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Association for Computers and the Humanities |
by Terence Harpold
A special session on hypertext, "Hypertext, Hypermedia: Defining a Fictional Form," will be held at the 1992 Modern Languages Association Convention. The session, Special Session #119, is scheduled for Tuesday, December 29, 1992, at 12:00 noon. Participants are Terence Harpold, University of Pennsylvania (chair); Michael Joyce, Jackson Community College; Carolyn Guyer, Leonardo; Judy Malloy, Manistee, MI; and Stuart Moulthrop, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Until recently, critical discussion of hypertext has tended to focus on problems of implementation, psychology and epistemology--the issues raised by hypertext as a kind of writing, independent of its subject matter. Little attention has been paid to the distinct characteristics of hypertext as a fictional form. This session will be devoted to a discussion of hypertext fiction (and, more generally, electronic fiction) as an emerging mode of discourse in the late age of print.
The panel includes individuals from both academia and the growing community of artists working in electronic text and multimedia. In addition to the sizable body of theory and criticism they represent, each of the panelists is well- known for his or her electronic fiction. We expect a lively dialogue between the panelists (and with the audience), reflecting the variety of strategies at play in hypertext theory and practice.
Michael Joyce's paper, "Hypertextual Rhythms (The Momentary Advantage of Our Awkwardness)," will address the historical moment of recent hypertext fiction. He will argue that the common perception that hypertext is an awkward and opaque mode of discourse actually makes it easier for us to grasp its historical significance. Before the novelty of the electronic medium fades, and electronic text assumes the transparency that "conventional" text now has, we can understand it as a discrete representational form.
Judy Malloy's paper, "Between the Narrator and the Narrative (The Disorder of Memory)," will draw on several of her "narrabases" ("narrative databases") to discuss problems of narrative "truth" in radically non-sequential electronic texts. The randomness and interactivity of hypertext fiction make it possible to vary the reader's experience with each reading. The essential disorder of the fictional worlds that emerge mimics, she contends, the disordered yet linked structure of human memory.
Carolyn Guyer's paper, "Buzz-Daze Jazz and the Quotidian Stream (Attempts to Filet a Paradox)," explores the structure of narrative temporality in hypertext fiction. She will argue that hypertextual narratives are "complex mixtures" (Deleuze and Guattari), in which figure and ground are shifted arhythmically, in a chaotic or fractal way. The result is an oscillating transformation of the linear temporality of traditional fictional forms.
Stuart Moulthrop's paper, "Hypertext as War Machine," situates hypertext fiction as an inherently politicized byproduct of the late capitalist event-state of spectacle, simulation, and multinational aggression. Focusing on John McDaid's "Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse" and his own "Victory Garden," he asks whether the deformations of print narrative in these fictions provide an alternative to the semiotics of the spectacle, or represent (in Hakim Bey's term) merely "festal" digressions from the discourse of disembodied power.
For more information on this 1992 MLA special session, please communicate with:
Terence Harpold 420 Williams Hall University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 tharpold@mail.sas.upenn.edu
Over the last few years interest has been growing in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). The role of the computer in the classroom is being investigated both from the pedagogical aspect and from the programmer's point of view.
The "big dream" for some is the creation of an `Intelligent' Tutoring System (ITS), one that would incorporate the techniques of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and that would be flexible enough for the teacher of Modern Languages to use without a specialist knowledge of computing.
Until an Artificial Intelligent machine has been perfected, however, there is a need to explore other techniques as well and to test them in learning situations.
It has become apparent from conferences we have organized at Exeter, and elsewhere, and from correspondence with colleagues at home and overseas, that it is essential that there be an easily accessible means of information distribution about current research and its findings.
To facilitate an interchange of ideas and knowledge, we have decided to create a new periodical which will be devoted to all aspects of CALL: e.g.
The first number was published in 1990 by Intellect Books, Suite 2, 108/110 London Road, Oxford, OX3 9AW, U.K., to whom subscription requests (Personal 30 pounds sterling, Institutional 60 pounds sterling) should be addressed.
Sole distributors outside Europe are: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 355 Chestnut Street, New Jersey 07648, U.S.A. Researchers into any field of CALL are invited to submit articles.
General Editor: Keith Cameron (Exeter) Associate Editors: Jeremy Fox (East Anglia) Henry Hamburger (George Mason, Virginia) Masoud Yazdani (Exeter) Advisory Board: Gordon Burgess (Aberdeen) Stephano Cerri (Milan) Francoise Demaiziere (CNEAO, Paris) Brian Farrington (Aberdeen) Ralph Ginsberg (Pennsylvania) Gerard Kempen (Nijmegen) Rex Last (Dundee) Dana Paramskas (Guelph) German Ruiperez (Madrid) Camilla Schwind (Marseille) Dieter Wolff (Duesseldorf)
The Journal Editor
Details of forthcoming conferences or points to be raised in the Forum section should be sent to:
Keith Cameron (General Editor) Computer Assisted Language Learning Queen's Building, The University Exeter, EX4 4QH, U.K. cameron@exeter.ac.uk
Volume 5, parts 1-2, appearing shortly, will include: "HyperCard and The Development of Translation and Vocabulary Skills," "A Hypertextual Approach to Teaching French," "Keep Smiling! The Happy Hypertext," "Going AI, Foundations of ICALL," and "An Evaluation of Grammar-Checking Programs as Self-Help Learning Aids for Learners of English as a Foreign Language."
