historic overlap of cryptology and philology persist in an artifact of computing-passwords-that many of us use every day.Lennon and McCartney: Painting with Sound explores the work of two of the most influential composers of the twentieth century. One of their preferred tools is the dictionary, that preeminent product of the philologist’s scholarly labor, which supplies the raw material for computational processing of natural language. Like philologists, hackers use computational methods to break open the secrets coded in text. Lennon emphasizes the convergence of cryptology and philology in the modern digital password. Throughout, Passwords makes clear the continuity between cryptology and philology, showing how the same practices flourish in literary study and in conditions of war. Lennon’s history encompasses the first documented techniques for the statistical analysis of text, early experiments in mechanized literary analysis, electromechanical and electronic code-breaking and machine translation, early literary data processing, the computational philology of late twentieth-century humanities computing, and early twenty-first-century digital humanities. What is more, these humanistic uses, no less than cryptological ones, are marked and constrained by the priorities of security and military institutions devoted to fighting wars and decoding intelligence. He argues that computing’s humanistic applications are as historically important as its mathematical and technical ones. But Brian Lennon contends that these two domains, both concerned with authentication of text, should be viewed as contiguous. Cryptology, the mathematical and technical science of ciphers and codes, and philology, the humanistic study of natural or human languages, are typically understood as separate domains of activity.
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