Willard McCarty, Professor of Humanities Computing, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London, is the 2006 recipient of the Richard W. Lyman Award. Best known as a theoretician, McCarty is also steeped in the practical dimensions of the application of information technology to the problems of humanistic learning. In 1987 he founded Humanist, a digital medium designed to bring together scholars working on problems born of the intersection of computing and the humanities.

Also since the late 1980s he has tested his approach to the digital humanities on Ovid's Metamorphoses, encoding the text and working with a series of research assistants to better understand what encoding might contribute to literary criticism and the humanities as a whole. In his newest book, Humanities Computing, McCarty explains how and why humanities computing is in itself an intellectual humanistic field of inquiry.

Professor McCarty delivered the following address at the 2006 ASC conference.