This summer the Netherlands Historical Data Archive opened its brand new Scan/OCR Laboratory. With a special grant from the Dutch government it was able to install four major 486- stations with two HP Scanjets, a large A3-scanner and a Book-scanner that can read books in an angle of 60 degrees.
The following OCR systems have been installed: Kurzweil K5200, Omnipage Professional, Recognita, LiOCR, ProLector and Type Reader. Other OCR packages, with special capabilities for the optical recognition of historical documents, which often require specific techniques such as, for example, image-enhancement, will be purchased in the near future.
The Netherlands Historical Data Archive hopes to serve two purposes with the Scan-OCR Laboratory. First, the Historical community in the Netherlands is served with a service institution where historians can scan and read their source documents or have it done against reasonable prices.
Secondly, the NHDA does research in the special techniques and processing that optimize OCR results when scanning old or damaged documents.
The retrieval of the scanned information is also included in this process: texts can be "piped" into special text retrieval software whereas numerical data will be stored in database structures.
The official opening of the Scan/OCR Laboratory will take place in September of this year. For more information, communicate with:
Netherlands Historical Data Archive
P.O. Box 9515
2300 RA Leiden, Netherlands
Phone: (31) 71-272719/272228
Fax: (31) 71-272615
R. van Horik
rvhorik@rulcri.leidenuniv.nl
L.J. Touwen
lettxc@rulmvs.leidenuniv.nl
Lou Burnard and Alan Morrison of the Oxford Text Archive have recently circulated a new version of the instructions for reaching the OTA through the anonymous ftp process.
Ftp to the following address in either of its forms:
black.ox.ac.uk
129.67.1.165
Once you've reached the location you'll be prompted for a name. Type in anonymous. When you're asked for a password, enter your e-mail address. If all is well, you'll be told "Guest login ok: access restrictions apply."
Retrieving the List of Holdings
Start your search by moving to the OTA directory. Do this by entering the command:
cd /ota
Then, to see a list of all the files and directories available to you, enter the command:
ls
Another command, ls -l, does the same thing, but gives you additional information about file size, date of modification, and other matters.
To get a list of the holdings of the OTA, type in the command:
get textarchive.list
The file will be transferred immediately to your own machine as a file with a similar name.
Other Useful Files
Other useful files which you can retrieve are textarchive.info, which contains general information about the Archive, textarchive.sgml, which contains the same information as the file textarchive.list, but in SGML form, and textarchive.form, an OTA order form which is also included in the file textarchive.info.
When you've finished with your file transfer, remember to sign off and return to your own machine by entering the command "bye."
Oxford Text Archive Oxford University Computing Services 13 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 6NN, U.K. Phone: +44 (865) 273238 Fax: +44 (865) 273275 archive@ox.ac.uk
by Mary Dee Harris
The 30th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics was held June 28 through July 2, 1992, at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. It was a fitting location for the conference since the faculty at the University of Delaware and many of their graduate students have done important work in the field.
The conference began with two half-days of tutorials and proceeded for two and a half more days, with one afternoon devoted to student papers. The conference covered a broad range of topics, but included a number of papers showing the interest in large text corpora, an interest that overlaps with the humanities computing community. There were four tutorials; two on linguistics-oriented topics--Tree Adjunction and Situation Semantics--and two on text-oriented topics: Statistics for Computational Linguistics and Very Large Text Corpora.
Many humanities computing scholars will empathize with the need to learn statistics for dealing with textual material. This tutorial, presented by William A. Gale and Joseph B. Kruskal of AT&T Bell Laboratories, focused on statistical techniques found to be useful in linguistic research, as shown in their description:
"The review start[ed] with some very basic tools, such as methods for estimating the frequency of a token (word or n- gram), especially in the important but subtle case when the token has not occurred in the training sample. [They] emphasize[d] the sometimes underappreciated importance of uncertainty (variability, standard deviation) of estimates. The foundations of the Bayesian approach to statistics [were] reviewed, because the approach has been found useful in such widely different contexts as author identification, information retrieval, and sense disambiguation. A general orientation to such broadly useful tools as clustering, factor analysis/principal components analysis, and multidimensional scaling [was] included." (Proceedings, p. ix)
Interestingly, many of these topics were covered in the Computing in the Humanities course I took at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1960s, taught by a forward- looking computer scientist interested in language, Nell Dale.
