Passwords: Philology, Safety, Authentication

Cryptology, the mathematical and technical science of ciphers and codes, and philology, the humanistic examine of pure or human languages, are sometimes understood as separate domains of exercise. However Brian Lennon contends that these two domains, each involved with authentication of textual content, ought to be seen as contiguous. He argues that computing’s humanistic functions are as traditionally necessary as its mathematical and technical ones. What’s extra, these humanistic makes use of, at least cryptological ones, are marked and constrained by the priorities of safety and navy establishments dedicated to preventing wars and decoding intelligence.

Lennon’s historical past encompasses the primary documented strategies for the statistical evaluation of textual content, early experiments in mechanized literary evaluation, electromechanical and digital code-breaking and machine translation, early literary knowledge processing, the computational philology of late twentieth-century humanities computing, and early twenty-first-century digital humanities. All through, Passwords makes clear the continuity between cryptology and philology, displaying how the identical practices flourish in literary examine and in circumstances of warfare.

Lennon emphasizes the convergence of cryptology and philology within the trendy digital password. Like philologists, hackers use computational strategies to interrupt open the secrets and techniques coded in textual content. Considered one of their most popular instruments is the dictionary, that preeminent product of the philologist’s scholarly labor, which provides the uncooked materials for computational processing of pure language. Thus does the historic overlap of cryptology and philology persist in an artifact of computing―passwords―that many people use on daily basis.