This is the text of a report the ACH submitted to the MLA for their review of our affiliation with them. The peculiar organization and section contents follow the form stipulated by the MLA.
The first use of computers in humanities research dates back to the 1940s, but it only started to be a field rather than an activity of isolated individuals in the 1960s. Through the 1960s and 1970s, work in humanities computing was almost exclusively devoted to texts, as any work involving sounds or images was still difficult and expensive. In literary studies, early work was concentrated in three major areas: the preparation of reference works such as concordances and dictionaries; stylistic analysis; and authorship attribution. Any work at all, however, usually involved a great deal of effort to get computers to work appropriately on textual data, which wasn't a major focus of commercial work with computers in those days: most scholars will be familiar with concordances produced in this era that printed the text in upper case, because printing in lower case was long seen as a specialized luxury.
By the 1970s important work began to come out of humanities computing, notably in work with databases by historians: for example, the famous study of the medieval Florentine population by David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles: une étude du "catasto" florentin de 1427 (1978). Although historians are welcome in the ACH, they have tended to work within their own societies instead since this era. Gradually better facilities for representing and printing texts with computers became available; beginning in the 1980s early varieties of desktop publishing began to play an important role in scholarly work, and the rise of the personal computer was accompanied by a wider use of electronic mail and other technologies for interaction among people. Work on stylistics and attribution continued to develop: the single most influential and well-received work in computer-assisted criticism, Computation into criticism: a study of Jane Austen's novels and an experiment in method by J. F. Burrows, appeared in 1987, and the past decade has also seen a good deal of important work in attribution, notably on the question of the possible Shakespearian authorship of Edward III and the "Elegy" for William Peter. The last decade has seen two further developments of immense importance: the rise of artistic works intended for electronic publication, and the spread of the Internet and the World Wide Web to a broad audience.
Like many professional associations, the ACH has seen its role as centered on facilitating communication among people working in the field; and so our major activities have been the publication of our journal and the organization of our annual conferences. Together with several of our sister associations, we have been closely involved in one major collaborative project, the Text Encoding Initiative, which sought to develop guidelines for the representation of text in electronic form. Most of the first stage of this work was done between 1987 and 1994, though the organization continues and is currently in the process of seeking a permanent home and funding. The TEI has been highly influential in academic and commercial practice: the TEI's guidelines are used by many electronic-text centers at libraries today (at the Universities of Michigan and Virginia, for example), and are also followed by a number of commercial developers of electronic reference works (such as the Arden Shakespeare on CD-ROM and the English Poetry Full-Text Database from Chadwyck-Healey). Some innovations (and some personnel) from the TEI have also been taken up by the World Wide Web Consortium for its efforts in developing XML, intended for future work on the Web.
Over this period the size of our membership has remained roughly constant. It has also undergone a good deal of rotation: we have long observed that a number of members are in the organization for five to ten years and then drop out. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the field, it does not often represent a member's primary academic field: today there are at most half a dozen faculty members in modern languages in North America who are considered by themselves and their departments to have humanities computing as their primary specialty. There are a few departments devoted to the subject in Europe, but none in North America. Consequently, it is not unusual for a scholar to become involved in the field for part but not all of his or her career, perhaps when one particular research project calls for computing in its methodology, but not the next. For much the same reason, our association has also not grown together with the recent boom in computer use in the humanities and the world generally: a reason for this boom is that it grows less and less necessary to have any specialized skills to do certain things with computers---publishing, in particular. The ACH has always been focused on new development, though, and not just using what's readily available. Many people today are interested in publishing materials on the Web without spending a lot of time developing new methodologies or reflecting critically on the activity, just as most people who resort to paper publication use the system rather than seeking to develop or analyze it. Using what's available is a reasonable and legitimate approach, but we have not sought to cater to this level of work, and have instead remained an association of the much smaller number of people who do seek to make the theory and methodology of humanities computing a topic of their research.
The ACH first presented sessions at the MLA convention in 1979; in this report we seek to account only for the last decade or so of activity at the MLA. (In the Appendix there's a full list of all the sessions and talks from this period.) Through 1995, as the work of the TEI was in progress and then finally published, several ACH sessions were devoted either to presentation and discussion of the TEI's work, or to more general questions about the representation of text in electronic form. (The two 1995 sessions were intended to serve together as an introduction to the TEI, and so took the form of two long presentations rather than collections of papers. This approach seemed on reflection ill-suited to the nature of the MLA convention, at which it can be difficult to attend two linked sessions, and large blocks of time are not available for extended presentation and discussion.)