The tutorial on Very Large Text Corpora with the sub-title, "What You Can Do with Them, and How to Do It," was described as follows:
"This tutorial aims to give researchers who are interested in working with large text corpora the information and the resources they need to get started. We will discuss: (1) what corpora are available, and how to get them; (2) practical, legal and technical issues in getting new material; (3) availability of annotated corpora; (4) software for simple linguistic annotation of unrestricted text--lemmatizers, taggers, parsers--what is available, and how to create your own; (5) how to do efficient machine- aided annotation; (6) how to index and search large (annotated or plain) corpora efficiently; (7) examples of research based on large corpora.
"Discussion of the design and implementation of a sample of useful and available software will be featured. We will provide a bibliography and a guide to available corpora and software." (Proceedings, p. ix)
The handout that accompanied the presentation had the subtitle, "Wrestling with a Text Corpus on Unix," with subtopics: (1) what an annotated text corpus is like, (2) how to get one, (3) how to build one, (4) how to search for things in one, and (5) how to count things in one--a somewhat different selection from the promised agenda.
However, the presenters, Mitch Marcus and Mark Liberman from the University of Pennsylvania, covered many interesting topics. Much of their presentation focused on work done in conjunction with the Penn Treebank project, directed by Marcus, and the Linguistic Data Consortium, directed by Liberman and sponsored by the U.S. Linguist Data Consortium, which was recently funded by DARPA for over $5 million to collect annotated and unannotated speech and text.
They described different stages of a corpora: (1) raw text divided into sentences, (2) text tagged with part of speech, (3) text annotated with skeletal syntactic structures, and (4) merged text derived by combining the annotations of (2) and (3), and reviewed some of the problems of automatically achieving these stages, beginning with tokenization and sentence division.
The Penn Treebank project has developed a small set of tags for identifying part of speech, only 34 tags plus punctuation in comparison to many more for the other available corpora: 87 for the Brown Corpus, 135 for the LOB Corpus, and so on.
They argued that a smaller tag set improves recoverability and consistency, claiming thereby to use a "pre-theoretical level of description," an eminently arguable point among many researchers.
Marcus described the Penn Treebank project in some detail, providing the goals, the methods, and the progress made to date. After that, he moved into detailed examples of UNIX shell utilities that can be used for processing text: grep, hgrep, fmt, etc.
After explaining data search and retrieval, filtering, reformatting, indexing, and concordancing, he admitted that UNIX could not handle co-occurrence, but argued that that was not necessary to their purposes.
He also described some `lex' programs created by converting UNIX commands into C code. He maintained that the use of UNIX commands was an overall efficiency improvement in that it reduces human time in exchange for inefficient computer processing for tasks that usually need to be done only once. All in all, the tutorial was a worthwhile experience.
The conference technical sessions covered the usual range of topics from the mathematics of language (the focus of a new ACL Special Interest Group, SIGMOL) to discourse analysis, with a strong focus on probabilistic methods for parsing and interpretation. As has been the trend for several years, more and more papers reflect work in discourse analysis and retrieval of information from texts.
One of the invited talks was "Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, and All That," a joint effort by Karen Sparck-Jones of Cambridge University and Martin Kay of Xerox PARC and Stanford University. Sparck-Jones began by discussing Information Retrieval (IR) as a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task, i.e. retrieving information from textual materials.
She outlined the issues in document retrieval using indexing--the standard IR approach. The aim is to design an indexing language based on terms and their relations to improve user performance for precision and recall in a large file with small sets of relevant information.
Kay discussed whether and how NLP could contribute to IR, in particular the extent to which user requests can be transformed into meaningful queries--a problem requiring more than linguistic capability. Clearly more research is needed in this important area.
The other invited talk by Don Walker, "Reflections and Projections," covered his reminiscences of the many years of his work in computational linguistics and some ideas of where the field is headed in the future. The talk was essentially a history of the field since Walker has been such a central figure in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence since the early 1960s.
The ACL Executive Council has selected an Associate Secretary/Treasurer beginning this year to assist Don Walker and to prepare for Don's eventual retirement from that post. Judith Klavens is at Columbia University (klavans@cs.columbia.edu).
ACL-93 will be held at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, from June 22-26, 1993. It is scheduled to immediately precede the Linguistics Society of American's Summer Institute to be held at OSU beginning June 28, 1993. Terry Patten of OSU (patten@cis.ohio-state.edu) will handle local arrangements.
The next conference on Applied Natural Language Processing is expected to be held in the United States within two years. ACL'94 will be held at NMSU, June 27-July 1, 1994, with Yorick Wilkes organizing it.
For further information about ACL, please communicate with:
Don Walker (ACL) Bellcore, MRE 2A379 445 South Street, Box 1910 Morristown, NJ 07960-1910, U.S.A. 201/829-4312 walker@flash.bellcore.com
by Toni Dorfman & Marilyn Carbonell
In the afternoon of the first day, two and three to a terminal in the basement of Cockefair Hall at the University of Missouri--Kansas City, they plunged on-line into OCLC FirstSearch. Professor of History Carla L. Klausner discovered that her book on the Seljuk vezirate had been published in Farsi.
