Association for Computers and the Humanities
2006 Executive Slate
I consider it a great honour to be nominated to stand for re-election as ACH President, and I would like to take this opportunity to confirm that, if re-elected, I would be delighted to continue to serve the humanities computing community in this role for a further term, and to have the opportunity to continue to work with the outstanding team of people on the ACH Executive.
The past three years have been crucial in the history of ACH. During this period, we have moved under the "Umbrella" of ADHO (Allied Digital Humanities Associations), adopted Literary and Linguistic Computing as our official Journal, developed a revenue sharing model in partnership with ALLC, and fostered closer relationships with existing and emerging Associations involved with Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. It is important that we continue to build on this work, while not losing sight of the unique aspects of our Association. If re-elected to serve as ACH President, I would undertake to ensure that ACH continues to support its existing community, and to maintain the activities that have been so beneficial to our membership (including our mentoring program, jobs committee, and affiliates initiative). At the same time, it is important that ACH continues to develop new activities that have been established, including postgraduate bursaries and the electronic Journal Digital Humanities Quarterly.
I would seek to ensure continuity and to maintain the existing, strong partnership between ACH, ALLC and ADHO.
I terms of my own background, my training is in history, but I have worked in humanities computing since 1993, in the UK and USA. In April 2005, I moved to London to take up a post in the Centre for Computers in the Humanities (CCH) at King's College, London. I'm now managing a new UK-wide project called the AHRC ICT Methods Network, which is funded for three years to examine and promote the use of ICT for research in the Arts and Humanities. The Methods Network will be launching a series of events and publications around this topic, focussing on new developments and advanced methodologies, research processes, questions, and methods. At the core of our work will be some key questions, which I think are core to the application of technology to the Humanities: what will does technology enable researchers to do that could not be done before at all? Does it enable 'old' research to be done in a significantly new way? In what ways does the technology serve the scholarship?
Prior to moving to London, from 1997-2005, I was the Assistant Director for Humanities Computing at New York University's Information Technology Services, where my responsibilities were based around supporting digital scholarship in the humanities at NYU.
I am active in a number of humanities computing initiatives, including the Digital Resources for the Humanities (DRH) conferences, and have served as a Local Organizer (in 2001) and Programme Chair (2003) of the ACH-ALLC conference. I have developed and taught courses on Humanities Computing, and have written extensively on humanities computing topics, most recently completing a book: Digitizing collections: strategic issues for the information manager, part of the "Digital Futures" series published by Facet Publishing.
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I would like to thank the Nominating Committee for asking me to stand for President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. It is an honor to be recognized by members of an Association with which I have been long affiliated.
In fact, my involvement with the ACH dates back almost two decades, starting with technical reviews that I wrote for Joe Raben, then editor of Computers and the Humanities, in the mid-1980s. I served as the Technical Review Editor and as a member of the Editorial Board for CHum for a number of years in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. I have also served as member of the Executive Council, and as Chair of the Program Committee for the annual ACH/ALLC conference in 1997. In the last couple of years, I have been working on an open source implementation of PhiloLogic designed to handle large amounts of TEI (and other) data in SGML and XML. The most recent release of PhiloLogic is being used by several humanities computing projects including the Brown Women Writers Project.
As Assistant Director of the ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago since 1988, I have played a role in a wide variety of humanities computing activities nearly all of which have involved extensive collaboration. The ARTFL Project itself is the result of an international collaboration and much of our activities center on maintaining an ever-expanding set of collaborations with commercial, most notably Alexander Street Press, and academic organizations on the Chicago campus, in North America, and abroad. In addition to supporting our original mission as a project for research in French literature and history, ARTFL is now also involved with projects as varied as maintenance of a South Asian digital library, creation of multi-media for language instruction, and software development for access to large collections of text and images used by many projects. Many of our partners are academic libraries, and I am particularly excited by ARTFL's involvement in the new Collaborative Initiative for French and North-American Libraries (CIFNAL). Thus, I bring to the Association considerable experience in working with diverse groups in humanities computing.
I received a PhD in French History from the University of Ottawa in 1991 and have published extensively on humanities computing as well as in French history. My most recent publications include a study of the structures of the renvois in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert, work on theater performances in Paris during the French Revolution, and an analysis of author gender differences in French literature in the 18th and 19th centuries. I am currently working on the idea of "tradition" in France and England from the 17th to 20th centuries.
My background includes scholarly research, technical development and management of a humanities computing center, all of which I believe will serve me well in representing the diverse interests of the members of the ACH.
