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ACHWeb 2007 Candidate Statements |
Executive Council nominees are standing for 3 positions on the council.
I am currently the Director of the Women Writers Project at Brown University http://www.wwp.brown.edu/, where I have worked in text encoding and digital humanities research for the past 15 years. I have served as Chair of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium http://www.tei-c.org/ and am currently its Vice-Chair; I have also been a member of the ACH Executive Council for a number of years, during which I helped to found ACH's popular jobs mentoring service and have served in various capacities including Vice-President. I am also the editor-in-chief of the newly founded journal Digital Humanities Quarterly http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/, published by ADHO and the ACH. My own research focuses on the theory and politics of digital humanities scholarship, and of digital text representation in particular; I'm fascinated by the forces that are shaping the emergence of this field and the variety of institutional forms it is taking.
As President of the ACH, I would pursue three sets of priorities. First, I would like to extend our existing programs of membership services, particularly those aimed at community development such as bursaries and mentoring services. Second, I would like to see ACH sponsor ways of exploring and studying the cumulative record of digital humanities publications and conference proceedings. And third, I would like to involve younger scholars more extensively in the organizational and outreach activities of the ACH. Thanks to recent membership development efforts and the thriving relationship with ADHO, ALLC, and SDH-SEMI, ACH now has greater resources to pursue such initiatives and I would like to see our level of activity increase to take advantage of this opportunity.
I began to work seriously with computers in the early eighties, using dBase programs to analyze Old English meter, and wrote a program for managing government documents collections in 1990. As I was investigating the style of William Golding's The Inheritors using a corpus of novels and an interactive concordance for my Language and Style in The Inheritors (1999), I joined ACH and discovered I had been doing humanities computing all along without knowing it.
My recent work on computational stylistics and authorship attribution and three major ongoing projects, Approaches to Corpus Stylistics (forthcoming, Routledge), Literary Vocabulary: A Study of Ten Writers, and an electronic scholarly edition of Chaucer's Clerk's Tale (with my colleague Martha Rust), are more explicitly “humanities computing.” They remain, however, fundamentally about stylistics, authorship, literary studies, and Chaucer. In my view, humanities computing makes its most important contributions when its findings appear in traditional disciplines, departments, journals, and conferences, and affect the consciousness and praxis of professionals in those disciplines.
When Lorna Hughes and I developed and co-taught NYU's first graduate course in humanities computing, we put this view into practice by placing it among the English Department's regular graduate offerings. Many of my presentations at conferences such as The Poetics and Linguistics Association International conference and the MLA Convention also have a humanities computing component. If elected, my goal will be to continue to spread our methods into mainstream venues. This will require doing and encouraging deeply collaborative work (I'm currently working on such projects on Camus, Huxley, and 19th Century French novelists). It will also require liaisons with disciplines and approaches that could and should make much more innovative and productive use of computers than they do currently. Finally, we must persuade 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 humanistic knowledge is created and disseminated. The increasing appearance of computational work in mainstream journals and the recent buzz over Franco Morretti's work within literary studies suggest that the time may finally be ripe.
Over the near term, the most important internal issues facing the organization are, in my view, continuing the momentum generated by the creation of ADHO, working with SDH/SEMI to assure a smooth integration of our newest partner organization, assuring that we capitalize on the strong position of our journals, and beginning to use our stronger financial situation to promote projects beneficial to the entire humanities computing community. I'd also like to begin working on strategies for creating more and more productive links between the various strands of interest among our membership; this will become more important as we grow larger and even more diverse. Our other major challenge is to make sure that we take advantage of the extraordinary talent within our community to tap into recent increases in funding opportunities for digital humanities and cyberinfrastructure from major granting organizations.
I am a Lecturer in Electronic Communication in the http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/ School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ University College London (UCL), where I teach Internet Technologies, Digital Resources in the Humanities, and Web Publishing. My research interests revolve around the development, appropriation, and user testing of computational technologies to allow research in the humanities which would otherwise be impossible to undertake.