"Hey," she said, "I don't remember any royalties." This was one of many discoveries on the UMKC campus May 12-15, 1992. Was it the first conference on computing ever convened in this country by a university's arts and humanities faculty?
Jane Rosenberg of the National Endowment for the Humanities thought so. She led a session of the Humanities and Arts Computing Conference, or HACC, on May 15.
Rosenberg, an assistant director at NEH's Division of Research Programs, took the capacity crowd through a mock panel evaluation of two hypothetical proposals that incorporated computing.
Whether it was the first of its kind or not, HACC was conceived with both practical and political aims: to demonstrate to faculty and administrators alike the need for computing in the arts and humanities.
It started in January when Linda Voigts, Curators Professor of English at UMKC, was serving in Washington, D.C., on an NEH panel to evaluate two competitions for funding. She discovered that the NEH now required any proposal that did not include computer use in research and dissemination to defend that omission. "That policy reflects," she wrote in February to the faculty, "the present state of scholarship in the humanities."At UMKC the new five-year plan stipulates an increase of $2.5 million a year in external funding for research. So to Marvin Querry, the acting vice chancellor for academic affairs at UMKC, the need was self-evident.
In March he and Ronald A. MacQuarrie, the acting dean of graduate faculties and research, approved $3,600 to fund a conference on the humanities and the arts for a projected fifty people. "The technology is for everybody, not simply for scientists and mathematicians," said Querry.
Each registrant paid a $5 fee, plus $10 for three lunches, half the cost of which was borne by the Office of Research Administration. Even with a turnout 68% over original estimates--84 participants instead of 50--and with a packet of goodies for each (including bibliographies, electronic mail tips, file transfer protocols, and a Xerox of "Zen and the Art of the Internet" by Brendan P. Kehoe), the conference stayed close to its projected budget.
More than half the participants were from the College of Arts and Sciences (faculty and staff from English, history, art, foreign languages, philosophy, theatre, and continuing education).
The conferees also included seven university librarians, four faculty from the Conservatory of Music, a rogue registrant from the School of Pharmacy ("Yes, but I'm working on a Ed. Spec.," Rodger Palmer said), people from academic affairs, computing services, and other institutions, and 15 graduate students.
Computing savvy among them ranged from high to nonexistent. So the range in offerings was wide.
A highlight for all, however, was the keynote address by Susan Hockey, formerly of the Oxford University Computing Service and now director of the Princeton-Rutgers Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities.
Hockey made the topic of electronic texts clear even to those who the day before had confused Snobol with a sports event. Afterward, she fielded the most intricate technical questions with aplomb.
Other highlights included a lab demonstration of the computer in musical composition by James Mobberley, 1992 Guggenheim fellow on the Conservatory faculty; an introduction to E-mail by Gary McDonald of the UMKC computing services; and a talk by Jane Lago, managing editor of the University of Missouri Press, on preparing electronic manuscripts for publication.
Also included were workshops by Ann Thorne, of Missouri Western College, and Patrick Peebles and David Weinglass, of UMKC, in preparing camera-ready copy, and by Louise Sherby and Kathleen Schweitzberger, of the UMKC Libraries, in on- line information systems.
Scheduled after grades were due, HACC attracted a relaxed constituency. "One of the unexpected bonuses of the three days," said W. Clark Hendley, associate dean, "was the ample opportunity to talk and interact with colleagues about research matters generally."
By Friday HACC was pervaded by the fervency of the newly converted. Every HACCer was convinced of the necessity for computer competence in research in the arts and humanities. A dozen faculty since have requested VAX accounts.
"From the enthusiastic response to this conference," wrote Professor Klausner afterward, "it is very evident that many of us share the same concerns as the organizing committee about the need to become familiar with and to use the latest technology." As Vice Chancellor Querry put it, "Without the equipment and the know-how, you can't get into the game."
by Paul Fortier
The ACH will be organizing two sessions at the 1992 MLA Convention, to be held December 27-30, 1992, in New York, around Mark Olsen's position paper proposing a new direction for computer-aided studies of literature.
by Mark Olsen
Both sessions are organized around responses to Olsen's theses, and ample time has been set aside for audience participation.
Session I: Tuesday, December 29, 1:45-3:00 Morgan Suite, Hilton 1. "Computer-Aided Literary Studies: Addressing the Particularities of Medieval Texts," by Gina L. Greco (Portland State U.) and Peter Shoemaker (Princeton U.). 2. "Have it Your Way--and Mine: The Theory of Styles," by Ellen Spolsky (Bar-Ilan U., Israel). Respondants: Mark V. Olsen (U. of Chicago) and Chuck Henry (Vassar Coll.) Session II: Wednesday, December 30, 3:30-4:45 Riverside Ballroom, Sheraton 1. "An Argument for Single-Author and Other Focused Studies Using Quantitative Criticism," Joel D. Goldfield (Plymouth State Coll.) 2. "Literary Texts and the State of the Language: The Role of the Computer," Dennis Taylor (Boston Coll.) Respondants: Mark V. Olsen (U. of Chicago) and Stephen N. Matsuba (York U., Toronto)
by Michael Sperberg-McQueen & Lou Burnard
We are happy to announce that a new fascicle of the second draft of the TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange is now available for public comment.
