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Association for Computers and the Humanities |
http://www.stg.brown.edu/stg/staff_pages/allen.html
I received an AB from Bowdoin College and a PhD, in philosophy, from Brown. After teaching philosophy I joined Brown's Computing and Information Services in 1984, working as a consultant, project leader, and strategic planner, and specializing in humanities computing. I was Co-Director of the Women Writers Project (1992-94) and in 1994 became Director of the Scholarly Technology Group, an applied research and development group that develops advanced techniques for using information technology. My research interests are in theoretical topics in text structure and humanities methodology: I joined the Text Encoding Initiative in 1989, as the American Philosophical Association's delegate to the TEI Advisory Board. I have been an ACH member since 1989, serving on the Executive Council (since 1995), and on various ACH subcommittees.
As I argued in CHum in 1995, our community can be, should be, but isn't, playing a leadership role in shaping and assimilating the new intellectual technologies. This is a great opportunity for us as we have the needed well-theorized experience with these new ways of engaging cultural material. But we also have a major strategic problem: ACH is clinging to the past. We must draw on our experience and respond to the rapidly changing intellectual landscape. Without abandoning our traditional topics, themes, and research areas, we must ensure our identity is evolving and we are building on our past achievements. Then we must remedy our absence from the various public efforts to shape the assimilation of emerging technologies, the many national and civic conversations on global networking, technology and education, technology and culture, digitial libraries -- we aren't there and we should be.
And there are related operational problems: ACH support for quality humanities computing research among the membership is weak and inconsistent. We must be more innovative, intellectially demanding, and effective in creating structures that support our intellectual lives. In addition, too many humanities computing leaders are not ACH members. We must double in size in order to be representative.
My agenda for ACH is thus one of aggressive organizational development and change, and better support for high quality scholarly work, while recovering relevance and increasing influence. While I certainly appreciate ACH's traditional focuses as providing a foundation of value and significance, I should say, frankly, that if elected I would be quick to risk current achievements in order to secure future prospects.
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m
My experience in humanities computing revolves around scholarly communication, as a founding co-editor (from 1990-96) of Postmodern Culture, the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, and then (from 1993-present) as the Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. In both of these capacities, I have worked with scholars at many different institutions and in many different disciplines, as well as with students, librarians, university administrators, government and private funding agencies, commercial and academic publishers, and hardware and software makers. Since 1990, I have been involved in the growth of the internet as a medium for scholarly communication, from email through gopher and on to the Web. I believe that humanists have a great deal to contribute to the development of information technology (not least, by posing practical and intellectual problems for it), but it is also clear to me that humanists need to assert themselves if they are to play a role beyond their disciplines and departments. As the principle association representing computing humanists in North America, the ACH has both the opportunity and the responsibility to promote a humanist agenda in the development of information technology. However, it can only do this if it takes a larger view of its constituency and its mandate. Humanities computing has a long and proudÑand mostly textualÑhistory: at this point, though, the ACH won't survive for long unless it expands its boundaries to match the expanding field of humanists using computers. To that end, if I'm elected, my first priority will be to bring the organization and its activities to the notice of humanists in art, art history, architecture, drama, history, music, religion, and other disciplines, and to encourage the participation of librarians who specialize, as many do, in the humanities. Second, following up on the organizational outreach already expressed by ACH membership in NINCH, I will look for additional opportunities to connect the ACH with other, partially overlapping organizations, such as ASIS, EDUCOM, the MLA, and some of the ACM SIG groups.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
Willard McCarty (Ph.D. in English, Toronto) is Senior Lecturer, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London (U.K.) and Vice-President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. He has been involved with computers since the mid 1960s and in humanities computing since the late 1970s, most prominently as editor of Humanist, which he founded in 1987. He has lectured throughout North America and Europe and published widely in humanities computing and classics. His forthcoming book, An Analytical Onomasticon to the Metamorphoses of Ovid (in print and electronic form), is a new kind of reference work based on a densely encoded text of the poem. He lives in Leyton, a DIY paradise in the East End of London, with his artist-wife, where he works on Ovid, cooks whenever possible and is learning about gardens.
http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~djb/
David J. Birnbaum is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures of the University of Pittsburgh, where he has taught since the late 1980s. He became involved in humanities computing in the mid-1980s in response to the absence of computer tools capable of supporting his dissertation research in the textual and linguistic study of medieval Slavic manuscripts. Much of his subsequent research in electronic text issues concentrates on representations of writing systems (see his 1996 report on early Cyrillic character, glyph, and SGML character entity issues in Computer Standards and Interfaces) and structured text (primarily SGML and often within a TEI framework). He is an editor of the Proceedings of the 1995 First International Conference on the Computer Processing of Medieval Slavic Manuscripts (Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, 1995) and serves on the editorial board of Text Technology. Some of his electronic text projects are described at his web site. His favorite programming language is SPITBOL.
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ats/ats.html
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 services in the US, and is involved in the delivery of bibliographic and non-bibliographic information at Stanford.
