Ballots for the ACH election have been mailed out to members of the Association. We are also posting the biographical statements of the candidates and their URLs to provide more information than can fit on the ballot. For voting information, please see your ballot.
Jim Coleman is the Head of Academic Computing for the Humanities at Stanford, and manages Stanford's Academic Text Service, one of the first networked, e-text centers in the US.
He also manages a number of digitization projects currently underway at Stanford which model in an exemplary way how large scale text and imaging projects can be designed and implemented. He is particularly interested in exploring and extending the interactions between a number of technologies and standards -- SGML in general, TEI, Dublin Core, EAD in particular, MARC catalog records, thesauari (LSCH, AAT, et al.), and database technologies -- and actual implementation strategies. He believes that the Association for Computing in the Humanities represents one of the most vital venues for the exploration of these issues and development of theoretically sound and practically viable practice.
David Durand is a computer scientist whose current research interests are collaborative editing in hypertext systems, the formal structure of text, and the structure and implementation of text processing and analysis tools. He has served on the TEI's Syntax and Metalanguage committee, and the working group on hypertext. With Steven DeRose he wrote _Making Hypermedia Work: a User's Guide to HyTime_, describing the use of SGML for hypermedia. He co-organized 2 workshops on versioning at the ACM Hypertext conference and has presented papers on markup structures at the ACH. He is a Senior Analyst at Dynamic Diagrams, an Information Design firm, where he is developing a state-of-the-art mapping and structure-discovery system for the WWW. Currently he is finishing his PhD in Computer Science at Boston University.
Harald Baayen studied linguistics at the Free University of Amsterdam. In 1989 he completed his PhD thesis on statistical and psychological aspects of morphological productivity. Since 1990 he has held post-doc positions at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His research interests include lexical statistics in literary and linguistic corpus-based computing, general linguistics, morphological theory, and the psycholinguistics of morphological processing both in language comprehension and in speech production. Since 1991, he has been an active participant in the ACH-ALLC annual meetings, where he has presented several papers on quantitative linguistics and stylistics.
John Unsworth has a BA from Amherst, an MA from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, all in English. His graduate work focused on contemporary academic postmodernism, its audience and its publishers. That interest in publishing and in postmodernism was continued, when he joined the faculty at North Carolina State University, in the founding and editing of Postmodern Culture, the first peer-reviewed electronic scholarly journal in the humanities. Since 1992, Mr. Unsworth has been the director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, an interdisciplinary center that supports long-term, large-scale research projects across the humanities; at present, the Institute supports 25 projects, in architecture, archaeology, history, literature, art, music, religion, linguistics, classics, and other disciplines. The work of the institute depends heavily on Standard Generalized Markup Language, but it also involves problems and projects in digital imaging, three-dimensional modeling, and Unicode.
Lynne Grundy is Lecturer in Humanities Computing at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London. She teaches in the college undergraduate program, Humanities with Applied Computing, and also in courses offered to staff and postgraduates of the humanities departments. Her research interests are in the field of Anglo-Saxon culture, particularly lexicology (she is a co-editor of the recently published Thesaurus of Old English, which draws on a large database), poetry and theology, maintaining also an informal teaching-base within Medieval Studies. Other interests of a computing bent include textual, metrical and linguistic analysis. She writes and translates poetry, swims hard and collects languages, books and baroque recorders.
Mark Olsen has been Assistant Director of the ARTFL Project, University of Chicago, since October 1988. The ARTFL Project is one of the leading research and development organizations in the "Humanities Computing" field, providing access to its extensive text, image, and databases to scholars in North America and world-wide and developing new databases and software for scholarly applications.
He received a PhD in French history from the University of Ottawa in 1991, and is author of more than 50 articles and notes on history, methodology/theory, philosophy, and computer applications. With a team of researchers, he recently published a volume titled _Theatre, Opera, and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris: Analysis and Repertory, (Greenwood Press, 1996), which challenges traditional interpretations of the role of the stage in the Revolution based on a computerized analysis of some 92,000 performances of plays from 1789 to the end of 1799.
Olsen has been an active member of the "Humanities Computing" community, serving as Technical Review Editor for Computers and the Humanities (CHum) from 1988 until mid-1996, ACH Executive member since 1993, and as Program Committee Chair for the 1997 ACH/ALLC annual conference to be held at Queens University. He is also well-known for his controversial views on "text theory and computing" (see CHum, 27: 5-6, 1993-4) and on the Text Encoding Initiative (presented at ALLC/ACH annual conference, 1996).