Much of my research has revolved around using advanced technologies to read Ancient Roman texts, but in recent years I have been involved in a variety of projects. I am Associate Director of the JISC funded http://vera.rdg.ac.uk/ Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology(VERA) Project (with the University of Reading), and co-Investigator of the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC funded Image, Text, Interpretation: e-Science, Technology and Documents Project (with the University of Oxford). Recent research also includes the http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/research/reach/ ReACH (Researching e-Science Analysis of Census Holdings) project: an AHRC funded e-Science workshop series. I was co-investigator in the http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/research/circah/lairah/Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts and Humanities (LAIRAH) project, based at SLAIS, and am co-manager of http://www.teibyexample.org/TEI By Example, based at the http://www.kantl.be/ctb Centre for Textual Criticism and Document Studies in Ghent, Belgium.
I am general editor of http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/Digital Humanities Quarterly, on the editorial board of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, and am on the executive of both the http://www.ach.org/Association for Computers and the Humanities and the http://www.allc.org/Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing. Over the past 18 months I have been looking after membership issues for both ACH and ALLC, building up an improved relationship with OUP, and overseeing marketing and the production of new promotional materials. In that period subscription to the LLC Journal has increased by 26%.
If elected, I would like to continue the outreach work done by ACH, encouraging new individuals (including graduate students) to join our community. I believe that there is a wider community that we are currently not reaching, and that the association should be looking outwards to make others aware of the importance of our discipline, the range and type of work included in our discipline, and the benefits on offer to traditional humanities scholars in joining discussions in digital humanities. By strengthening our subscription base, we can increase funding our funding opportunities to new and young scholars, and encourage the development of the infrastructure which underpins our research.
John A. Walsh holds a Ph.D. in English literature and is an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Science, where he teaches and conducts research in the areas of digital humanities and digital libraries. John's research interests include digital editing and textual studies; the application of XML, semantic web, and metadata technologies as tools for the discovery, analysis, and representation of humanities data and complex textual and graphic documents; and the evolution of the document in the digital age. Specific research projects include The Swinburne Project http://www.swinburneproject.org/, The Chymistry of Isaac Newton http://www.chymistry.org/, and Comic Book Markup Language http://www.cbml.org/. In addition to his research activities, John has over ten years experience as a developer, manager, and librarian working on digital scholarly projects. John publishes articles on digital humanities and digital libraries topics and is a frequent presenter at the major digital humanities conferences. John recently played a leading role on the committee that established a new Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities at Indiana University.
As Vice President of ACH, 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. In support of this outreach, John would explore ways that ACH might facilitate further cooperation and communication among the growing network of digital humanities centers and institutes. And John would work hard to ensure the continued success of important events such as the annual Digital Humanities conference.
Paul Caton currently holds a post-doctoral research fellowship with the TEXTE Project at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Before moving to Ireland he spent ten years working for the Women Writers Project and the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University. Over the decade he has tackled many different tasks in humanities computing including text encoding, programming, and interface design. In 2004 Paul gained his Ph.D at Brown with a dissertation on the need for a dialectical relationship of critique between text encoding and mainstream English literary studies. He has presented on humanities computing topics at conferences such as Digital Humanities, Extreme Markup Languages, and Digital Resources in the Humanities, among others.
Paul believes that because digital humanities work often occupies a marginal or anomalous position in traditional academic structures (both administrative and intellectual), the ACH is a vital community organization and he will be delighted to help it by serving on the Executive Council, in any role.
Øyvind Eide is a senior analyst at the Unit for Digital Documentation, University of Oslo. He has been involved in several digitisation and database development projects in the humanities, including the Documentation Project (http://www.dokpro.uio.no/), the Museum Project (http://www.muspro.uio.no/) and the Ibsen Manuscript Project (http://www.dokpro.uio.no/litteratur/ibsen/ms/). He is the co-convener of the TEI Ontologies SIG (http://www.tei-c.org.uk/wiki/index.php/SIG:Ontologies) and the chair of The CIDOC Co-reference Working Group (http://cidoc.mediahost.org/co_reference_wg(en)(E1).xml).