A second recurrent subject in this period was the question of computerized text analysis, for work in stylistic study and authorship attribution. Both of those areas of work continue to be important in the field, but we have had no sessions on them in the last few years, as other topics have come to seem more urgent. We have also consciously shifted the focus of our sessions to topics of greater general interest: because we do have our own conference which offers a place for many more papers, it has not seemed vital to include papers on attribution, for example, in MLA sessions---the results of such study are often of wide interest, but the methodology is quite technical and not readily accessible to those outside the field. Recent ACH sessions have also not included much on teaching, though we did have one session on this subject in 1998. Although the use of computers in teaching is an important subject, particularly in the fields of composition and language instruction, it is a subject more commonly addressed within other professional associations than in ours.
The one subject above all that has had increasing prominence in our sessions is hypertext. The first MLA sessions on hypertext took place at the 1988 convention, and one of them was sponsored by the ACH; as late as 1994 people were putting the term in quotation marks in abstracts they submitted to us. From 1993 onwards it has been a pervasive subject even in sessions not designed to focus on hypertext. We feel that our range of talks on this subject has covered the field better than many accounts of it do: in particular we have treated both practical and expressive uses of hypertext. The series of TEI talks gradually changed into a group of talks about creating and using large bodies of electronic texts for research purposes, and we have also had a number of talks on hypertext literature, including a number on hypertext and poetry and not just the more commonly-discussed hypertext fiction.
The other subject that has been increasing in prominence is electronic publishing. This inevitably comes up in many hypertext talks, of course, since there are questions about publishing hypertextual works of a kind that don't arise with conventional printed texts; we are also seeing more and more concern about the legal questions surrounding intellectual property in the digital world, questions that are not at all settled and may have a very large impact on the possibilities of electronic publishing. It is generally agreed by people in the field that the major obstacles to the creation of large-scale digital libraries are not technical but legal; we expect to find ourselves turning to such subjects again in the future.
We have found in recent years that we can count on getting about fifty people at each session; an exception was the "Spatial and Geometric Metaphors for Text" session in 1997, which came particularly late in the convention and only attracted an audience of fifteen. We can't claim to spend any time trying to publicize our MLA sessions outside the scholarly world, but journalists have published pieces about several of them anyway in recent years. Laurent Belsie, "Pride and Prejudice About Electronic Publishing", Christian Science Monitor, 27 December 1996, page 3, discussed our 1996 sessions on poetry and computers before they even took place; and this year, Lisa Guernsey, " Seeking Legal Protection for Their Web Site, Scholars Make a Deal With U. of Maryland", Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 March 1999, spoke at length about the paper by Neil Fraistat and Diane Krejsa from the 1998 convention.
We have been an allied organization for twenty years; we would of course like to remain one, but under current MLA policies we seem to fall in between being an allied organization and an affiliate organization. We have no staff at all, but on the other hand we do sponsor an annual conference.
For many years the ACH published a quarterly newsletter, but with the broadening availability of electronic communications it ceased to seem the most effective medium, and the last issue appeared in the summer of 1995. Since then we have had one paper mailing every year with billing for dues and balloting for officers; we have started a private e-mail list for ACH members, ACH-L; and we continue to support the long-running public discussion list, Humanist. ACH-L is appropriate for the announcements that used to appear in the newsletter; Humanist also prints some of those announcements, but also publishes more substantial reports and discussion. We also maintain a web site at www.ach.org which offers announcements and general information about the society. Considerable amounts of information about our annual conferences are available on the Web, though this information is created and maintained by the local organizers of each conference and so is linked from our web site but not stored there. Since 1996 we have also included on our web site descriptions of our MLA sessions, and a guide to other MLA sessions that included talks related to the use of computers in teaching and research; in 1998 there were 45 sessions in this list.
Our journal, Computers and the Humanities, was founded in 1966 and has only one real peer in the field (Literary and Linguistic Computing, the journal of our European sister society). In the mid-1990s there was a change of editors, and in the process publication slipped behind schedule; but the current editors, Nancy Ide and Daniel Greenstein, have worked on catching up, and it is now appearing on time.