As readers will recall, TEI P2 is being distributed for comment as a series of fascicles or part-issues, each containing a complete chapter of P2, as and when the texts were available. (File TEI ED J8, "Obtaining the Second Version of the TEI Guidelines," has the details, if you have forgotten).
The present fascicle contains chapter 22 of P2, which discusses the TEI header. The TEI header serves as the bibliographic description of the machine-readable text.
In addition, it provides a more detailed description of the encoded work ensuring that the electronic text, its source, its encoding, and its revisions are thoroughly documented.
Some minor modifications of the expected overall contents of the Guidelines are also visible in this fascicle's overall table of contents for TEI P2; a more thorough revision of the expected contents will be distributed shortly, as soon as we can agree on a few more details.
Other fascicles will be announced as they become available. Thank you for your patience!
Texts of P2 are being made available in a number of different electronic formats. These include plain screen- readable text (filetype DOC), LaTeX (filetype TEX), PostScript (filetype PS) and of course SGML (filetypes P2X and REF).
To get electronic copies of this fascicle from the TEI-L fileserver, all you need do is send an ordinary e-mail note to the address listserv@uicvm (or listserv@uicvm.uic.edu), containing the line "GET P222 xxx" (where xxx is one of the filetypes mentioned above).
The documents you request will be returned to you automatically as e-mail messages. Beware! some of the files are quite large, and so may be delayed. You will also receive an automatic notification that the file is on its way to you. (If you receive something illegible in a "Listserv packed format," please contact one of the editors directly to see about getting you the file in a more useful form.) If the filetype you want is not available, contact us directly.
The same files are available via anonymous FTP from the SGML Project at the University of Exeter. To access these files, your computer system must be on the Internet. If it is, you should be able to give the command:
ftp sgml1.ex.ac.uk
or ftp 144.173.6.61
When you are connected to the Exeter SGMLbox, type the following commands:
cd tei\p2\drafts
get p222.xxx
where xxx is the filetype as mentioned above; note however that the filename must be given in all lower-case letters. The files may also be obtained from the Markup-L Listserv fileserver in Germany, and from Professor Syun Tutiya in Japan.
For more details on these and other sources of TEI information, please order copies of the files:
EDJ8 MEMO, which describes how to retrieve electronic copies of TEI P2 and the various formats in which they are available, and EDJ9 MEMO which describes how to request paper copies of TEI P2, for those without electronic mail access. On the Exeter file server, these may be edj8.doc and edj9.doc.
For further information, please communicate with:
Michael Sperberg-McQueen
u35395@uicvm.bitnet
The Ninth Conference on Computers and Writing will be held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on May 20-23, 1993.
The theme of the conference is "Lessons from the Past, Learning for the Future." Conference chairs are Emily Jessup, Susanmarie Harrington, William Condon, and Wayne Butler.
Topics of the conference will include: computers, writing, and the K-12 classroom; getting started with computers and writing instruction; applications of hypertext in the teaching of writing; multimedia and writing instruction; computers and the reading-writing connection; explorations of the virtual classroom; uses of computers in promoting collaborations among students, across disciplines, and over long distances; the effects of computers on the learning process, and on the interactions among students and teachers; and changing sociopolitical contexts for computer use.
For further information on the conference, please communicate with:
Computers and Writing Conference English Composition Board 1025 Angell Hall University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109 computers.and.writing@um.cc.umich.edu
HOPOS-L is a new electronic discussion group on the history of the philosophy of science at either:
listserv@ukcc.bitnet or
listserv@ukcc.uky.edu
It's designed as a forum for the exchange of information, ideas, queries, job notices, course syllabi, conference announcements, and other news of interest. The owner is:
Don Howard einphil@ukcc.uky.edu
Starting with the January 1993 issue, the journal _TEXT Technology_ will move its home base to Dakota State University.
_TEXT Technology_ publishes articles and reviews about all facets of using computers for the creation, processing, and analysis of texts. It is designed for academic and corporate writers, editors, and teachers. The bimonthly journal contains timely reviews of software for writing and publishing, discussions of applications for the analysis of literary works and other texts, notices of significant events in computing around the world, bibliographic citations, and much more.
Submissions of articles and reviews are welcome. They should be sent as ASCII files via e-mail to the editor, Eric Johnson, at eric@sdnet.bitnet, or they may be submitted on MS-DOS disks sent to the address below.
Subscription rates for one year (six bimonthly issues of sixteen pages each) are $20 for the U.S., $27 for Canada, and $35 for any other countries (all prices are U.S. funds).