Mark Olsen
mark@barkov.uchicago.edu
CV: http://barkov.uchicago.edu/mark/mark.cv.html
ARTFL Project: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/ARTFL/
PhiloLogic: http://philologic.uchicago.edu/
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Professor of English, Webmaster, and Director of Undergraduate Studies, New York University
My first serious work with computers (1981-84), used dBase programs to analyze Old English metrical patterns and answer some important questions about OE metrical theory. I wrote a program for managing government documents collections (1990) that simplified the sharing and discarding of those documents. My Language and Style in The Inheritors (1999) investigated the style of William Golding’s strange second novel using a novel corpus and interactive concordance. While working on these projects, I joined ACH and discovered I had been doing humanities computing without knowing it.
My recent work on stylometry and authorship attribution, a book in progress (Approaches to Corpus Stylistics, Routledge, 2006, with Jonathan Culpeper, Bill Louw, and Martin Wynne), and an electronic edition in progress (The Clerk’s Tale for Peter Robinson’s Canterbury Tales Project, with Martha Rust) are more explicitly “humanities computing.” They remain, however, fundamentally about stylistics, authorship, and Chaucer: humanities computing can make important contributions only if its findings make their way into traditional disciplines, departments, journals, and conferences, and into the consciousness and praxis of professionals in those disciplines. Otherwise, it risks becoming a support or service activity without full legitimacy in the eyes of the academy.
When Lorna Hughes and I developed and co-taught NYU’s first graduate course in humanities computing, we put this view into practice by calling the course “Topics in Literary Theory: Computers and Literary Studies,” and placing it among the English Department’s regular graduate offerings. I also frequently give papers with a humanities computing component at conferences such as The Poetics and Linguistics Association International conference and the MLA Annual Convention. The current projects mentioned above, a recent article by Thomas N. Corns and I on Milton and authorship that appeared in Milton Quarterly, and another article in progress on the authorship of a medieval saint’s life, which Christina Carlson and I plan to place in a medieval journal, show that collaboration and mainstream placement of work with a humanities computing component are possible.
If elected, my goal will be to continue to spread our methods into mainstream venues. This will often require doing and encouraging deeply collaborative work. It will also require liaisons with disciplines and approaches that could and should make much more innovative and productive use of computers than they now do. Finally, it will require persuading the traditional disciplines not only that humanities computing studies are legitimate and deserve full scholarly recognition, but also that they have the potential to affect profoundly how knowledge is created and disseminated.
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Natalia “Natasha” Smith holds an M. A. in Linguistics and an MS in Library Science. Prior to coming to the U.S., Natasha worked as senior editor in a publishing house in Moscow. She is currently a Digitization Librarian and head of “Documenting the American South” (http://docsouth.unc.edu/), a digital library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While at UNC, she led, managed and served as principal investigator on several projects to create collections of electronic texts in the humanities, a new amalgam of digitized primary sources published online with supporting materials, including scholarly essays, commentaries, annotations, summaries, and biographical information.
Since 1995, Natasha has actively worked with digital humanities and TEI. She was one of the founding members of the Digital Library Federation WG on Encoding Standards that came up with “TEI in Libraries Best Practices Guidelines.” She was on a Task Force charged with developing recommendations for migrating existing TEI resources from SGML (P3) to XML (P4). She also served the 2003-2005 term on the TEI Executive Council and currently represents UNC in the TEI Consortium. Natasha is not new to the ACH either. She served on the Executive Council (2002-2005), on Program Committees (2003, 2004 and elected for 2007 PC), was on the 2003 and chaired 2004 Nominating Committees.
She writes: “It is truly a great honor to stand for Vice President of the ACH, particularly at the time of current important and exciting organizational changes--the time that I urge us to see as an opportunity to reflect upon what has been achieved, where we stand, and what directions would work best for the Association and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. As we work on shaping our future, I would like us to focus on strengthening collaboration with other professional organizations, especially libraries.
“The dialogue with professional librarians associations has already started, but a lot still needs to be done in establishing a closer relationship and in promoting the ACH and ADHO among libraries. Although the scholar/librarian collaboration is a well-established model in a 'traditional' setting, it is especially needed in today's digital environment. Libraries traditionally served as repositories of information, however now they can and do already take on the role of publishers by working on archival and publishing projects in humanities computing.
“This new role brings a whole array of complex and important issues and responsibilities -- careful selection, implementations of standards, useful project design and interface, just to mention a few -- where a historically proven partnership of scholars and librarians are extremely beneficial for everybody. Such a librarians and scholars partnership in the digital world is not just desirable, but logical and essential, in a world where the latter creates new, born-digital scholarship based on valuable collections of primary source materials published online by the former.