He is also interested in the creation of "digital libraries", and in exploring how large scale text and imaging projects can be designed, implemented, and preserved. In this regard, he is the co-author of the recent Council on Library and Information Resources' publication, _SGML as a Framework for Digital Preservation_. 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.), database and delivery (Z39.50 et al.) technologies -- and actual implementation strategies. He believes that the Association for Computing in the Humanities represents the most vital venues for the exploration of these issues and development of theoretically sound and practically viable implementation strategies.
http://library.berkeley.edu/autobiography/cfaulhaber/
I have been a computing humanist since using data base technology to compile the catalog of medieval manuscripts in the Hispanic Society of America (1978-80), which led to the development of the PhiloBiblon data base program for cataloguing primary sources in medieval studies. I have been involved with a number of imaging and machine-readable text projects, most notably the Archivo Digital de Manuscritos y Textos Espannoles (ADMYTE). I am just finishing a term on the MLA's Committee on Scholarly Editions, where I served as the primary drafter of the Committee's new Guidelines for Electronic Scholarly Editions. Currently, as the director of The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, I have overseen a number of digitizing and cataloguing projects. I would cite in particular those that have made use of the Encoded Archival Description cataloguing standard, developed at Berkeley.
If elected to the Executive Council, I would be particularly interested in finding practical ways to move humanities computing into the mainstream of humanities teaching and scholarship. Much of what we do as computing humanists is irrelevant to the concerns of our colleagues. I would like to change that.
Julia Flanders is the Textbase Editor of the Brown University Women Writers Project, where she has worked for the past five years on practical research in the use of SGML/TEI to encode primary source texts, contributing articles, papers, and commentary to the ongoing discussions of the text encoding community. The WWP is creating a textbase of pre-Victorian English writing by women, and conducts research on TEI encoding with particular emphasis on issues of textual structure, concurrent hierarchies, and encoding of features for literary and historical analysis.
She holds undergraduate degrees in history and English literature from Harvard and Cambridge Universities and an MA in English from Brown University, and is currently working on a PhD in English at Brown. Her research concerns include editorial theory and its relationship to electronic textuality, the history and gender politics of scholarly editing, and approaches to documentary transcription in TEI/SGML. She is particularly interested in making serious encoding systems like (but not limited to) the TEI more easily available to the lay user, especially as use of electronic texts becomes more widespread, and in convincing a larger academic audience that using SGML is part of the thinking process, not just part of the delivery process. She also works at bookbinding, calligraphy, and paper marbling, and she runs a very small vanity press.
http://parallel.park.uga.edu/dgants/cv.html
My computing interests spring from my graduate school days at the University of Virginia where I was a "charter member" of the Electronic Text Center, eventually rising to assistant coordinator before leaving to commence my current appointment at the University of Georgia. I retain a fascination with electronic texts and editing, and with issues of text encoding. This fascination is most evident in my work with the new Cambridge University Press Collected Works of Ben Jonson, for which I serve as the Electronic Editor, and in my involvement with a TEI workgroup charged with developing an addendum to P3 for the encoding of physical information about books and manuscripts. I have also become heavily involved with humanities computing as it affects the teaching profession. Since last winter I have directed, along with a colleague in Rhet/Comp, the Georgia On-line Teaching Initiative, a pilot project to create teaching and training resources in support of on-line local and remote instruction. This project will eventually support a variety of introductory and advanced on-line courses within the humanities. As a member of the Association's Executive Council I would like to further the cause of digital resource and training development. In particular I would like to see a continued emphasis on adapting and expanding the TEI to meet the rapidly changing needs of editors, teachers and researchers. I would also like to see an outreach effort aimed at expanding the use of emerging technologies in the classroom beyond simple Web pages. Such an enterprise might begin with a movement to revise the traditional graduate school research methods course to include an introduction to computing methods, and the addition of basic technology training to undergraduate service courses such as freshman composition.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/staff/dms8f.html
I am the founding director of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia. This nationally-known library service, open since August 1992, combines an on-line archive of thousands of SGML texts and digital images with a Center housing equipment suitable for the creation and analysis of text.
If elected, I will bring to the ACH Executive Council a librarian's perspective and a cluster of skills and experience that are central to the organization's mission and goals:
Six years of day-to-day experience "in the trenches" of a digital library, including significant time spent creating a diverse and expanding user community locally, through ongoing training sessions, support of individual projects, and our Internet-accessible resources.
Six years of day-to-day experience creating and manipulating standardized texts, including large volumes of TEI-encoded data (from the dark days of P1 into the light of P3), EAD finding aids, and archival-quality images.
Five years of experience teaching national etext and internet courses in the annual summer Book Arts Press Rare Book School at Virginia, and more recently at the University of New Brunswick and the Folger Institute.
A particular interest and experience with the library and archive role of humanities computing, including Special Collections and museums applications of computer technologies. Current projects include the Mellon-funded Electronic Archive of Early American Fiction and the American Heritage EAD project.
Moreover, I am a long-time activist on the humanities computing scene nationally and internationally, traveling often in the US and Canada, and including recent trips to London, Paris, Sydney, Perth, Glasgow, Oxford, Bielefeld, Kiel, Hamburg, Berlin, Tsukuba, Osaka, and Tokyo. Accounts of my work of the Etext Center have appeared in national publications as diverse as The Economist, The Chemical and Engineering News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Australian Financial Review.