Report on MLA sessions

The ACH runs two sessions every year at the Modern Language Association's convention in December. It's an opportunity for us to publicize the kind of work we do and to hobnob with the like-minded. For the 2004 convention, Aimée Morrison of the University of Waterloo organized a panel called "The Material Electronic Text", and David L. Gants of the University of New Brunswick organized a panel called "Digital Preservation and Electronic Scholarly Editions"; the six speakers who made up these panels were all people who had never appeared in an ACH panel at the MLA before.

Our panels for December 2005 are: "Scale and Scholarship in the Digital Humanities", organized by Anh Bui of the University of California, Berkeley, and "Computer Literacy: assessing the impact of IT on English Literature teaching and research", organized by Paul Vetch of King's College London.

Since 1996 we've also published on www.ach.org a list I compile of all sessions at the convention that have something to do with humanities computing; the collection of these lists gives a snapshot of changing activity in the literary end of humanities computing. After a dip in 2003 the length of the list went up in 2004: perhaps a sign that more is going on.

As always, my method of organizing these panels has been to find people like Anh and Paul and ask them to do all the work. We have also frequently asked graduate students or recent PhDs to organize one or both, so that we don't just have the same people involved all the time (as is common in some other organizations that run MLA sessions) and because it may actually be helpful to their careers. I'd be interested to hear from people interested in doing a panel or people who know some good candidates for the job.

Aimée and Dave last year were the first to use the notes on this activity and how to do it that I've composed; I hope these will prove helpful to future organizers, who have a lot of MLA rules to deal with on top of the normal labor of assembling a panel.

-- John Lavagnino - 12 June 2005