Subscriptions (which may be charged to MasterCard or Visa) should be sent to:
TEXT Technology 114 Beadle Hall Dakota State University Madison South Dakota 57042-1799
The Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto, takes pleasure in announcing the second volume of CCH Working Papers (CCHWP).
CCHWP is intended as a vehicle for the discussion of computer methodology in the context of research whose focus is primarily on texts rather than on the machine or its software.
Whether the computer is itself an object of study or chiefly a tool for it, CCHWP addresses its capabilities for affecting our understanding of texts.
CCHWP is an occasional publication, with a provisional schedule of one volume per year.
Each volume contains several related papers or a single monograph, written in either English or French with a summary in the other language.
_A TACT Exemplar_, T. Russon Wooldridge, ed., with papers by John Bradley, Willard McCarty, Kenneth B. Steele, and T. Russon Wooldridge, $18.50 (CAN), $16 (U.S.) from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto.
_Historical Dictionary Databases_, T. Russon Wooldridge, ed., with papers by P. Caron, L. Dagenais, W. Edwards, G. Gonfroy, A. Ikse-Vitols, D.A. Kibbee, I. Lancashire, D. Megginson, B. Merrilees, T. Nadasdi, F.W. Tompa, and T.R. Wooldridge, $35 (CAN), $30 (U.S.) from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto.
The papers contained in this second volume were first given at a symposium on "Historical Dictionary Databases and Data Retrieval Requirements" held at the University of Toronto in October 1991.
The historical dictionaries concerned are all ones that first appeared in manuscript or print, and are, or have been, the subject of research projects involving their electronic capture.
The great majority of the texts belong to the tradition of French lexicography and describe a past state of the language.
B. Merrilees, W. Edwards and D. Megginson discuss the establishment of a critical edition and electronic database of Firmin Le Ver's 15th-century Latin-French _Dictionarius_.
T.R. Wooldridge describes the structures of several of Robert Estienne's and Jean Nicot's 16-17th-century Latin- French and French-Latin dictionaries that have been put on computer.
D.A. Kibbee considers the structures of a number of 16th- century French-English dictionaries (Palsgrave, Veron, Baret, Huloet-Higgins, Hollyband), and explores the organization and aims of a future database containing them.
I. Lancashire examines tagging systems for the French- English dictionaries of John Palsgrave and Randle Cotgrave in the context of a Renaissance knowledge base.
P. Caron, L. Dagenais and G. Gonfroy describe a project to capture in electronic form the 18th-century _Dictionaire critique_ of Jean-Francois Feraud, and discuss the structures of the text and of a database representation of it.
T.R. Wooldridge, A. Ikse-Vitols and T. Nadasdi discuss aspects of the computer-assisted CopuLex Project, which is analyzing the information systems used by French dictionaries from the 16th-century to the present.
F.W. Tompa surveys the types of information retrieval obtainable using software developed at the University of Waterloo for the database version of the _Oxford English Dictionary_.
All orders must be prepaid by check or money-order, payable to the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, at the following address:
Centre for Computing in the Humanities University of Toronto Robarts Library 130 St. George Street Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A5 Canada Phone: 416/978-4238 Fax: 416/978-6519 cch@epas.utoronto.ca
Canadian residents should add 7% GST (University of Toronto number R108162330).
Editorial Board of CCHWP Series Editor: T. Russon Wooldridge, French Toronto Associate Editor: Willard McCarty, CCH Toronto Members: Brad Inwood, Classics University of Toronto Douglas A. Kibbee, French University of Illinois at Urbana Ian Lancashire, English University of Toronto Stephen R. Reimer, English University of Alberta William G. Winder, French University of British Columbia
by David Owen
The American Philosophical Association sponsors a Committee on Computer Use in Philosophy. The Committee (created by the APA Board in 1985) collects and disseminates information on the use of computers in the profession and makes recommendations for appropriate actions by the Board of the Association. The Committee publishes the _APA Newsletter on Computer Use in Philosophy_.
Six Subcommittees
The Committee does its work through a set of six subcommittees:
The Committee is sponsoring a special session at the December meetings of the Eastern Division of the APA in Washington, D.C. The program includes a set of presentations on the ways in which philosophers are using computers for teaching and research as well as a set of papers on ethics and computing (2:00pm December 28, in the Military Room of the Washington Hilton Hotel). Another special session, on electronic texts and hypertext, will be presented at the Pacific APA in San Francisco, March 25-28, 1993.
The Committee co-sponsors the annual conference on Computing and Philosophy. The 8th conference will be held August 12- 14, 1993, at Carnegie Mellon University. Contact Robert Cavalier for further information. Deadline for submissions is Monday, February 15, 1993.
Deborah Johnson, chair johnson@macbeth.princeton.edu Jesse Yoder yoder@woods.ulowell.edu David Owen owen@ccit.arizona.edu Robert Cavalier rc2z@andrew.cmu.edu Allen Renear allen@brownvm.bitnet John Ladd jladd@brownvm.bitnet Terrell Bynum bynum@ctstateu.bitnet
The 6th U.K. Conference on Computers and Writing will be held at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Dyfed, Wales, on April 13-15, 1993. Its theme is "The Experience Of Writing." The chair is Daniel Chandler.
