CCT announces retirement of Professor Martin J. Irvine, Founding Director of the CCT program
It is with bittersweet feelings that we announce the retirement of Professor Martin J. Irvine, Founding Director of Georgetown’s Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) Program, and a member of the Georgetown community for 38 years, whose vision and leadership helped shape one of the most innovative interdisciplinary programs in the university and the first graduate program of its kind in the country. We would like to give you a window into the many contributions that Professor Irvine has shared with CCT and the Georgetown community.
Professor Irvine’s Living Legacy
Professor Irvine joined Georgetown as a professor in the English Department in 1987, but he soon expanded his research and teaching across several fields. For over three decades, Professor Irvine has been a pioneering scholar, teacher, and builder of intellectual communities. Following discussions with the Graduate Dean in 1994, he was appointed in 1995 to lead a steering committee of faculty members from eight university departments to create the CCT program almost from scratch, since Georgetown did not have engineering or communication departments, and then only a small computer science department. The goal was to develop a vision that built on Georgetown’s historic mission, existing resources, and our Washington location for creating a new kind of interdisciplinary graduate program for a newly emerging communications and information world being shaped by computers and the Internet. The program would focus on the inter-relations among the domains of information and communications, digital media, the internet, and the future of computing technologies in their complex social, cultural, and political contexts.
CCT began with its first class of students in fall 1996 and has now graduated close to 2,000 students. As Director from 1995-2001, Professor Irvine worked tirelessly on building CCT and seeking out external and internal resources for creating a foundation for future growth, including working with Georgetown administrators for establishing CCT as a faculty tenure home in 2000. He also worked countless hours supporting CCT students, and in the early 2000s, he helped found CCT’s graduate student journal gnovis, which has continued to create opportunities for students to publish their research and provide a platform for other students for 25 years. With Professor Irvine’s leadership, CCT’s approach to interdisciplinary studies has become a model for many other programs around the world.
For Professor Irvine, merging computing and the humanities began while working on his dissertation at Harvard in 1981-82, where he learned UNIX and text processing and became the first liberal arts Ph.D. at Harvard to write a dissertation on a computer. His studies in early languages and literature (including Greek, Latin, and Old English) and the history of ideas would soon converge with learning more about computing and programming. Long before the “digital humanities” became a recognized field, Professor Irvine was already working at the frontier of computing and the humanities in the early 1990s as a member of the Computing in the Humanities group that connected scholars and projects in universities across the US and the UK. Well before most of us knew what the Internet would become, he was already building it. In 1993, he set up the first Web server at Georgetown to host The Labyrinth, a website for classical, medieval, and Renaissance texts and images in digital form. The Labyrinth web project is now widely recognized as the first interdisciplinary humanities website in the world. The Labyrinth, now archived as part of Digital Georgetown by the Library, is an early example of using the web as a global scholarly resource and platform for building communities of teachers and students. During the early Labyrinth project years, Professor Irvine also taught courses in Latin as an adjunct professor in the Classics Department, and learned digital text encoding and digital media production. He is also the first professor at Georgetown to begin using the web for courses and student materials (in 1994). He continues to design and code custom websites for all his courses, and composes introductions with online resources for each course unit for students to access anytime.
His contributions to the Georgetown community extend far beyond the classroom and his own web projects. In the mid-1990s, he served on many university committees to build awareness of the importance of the Internet and emerging digital media for teaching, learning, and research. In 1998-2001, he also served as Associate Vice President for Technology Strategy in the Office of the CIO to help create a bridge between the university’s IT organization and the needs of academic programs. In this role, he did extensive fundraising, targeting major corporations in technology and communications, to fund CCT (for student scholarships and a computer lab), and for Main Campus technology infrastructure needs. During these years, he helped shape the university’s early digital infrastructure and computing resources. An important outcome of Professor Irvine’s efforts as Associate VP in the CIO’s Office was being a motivator of the collaborative effort with the Provost, Dean, CCT, and Randy Bass to develop CNDLS as a unit to support faculty applications of the Internet and computing technologies for teaching and learning. CCT provided funding for the initial student employees at CNDLS, and CCT continues to fund a CNDLS scholarship each year to continue that relationship.
Professor Irvine’s scholarship—from The Making of Textual Culture to recent influential essays on semiotics, computing, media theory, and remix in the visual arts—has influenced generations of researchers and students. His earlier book, contributions to books, and articles in medieval studies and cultural theory continue to be among the most highly cited in their fields. During his years with CCT, Professor Irvine has continued to expand his own interdisciplinary learning and research in philosophy, linguistics, computer system design, information theory, semiotics, AI, and computer languages. His recent publications and conference papers are based on new archival research in the unpublished papers of C. S. Peirce and on primary documents from 17th-century mathematicians like Pascal and Leibniz for recovering the central ideas in the history of computing. In a full circuit of interdisciplinarity, Professor Irvine’s expertise in Latin, French, and archival methods has prepared him to do a new history of computing from the earliest sources to the present. This research is the focus of his new book project on the intellectual history of computing from Pascal to AI.
Professor Irvine’s greatest legacy lies in the communities he created over the past 30+ years. In the early 1990s, he helped create a new environment for scholars and faculty interested in learning Internet computing and digital media for applications in teaching, learning, and research, an environment that continues to today. He developed CCT through an ambitious collaboration across multiple departments and administrative units, helping to establish a program that has become a model for Georgetown’s commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry and intellectual experimentation. Through all of this, Professor Irvine has remained deeply committed to students—mentoring them, inspiring them, and encouraging them to think across boundaries between disciplines, media, and ideas.
In his courses over the last 10 years, Professor Irvine has focused on the intellectual history of computing, the design principles for computer systems, digital data, and software, and the development of Artificial Intelligence. In his Intro to AI course, he continues to help students embrace and understand not just the “how to” for using recent AI technologies, but the “why”, the reasons behind the design principles, and why the technologies belong to everyone.
As Professor Irvine retires, the program he founded and the generations of students he taught stand as a testament to his vision, curiosity, and intellectual generosity. As he transitions to retirement as an emeritus professor, he will continue to be a valued member of CCT and the Georgetown community, and he will be available for teaching and mentoring students in the years ahead.
We thank him for the ideas he sparked, the institutions he helped build, and the many students whose lives he has influenced.