“My academic background, publisher’s experience and work in academic libraries qualify me to serve as a natural liaison between communities of scholars, publishers, and librarians. I am sure my colleagues, members of the ACH and ADHO, have valuable suggestions and ideas about creating a larger awareness of the societies among our peers. With your help we are capable of creating a plan that works, a plan that will really attract new members and allies, both individual and institutional.”
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Neil Fraistat is Professor of English and Acting Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. He is a founder and General Editor of the Romantic Circles Website (http://www.rc.umd.edu) and for six years served as the Chair of MITH’s Internal Advisory Board. His most recent book is Volume II of The Complete Poetry of Percy Byshhe Shelley, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, which was awarded Honorable Mention for the MLA’s biennial Distinguished Scholarly Edition Prize (2005). He has been the recipient of the Fredson Bowers Prize from the Society for Textual Scholarship and a Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Association.
Fraistat has served one term on the ACH’s Executive Council and has sat on several of its committees, including two stints on the annual conference Program Committee. As a reelected member of ACH’s Executive Council, Fraistat would continue his efforts to bring together the scholarly editing community, as represented especially by the Society for Textual Scholarship and the European Society for Textual Scholarship, with the ACH. He also hopes to bring New Media studies further into the orbit of the ACH.
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I first became interested in humanities computing while an MA candidate in medieval studies at Western Michigan University at the tail end of the 1990s. I was very intrigued by the various electronic projects focused on bringing usually hard-to-view manuscript materials to a broader audience -- The Canterbury Tales project, Piers Plowman, and the Electronic Beowulf. This interest led me to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where I completed an MS in Library Science with the thesis "Medievalists' Use of Electronic Resources," based on a national user study. Since 2003 I have been Program Coordinator at the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities at the University of Kentucky (RCH).
My main work for the past three years (first as co-PI on the Electronic Boethius Project, directed by Kevin Kiernan, and more recently with the Venetus A project, a collaboration between the Stoa Consortium, RCH, and Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies) has been with image-based encoding, that is, investigating ways to both increase the physical description available in the TEI and create links between text encoding and digital images. More recently my project base has expanded and I have been working with a wider variety of materials, including (through the Stoa Consortium) the Neolatin Colloquia and Latin Lexicography projects. I work with individual scholars, many of whom are not familiar with the theory and practice of humanities computing, so it is important to me that the community in general be inviting and informative to new members.
I have been most active in the TEI Consortium, but I regularly use other markup systems, most significantly METS, and if elected to the ACH Executive Council I would work to encourage cooperation and understanding among the various sub-communities that comprise the association. I would also like to see the ACH reach out to individual humanities scholars who may be interested in applying technology to their research, but who require assistance to get started.
For more information about me, please see my CV at http://www.rch.uky.edu/dporter/CV.doc.
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Ken Price received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago and currently holds the Hillegass Chair in Nineteenth-Century American Literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author or editor of eight books on literary and textual studies. His work in humanities computing dates from 1995 when he and Ed Folsom began co-editing the Walt Whitman Archive <www.whitmanarchive.org>, a site supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the U.S. Department of Education. The NEH recently awarded a "We the People" challenge grant to the University of Nebraska to build a permanent endowment to support the Whitman Archive. At Nebraska, he is co-director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH). In broader professional service, he sits on the executive committee of the Association for Documentary Editing; he chairs the Americanist editorial board of NINES (a group founded to to establish a publishing environment for integrated and peer reviewed online scholarship centered in British and American nineteenth-century studies); and he chairs the MLA committee on information technology.
Humanities computing is making porous the borders that once separated the work of librarians, publishers, and scholars. Now we find publishers archiving materials, librarians acting as publishers, and scholars creating metadata. Despite these overlapping roles, communication between these groups is inadequate. If elected to the ACH Executive Council, Ken would promote collaborations that cross borders. We need better and earlier collaborations so that we can address key issues including the status of humanities computing within the academy, the advancement of standards-based work, and the sustainability and preservation of scholarship.
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Susan Schreibman is Assistant Dean, and Head of Digital Collections and Research at University of Maryland Libraries. She is co-editor of A Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell, 2004), and series co-editor of Topics in the Digital Humanities (University of Illinois Press). She is current co-editing A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (Blackwell, forthcoming 2007). Her online scholarly publications include The Thomas MacGreevy Archive <http://macgreevy.org>, a long-term digital archive centered on the 20th century Irish poet and art critic, and Irish Resources in the Humanities <http://irith.org>, an annotated gateway. Dr Schreibman is in the final year of her second term on the Council of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium. She has developed and taught many TEI workshops in Canada, Ireland, Sweden, and the U.S. In 2004 and 2005 she served as an ACH representative to the program committee for the Joint Annual Conference of the Association for Computers in the Humanities/Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing.