The organizers are interested in proposals exploring one or more of the following themes: writers' composing styles and strategies; collaborative writing and the computer; writers' experiences of the computer; computers and literacy; design of computer-based writing tools; and educational applications of desk-top publishing.
Proposals: Send 3 copies of a two-page (double-spaced) abstract for a formal (refereed) paper or informal session (don't send disks). Include (on an attached sheet): title of paper; name(s); affiliation(s); address(es); telephone number(s); e-mail address(es); category (refereed paper/informal session).
Deadlines: U.K. and all e-mail proposals must be postmarked by December 1, 1992 (overseas postal proposals by November 15). Notification of acceptance will be mailed by January 1993. Proposals should be sent to:
Daniel Chandler Computers & Writing 6 UWA Old College, King Street Aberystwyth Dyfed SY23 2AX, Wales, U.K. compwrit@aberystwyth.ac.uk
1993 ---- Mar 4-6 ------- Fourth Symposium on The Arts and Technology. Connecticut College Center for Arts and Technology, New London, Connecticut, U.S.A. David Smalley and Noel Zahler, Center for Arts and Technology, Connecticut College, 270 Mohegan Avenue, New London, Connecticut 06320-4196, U.S.A. E-mail: dasma@conncoll.bitnet or nbzah@conncoll.bitnet Mar 23-25 --------- AAAI-93 Spring Symposium Series, Building Lexicons for Machine Translation. Stanford University, Stanford, California. AAAI, 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, California 94025, U.S.A. E-mail: sss@aaai.org Apr 4-7 ------- ICML 93. International Conference on Mathematical Linguistics. Barcelona, Spain. Carlos Martin Vide, Universitat de Barcelona, Facultat de Filologia, Secci: de Linguistica, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585, 08007 Barcelona, Spain. Fax: 34-(9) 3-318.81.63. E-mail: d1frcmv0@eb0ub011.bitnet Apr 13-15 --------- 6th U.K. Conference on Computers and Writing. University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales. David Chandler, UWA, Old College, King Street, Aberystwyth, Dyfed SY23 2AX, Wales, U.K. E-mail: compwrit@aberystwyth.ac.uk Apr 21-23 --------- EACL '93. Sixth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Research Institute for Language and Speech, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. EACL '93, OTS, Trans 10, NL-3512 JK, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Phone: (+31) 30-392531, Fax: (+31) 30-333380. E-mail: eacl93@let.ruu.nl Apr 21-24 --------- Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Dan Fass, PACLING '93, Publicity and Local Arrangements, Centre for Systems Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada V5A 1S6. Phone: (604) 291-3208, Fax: (604) 291-4424. E-mail: fass@cs.sfu.ca May 20-23 --------- Ninth Conference on Computers and Writing. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Computers and Writing Conference, English Composition Board, 1025 Angell Hall, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, U.S.A. E-mail: computers.and.writing@um.cc.umich.edu May 28-30 --------- International Institute for Conservation, Canadian Group. Rob Stevenson, Workshop Coordinator, IIC-CG Conference '93, 50 Raddall Ave., Unit 1, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia B3B 1T2, Canada. Phone: 902/426-3880, Fax: 902/426-8627. Jun 4-6 ------- Second Language International Conference, Teaching Translation and Interpreting--Insights, Aims, and Visions. Cay Dollerup, Center for Translation and Lexicography, University of Copenhagen, 96 Njalsgade, DK 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark. Phone: + 45 31 542211, Fax: + 45 32 961518. Jun 16-19 --------- ACH/ALLC '93. The joint annual international conference of the Association for Computing and the Humanities (ACH) and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC). Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., U.S.A. Michael Neuman, Academic Computer Center, 238 Reiss Science Building, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. 20057, U.S.A. Phone: 202/687-6096, Fax: 202/687-6003. neuman@guvax.bitnet or neuman@guvax.georgetown.edu Jun 22 ------ Workshop on Very Large Corpora. Ohio State University. Sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Chemical Abstracts, Mead Data Central (MDC), and the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). Kenneth Ward Church, AT&T Bell Laboratories, 2b422, 600 Mountain Ave., Murray Hill, NJ 07974, U.S.A. Phone: 908/582-5325, Fax: 908/582-7550. E-mail: kwc@research.att.com Sep 15-17 --------- EUROCALL. Emancipation Through Learning Technology. University of Hull, U.K. June Thompson, CTI Centre for Modern Languages, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, U.K. Phone: 0482 466373, Fax: 0482 465991. E-mail: eurocall@hull.ac.uk Oct 1-2 ------- Conference on Electronic Journals. University of Manitoba, Winnepeg, Canada. Institute for the Humanities, University of Manitoba, 108 Isbister Bldg., Winnepeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2, Canada. Phone: 204/474-9599, Fax: 204/275-5781. E-mail: umih@ccu.umanitoba.ca 1994 ---- Aug 14-18 --------- Fourth International Conference on Bible and Computers. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Werkgroep Informatica, Faculty of Theology, Vrije Universiteit. Gregory Bloomquist, E-mail: gbloomq@acadvm1.uottawa.ca
