Passwords : Philology, Security, Authentication

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. But Brian Lennon contends that these two domains, both concerned with authentication of text, should be viewed as contiguous. He argues that computing’s humanistic applications are as historically important as its mathematical and technical ones. 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. 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. 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 emphasizes the convergence of cryptology and philology in the modern digital password. Like philologists, hackers use computational methods to break open the secrets coded in text. 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. Thus does the historic overlap of cryptology and philology persist in an artifact of computing―passwords―that many of us use every day. Today we regard cryptology, the technical science of ciphers and codes, and philology, the humanistic study of human languages, as separate domains of activity. But the contiguity of these two domains is a historical fact with an institutional history. From the earliest documented techniques for the statistical analysis of text to the computational philology of early twenty-first-century digital humanities, what Brian Lennon calls "crypto-philology" has flourished alongside, and sometimes directly served, imperial nationalism and war. Lennon argues that while computing's humanistic applications are as historically important as its mathematical and technical origins, they are no less marked by the priorities of institutions devoted to signals intelligence. The convergence of philology with cryptology, Lennon suggests, is embodied in the password, an artifact of the linguistic history of computing that each of us uses every day to secure access to personal data and other resources. The password is a site where philology and cryptology, and their contiguous histories, meet in everyday life, as the natural-language dictionary becomes an instrument of the hacker's exploit.-- Provided by publisher Cryptology, the science of ciphers and codes, and philology, the study of languages, are typically understood as separate domains. But Brian Lennon contends that computing's humanistic applications, no less than its technical ones, are marked by the priorities of security and military institutions devoted to fighting wars and decoding intelligence.