In the mid-1960s, the renowned art historian Jules Prown was jeered. He was presenting new research at the annual meeting of the College Art Association, the principal professional art historical association. Prown had used a mainframe in the Yale University computer lab to examine links between the socio-economic backgrounds of American painter John Singleton Copley’s sitters and their preferences in portraiture. His first slide—which showed an IBM punch card, then representative of cutting-edge computing technology—prompted some colleagues to boo. [1] Recounting this experience, Prown recalled:
At first consideration, the art historian and the computer would seem to be eccentric companions. Art historians are concerned with qualitative discriminations that reveal themselves slowly…to the investigations of a trained mind and sensitive eye. The computer…deals with quantitative computations at an unvarying pace with incredible speed. Its monotonous, inflexible, unthinking efficiency sends a shudder down the spine of any self-respecting art historian. [2]