OFFICERS
Nancy Ide President Dept. of Computer Science Box 252 Vassar College Poughkeepsie, New York 12601 ide@vassar.bitnet Paul A. Fortier Vice President Dept. of Romance Language University of Manitoba Winnepeg, Manitoba Canada R3T 2N2 fortier@uofmcc.bitnet Randall Jones Executive Secretary Dept. of German Brigham Young University Provo, Utah 84602 hrcjones@byuvm.bitnet jonesr@jkhbhrc.byu.edu Joseph Rudman Treasurer Dept. of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213 rudman@cmphys.bitnetACH EXECUTIVE COUNCIL
Malcolm B. Brown Academic Computing Dartmouth College Kiewit Computation Center Hanover, New Hampshire 03755 malcolm.brown@dartmouth.edu Christian Delcourt Universite de Liege Faculte de Philosophie et Lettres Place Cockerill, 3 B-4000 Liege, Belgium u017101@bliulg11.bitnet Marianne Gaunt Alexander Library College Avenue New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903 gaunt@zodiac.rutgers.edu Joel D. Goldfield Dept. of Foreign Languages Plymouth State College Plymouth, New Hampshire 03264-1600 jdg@coos.dartmouth.edu Mary Dee Harris Language Technology 2153 California St., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20008 mdharris@guvax.georgetown.edu Glyn Holmes Dept. of French The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario Canada N6A 3K7 gholmes@uwovax.uwo.ca Estelle Irizarry Dept. of Spanish Georgetown University Washington, D.C. 20057 irizarry@guvax.bitnet Karen Kossuth Dept. of Modern Languages and Literature Pomona College Claremont, California 91711 kkossuth@pomona.bitnet Anita Lowry Butler Library 325 Columbia University New York, New York 10027 lowry@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu Willard McCarty Centre for Computing in the Humanities Robarts Library, 14th Floor University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario Canada M5S 1A5 mccarty@epas.utoronto.ca Michael Neuman Academic Computer Center 238 Reiss Science Building Georgetown University Washington, D.C. 20057 neuman@guvax.bitnet Hans Rutimann Consultant 312 West 77th St., #G New York, New York 10024 bb.hxr@rlg.bitnet C.M. Sperberg-McQueen Computer Center (M/C 135) 1940 W. Taylor St., Room 124 University of Illinois Chicago, Illinois 60612-7352 u35395@uicvm.bitnetLIAISONS
Nancy Frishberg Linguistic Society of America 16 Woods End Road Stamford, Connecticut 06905 nancyf@seiden.com Mary Dee Harris Association for Computational Linguistics Language Technology 2153 California St., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20008 mdharris@guvax.georgetown.edu Carol Zuses Modern Language Association MLA 10 Astor Place New York, New York 10003 mlaod@cuvmb.bitnet mlaod@cuvmb.columbia.edu David Owen American Philosophical Association Dept. of Philosophy University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona 85721 owen@rvax.ccit.arizona.edu J. Penny Small American Philological Association 7 West 96th Street Apartment 9D New York, New York 10025-6539 jpsmall@cancer.bitnetEX-OFFICIO MEMBERS
Eric Dahlin Editor, _ACH Newsletter_ Humanities Computing Facility University of California Santa Barbara, California 93106-3170 hcf1dahl@ucsbuxa.bitnet hcf1dahl@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu Glyn Holmes Editor, _CHUM_ Dept. of French The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario Canada N6A 3K7 gholmes@uwovax.uwo.ca Elaine Brennan Editor, HUMANIST Women Writers Project Box 1842 Brown University Providence, Rhode Island 02912 elaine@brownvm.bitnet Allen Renear Editor, HUMANIST Box 1885/CIS Brown University Providence, Rhode Island 02912 allen@brownvm.bitnet
The _ACH Newsletter_, the newsletter of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, is published four times a year by the Humanities Computing Facility of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Editor: Eric Dahlin E-mail: HCF1DAHL@ucsbuxa.bitnet HCF1DAHL@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu Phone: 805/893-2208 Address: Humanities Computing Facility 4421 South Hall University of California Santa Barbara, California 93106-3170 U.S.A.
Submissions of material of interest to computing humanists are welcome, and should be sent to the editor by electronic mail, using markup for any characters which can't be transmitted.
The electronic version of the _ACH Newsletter_ is prepared from the files used to produce the paper edition. A few formatting changes have been made to adapt the text to electronic transmission but the content of the two versions is identical. A complete table of contents has been included for the convenience of e-mail readers. This page was last modified on