We have grown concerned about access to our publications and activities, and to materials in the field generally, by interested scholars in less-wealthy countries. The increased reliance on electronic communications does not generally seem to be a great barrier to such access; subscription and dues payments are the real problem. We are working on ways to facilitate participation by scholars who face such difficulties.
Our records of the ACH sessions at the MLA conventions from 1989 through 1998 list sixty-six speakers, respondents, and chairs. This group includes forty-nine different people, nine of whom appeared more than once during this period. The recidivists were: Matthew Kirschenbaum (four appearances), Michael Sperberg-McQueen (four), Paul Fortier (three), John Lavagnino (three), Mark Olsen (three), Joel Goldfield (two), Gina Greco (two), Charles Henry (two), Nancy Ide (two), and Willard McCarty (two). Many of the reappearances involve presiding or responding: only Kirschenbaum has given more than two talks for the ACH during this period. The two sessions we are proposing for the 1999 convention include only one person who has appeared in an ACH session in the last decade.
Not all of these speakers have been ACH members: we have not required this of them. We feel that we've cast the net pretty broadly, especially considering the small number of people involved in this sort of work prior to 1995. Our own concern in recent years has been to make greater efforts to include scholars working on languages other than English: compared to the mix of speakers at our own conference, these sessions have been much more slanted towards English. We find that we tend to get few paper submissions from scholars outside English-language literary studies to open calls for papers, and have tried to work harder to solicit them actively. One of the 1998 sessions was specifically devoted to language study, for example.
We currently describe our association's purpose this way:
The Association for Computers and the Humanities is an international professional organization. Since its establishment, it has been the major professional society for people working in computer-aided research in literature and language studies, history, philosophy, and other humanities disciplines, and especially research involving the manipulation and analysis of textual materials.
The ACH is devoted to disseminating information among its membership about work in the field of humanities computing, as well as encouraging the development and dissemination of significant textual and linguistic resources and software for scholarly research.
The ACH was founded in 1977.
A copy of the current ACH Constitution and Bylaws is appended to this report.
We had 130 members on March 16, 1999. A copy of the membership form from our web site is appended to this report.
Membership dues are as follows:
Individual regular member: US $65.
Student or Emeritus Faculty member: US $55.
Joint membership in ACH/Northeast ACH: add US $5.
Joint membership (for couples): add US $7.
This list differs at a few points from the information in the convention program, because it reflects late rearrangements or cancellations.
Presiding: Nancy M. Ide, Vassar College
Speakers: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois, Chicago, and James Coombs, Brown University
"A Hypermedia-Course Unit on Fielding's Joseph Andrews", Paul Delany, Simon Fraser University
"Hypermedia and the French-Emblem Book Project", David Graham, Ripon College
Presiding: Paul Fortier, University of Manitoba
"HUMANIST: A Global Seminar for Computing Humanists", Willard McCarty, University of Toronto
"BITNET: International Electronic Mail for Academia", Randall Jones, Brigham Young University, Utah
Presiding: Nancy Ide, Vassar College
Speaker: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois, Chicago
Presiding: Dawn Rodrigues, Colorado State University
"Style Checkers for English", David N. Dobrin, Lexicom
"Writers' Aids for Languages Other than English", David M. Graham, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Presiding: Joseph Rudman
"Computer-Assisted Authorship Attribution: A Rationale", Joseph Rudman
"Authorial Signatures in Awkward Cases", John F. Burrows, University of Newcastle, Australia
"Separating the Collaborative Effort of Shakespeare and Fletcher", Thomas B. Horton, Florida Atlantic University
Presiding: Nancy M. Ide, Vassar College
"Transforming the Canon: Electronic Capture of Early Women's Writing in English", Elaine Brennan, Brown University
"Calling Things by Their True Names: Text Encoding and the Nature of Text", C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois, Chicago
Presiding: Willard McCarty, University of Toronto
