Ada Lovelace: Creative computing and an experimental humanities

Pip Willcox and David De Roure give a presentation on Ada Lovelace,
one of the early pioneers in computing. In the 200 years since Ada
Lovelace’s birth, she has been celebrated, neglected, and taken up
as a symbol for any number of causes and ideas. A symposium to mark
the 200th anniversary of her birth narrated many of these,
including accounts of her generative relationship with Charles
Babbage and his Difference and Analytical Engines. This talk traces
some of the paths the idea of Lovelace has taken, what basis they
have in her life, and what her reception tells us about our own
scholarship and society. It goes on to describe our experimental
work responding to Lovelace and Babbage, and to the operatic ‘Ada
sketches’ of composer Emily Howard. We created a Web application to
produce music from maths through programming a digital simulation
of the Analytical Engine, after Lovelace’s idea that "the engine
might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any
degree of complexity or extent.