“It used to take students four or five classes to analyze the total form of a sonnet. Now, once the sonnet is key punched and fed into the computer, its form can be analyzed in only two minutes,” marvelled Dr. Edward Kline, former Director of Graduate Studies in English at Notre Dame.

It was 1973, and humanities scholars were just beginning to explore what computers could make possible for literary study. Dr. Kline’s enthusiasm in a Scholastic interview now offers a striking contrast to professors’ attitudes toward AI today.

Before Claude, ChatGPT or even Google, there were key punch machines and mainframe computers. Kline explained that a keypunch machine, “very similar to a typewriter,” punched information onto physical cards, which were then fed into a computer for an analysis. “I think their future is bright,” declared Kline.

What pushed computers further into the humanities at Notre Dame was PL/I, a programming language that worked with text, and LINGUASLEUTH, a program for poetry and prose. Developed with Notre Dame programmers Kook Huber and Marlyn Ritchie, LINGUASLEUTH acted like an early literary search engine: It could count words, identify patterns and rhymes, compare writing styles and recognize authorship and influence.

Still, excitement existed alongside an age-old fear: machine takeover. Asked whether computerized analysis could “kill emotional response, the true nature of literature,” Kline and Huber were confident. Kline argued computers were incapable of thinking, while Huber added that computers could analyze form but “never give the meaning of a work.”

Back then, there seemed to be a clear line between the computer’s role in assisting learning and the learner’s role in thinking critically. Today, that line has blurred, leading many classes to go technology-free or prohibit AI altogether. Kline’s interview highlights that changing attitude, as what was once a question of how much technology could assist learning has now become a question of how much it could inhibit it.