"Nonverbal Aspects of Language and the Implication for Computer Modeling", Charles Henry, Columbia University
"The Quantitative Study of Style in Traditional Japanese Poetry: Putting the Problem in Terms Even Computers Can Understand", John W. LaCure, Indiana University, Bloomington
"What Can and Cannot Be Done with Electronic Text in Historical and Literary Research", Mark Olsen, University of Chicago
"Hypertext and the Humanist Tradition of Literary Scholarship", Arnold Sanders, Goucher College
Presiding: Daniel T. Brink, Arizona State University
"Computer-Aided Literary Studies: Addressing the Particularities of Medieval Texts", Gina L. Greco, Portland State University; Peter Shoemaker, Princeton University
"Have it Your Way---and Mine: The Theory of Styles", Ellen Spolsky, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
Respondents: Mark V. Olsen, University of Chicago, Donald Bruce, University of Alberta, and Chuck Henry, Vassar College
"An Argument for Single-Author and Other Focused Studies Using Quantitative Criticism", Joel D. Goldfield, Plymouth State College
"Literary Texts and the State of the Language: The Role of the Computer", Dennis Taylor, Boston College
Respondents: Mark V. Olsen, University of Chicago, and Stephen N. Matsuba, York University, N. York
Presiding: Paul A. Fortier, University of Manitoba
"From Lemmatization to Interpretation", William Winder, University of British Columbia
"Technotropes of Liberation: Reading Hypertext in the Age of Theory", Mary E. Hocks, University of Illinois, Urbana
"Literary Scholarship in the Era of Electronic Text: Shortcuts and Caveats", Zoran Kuzmanovich, Davidson College
Presiding: Paul Fortier, University of Manitoba
"A chronological common-words vector in a corpus of English Renaissance tragedy", D. Hugh Craig, University of Newcastle, Australia
"Developing Electronic Texts Archives for Literary Research", Gina L. Greco, Portland State University; Toby Paff, Princeton University
Presiding: Joel D. Goldfield, Fairfield University and Plymouth State College
"Is There a Text in this Class? Creating Knowledge in the Electronic Classroom, Part 2", John Slatin, University of Texas at Austin
"Re-presenting Renaissance Dialectic in Hypertextual Poetic", Margaret Downs-Gamble, Virginia Tech
"The Author, the Law, and Technology in America", Catherine Taylor, Duke University
Presiding: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois, Chicago
Presiding: John Lavagnino, Brown University
Presiding: John Lavagnino, Brown University
"Voicing Digital Poetics: Performative, Pathetic, and Radical Ephemerality", Jeffrey Powers-Beck, East Tennessee State University
"Joined at the Word: The Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry Full-Text Database", Mary Blockley, University of Texas, Austin
"The Poetics of Artificial Intelligence", Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, University of Virginia
Presiding: Michael Neuman, Georgetown University
"Jumping to Occlusions: the Poetics of Electronic Space", Loss Pequeño Glazier, State University of New York, Buffalo
"Elizabeth Bishop in Hypertext", Barbara Page, Vassar College
Presiding: John Lavagnino, Brown University
"Hypertext Theory Post-Poststructuralism", Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, University of Virginia
"Storytime: Temporal As Well As Spatial Metaphors for Hypertext", Michael Groden, University of Western Ontario
"Out of Praxis: Textual Ontology, from Below", Allen Renear, Brown University
Presiding: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois at Chicago
"Texts as Animaps: Genre Transformation in the Early Nineteenth Century", David C. Lipscomb, Columbia University
"Applied Virtual Reality: Mapping Texts in Three Dimensions with VRML", Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, University of Virginia
Presiding: Leslie Z. Morgan, Loyola College, Maryland
"Bridging the Language/Literature Gap: Introducing Literature Electronically to the Undergraduate Language Student", Mary Ann Lyman-Hager, San Diego State University
"The Computer as Catalyst: Where do Second Language Acquisition Research, Cultural Studies, and the Less-Commonly Taught Languages Fit In?", Nina Garrett, Wesleyan University
"Computer Applications and Research Agendas: Another Dimension in Professional Advancement", Robert Fischer, Southwest Texas State University
Presiding: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, University of Virginia
"The Problems of New Technology in the Old Academy", David L. Gants, University of Georgia
"A New Hybridity: The University as Web Site Publisher", Neil Fraistat and Diane Krejsa, Esq., University of Maryland, College Park
"ok computer: Professing Literature in the Para-Economy", Joseph Tabbi, University of Illinois, Chicago
John Lavagnino
King's College London