As a member of the ACH Executive Council Dr Schreibman would continue her activities in promoting the digital humanities, particularly within the area of literary studies, and well as continue to create synergies between the digital library and digital humanities communities. She is especially interested in exploring how the ACH can promote the digital humanities, particularly, beyond the digital humanities community, through online publishing and training.
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John A. Walsh, Associate Librarian and Adjunct Associate Professor of English, is the Associate Director for Projects and Services of the Indiana University Digital Library Program, where he coordinates the activities of the program and manages select projects and initiatives. He has been working with digital text and image collections and other digital library content creation and delivery for over ten years. His main area of expertise is in the development of XML full-text literary and humanities digital collections. Current projects include The Swinburne Archive, a digital collection of the works of nineteenth-century British poet Algernon Charles Swinburne; the Chymistry of Isaac Newton, a digital edition of Isaac Newton's alchemical writings; and CBML, or Comic Book Markup Language, a TEI-based XML vocabulary for encoding comic books and graphic novels. John has a Ph.D. in English literature, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century British poetry. John is active in the digital humanities field, researching the application of XML-related technologies to the preservation, presentation, and analysis of literary texts and pop culture media.
As a member of the ACH Executive Council, John would enthusiastically support the continuation and growth of the ACH's important efforts to mentor and encourage new scholars in the field of digital humanities. John would also explore ways to enhance the online presence of ACH and to increase awareness--beyond the digital humanities community--of the activities and research of ACH members. And John would work hard to ensure the continued success of important events such as the annual Digital Humanities conference.
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Claire Warwick is a Lecturer at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College London. She is programme director of the MA in Electronic Communication and Publishing, and teaches modules on electronic publishing, legal and social aspects, and XML. She also supervises students undertaking research topics on internet political economy as part of the MSt in International Relations at the University of Cambridge. She gained her PhD in English literature from Cambridge and has subsequently worked for the English Faculty and Humanities Computing Unit at Oxford University, and the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield.
She is principal investigator of Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts and Humanities project: LAIRAH, (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/LAIRAH) and co-investigator of the User Centred Interactive Search with digital libraries project: UCIS (http://www.uclic.ucl.ac.uk/annb/DLUsability/UCIS.html). Both of these funded projects are conducting research into how humanities users interact with digital resources. The UCIS project studies how humanities researchers interact with digital libraries and whether it is possible to support their work more effectively by means of interface design. The LAIRAH project aims to determine levels of use of digital tools and resources in humanities research, and whether there are factors which may predispose a project to be useful and sustainable. Claire is also lead researcher of CIRCAh- the Cultural Informatics Research Centre in the Arts and Humanities; newly founded at UCL.
Claire’s research is essentially collaborative and involves teams both in the UK and internationally. She was a plenary lecturer at the Humanities computing Summer Institute, University of Victoria 2005 and an invited participant of the Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities, University of Virginia 2005. She will also be attending a meeting of the HCI-Book group in Vancouver in January 2006. She is a member of the UK AHRC Methods Network expert group to investigate the effects of collaboration on research in the humanities and is a part of a network proposal to SSHRC to work on the institutional contexts of Humanities computing.
She has therefore always considered the international focus of ACH to be particularly significant and valuable. Its activities help to foster international links made not only as a result of attendance at conferences, but through discussion on Humanist, the global reach of the jobs database, and the mentoring scheme. If elected she would therefore seek to further the collaborative, international aspects of ACH activities, to promote the exchange of ideas between researchers and practitioners in humanities computing, wherever they may be based in the physical world.
She would also seek to promote links between ACH and professional associations in the Library and Archives world since these communities have a great deal in common with ours. There is potential for greater dialogue and collaboration, in areas such as digital preservation, digital libraries, open access, standards etc, which she would seek to encourage further.
Her personal web page is at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/claire-warwick/new/
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Matthew Zimmerman works in Faculty Technology Services at New York University where he consults on digitization and encoding projects such as The Clerk's Tale, the Public Writings of Margaret Sanger, and the Aphrodisias project. Outside of New York University he is an active member of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium serving as the convener of the Special Interest Group on Presentation Tools, member of the Board of Directors, program chair for the 2005 members' meeting and, most recently, chair of the consortium. Matthew was one of the local organizers of the ACH/ALLC 2001 meeting in New York and has been a peer reviewer for Literary and Linguistic Computing for the past two years. If elected, Matthew would take advantage of being part of the new umbrella organization, ADHO, to maintain the high quality of the annual conference and work to attract participation in the conference outside of North America and Europe. He is also interested in developing ways for members of the humanities computing community to share tools.
For more information: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~mz34/cv.html
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