As a member of the ACH Executive Council, Øyvind would have a special interest in the cooperation between ACH and the museum and cultural heritage sector. Such cooperation is especially important with respect to data standards. The quality of data management as well as research and education could be improved by better integration between data sources expressed in e.g. TEI, FRBR and CIDOC-CRM.
Matthew Jockers is an Academic Technology Specialist and Consulting Professor in the Department of English at Stanford University. His current research is focused on how computation can be leveraged to study massive literature collections: what others have framed as the question of "what to do with a million books." To this end, Jockers spent 2006-2007 in residence at the Stanford Humanities Center where, as "Research Scholar in the Digital Humanities," he developed a set of "macroanalytic" tools and methodologies for studying literature in the aggregate. The tools and techniques he developed provide a computational approach to what Franco Moretti has imagined as a sort of "distant-reading," an alternative to close-reading that allows scholars to consider a whole galaxy of texts.
Jockers has presented several papers on this subject at ACH conferences but the thrust of his work is being channeled into a book, now tentatively titled: "Beyond Search: A Macroanalytic Method for Literary Text Analysis." The methodologies developed and employed here borrow from corpus linguistics, stylometry, data-mining, and authorship attribution (among others) in order to provide an alternative approach to reading literary history. Jockers likens his macroanalytic approach to macroeconomics where the focus is not on individual consumers but rather upon an entire economy of consumers or, in this case, texts.
At Stanford Jockers helped to develop and institutionalize an undergraduate degree emphasis in Digital Humanities; he has taught the program's core course for three years. Two years ago he developed and received support for the "Beyond Search Workshop," an interdisciplinary working group of twenty (+-) scholars, librarians, and graduate students who meet monthly to explore and discuss the intersections of digital libraries, technology, and the study of literature. Presently the group is working on a project that applies machine-learning techniques in order to auto-classify the individual sentences of 875 19th Century American novels. With Nicole Coleman, Jockers founded the "New Directions in Humanities Research" lecture series at Stanford, where past speakers have included ACH members John Unsworth, Stefan Sinclair, and Julia Flanders. Jockers serves as a Manager within the Academic Technology Specialist Program (http://ats.stanford.edu), which is committed to exploring and developing innovative uses of technology.
Jockers earned his Ph.D. in Irish studies in 1997 and has published a variety of papers on Irish-American literature. He has developed a comprehensive online database of Irish-American literature (http://www.wiisonline.org/resources.php?type=db) and developed a full text archive of western Irish-American novels (http://www.wiisonline.org/resources.php?type=archive ). Since 2005 Jockers has served as Secretary of the American Conference for Irish Studies (http://www.acisweb.com). He is the Executive Director of the non-profit Western Institute of Irish Studies (http://www.wiisonline.org/), and teaches regular courses on Irish-American literature at Stanford.
Patrick Juola is currently Associate Professor of Computer Science at Duquesne University (Pittsburgh, PA). He has been an active member of the DH community since 2001, specializing in text analysis, including questions of authorship and of cognitive complexity, and in making computing more accessible to non-specialists. His books include a current textbook on computer architecture, a book on authorship attribution to appear shortly, and a book on mathematics for humaninsts (co-authored with Steve Ramsay) under contract with OUP. He is also the organizer of the 2004 Ad-Hoc Authorship Attribution Contract and currently holds several nationally-funded grants for research into the digital humanities.
As a member of the ACH Executive Council, Patrick would try to enhance DH outreach activities into the humanities at-large as well as into related disciplines such as forensics/law, education, computer science, and psychology.
Bethany Nowviskie is Assistant Librarian and Director of Digital Research and Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library, where she is responsible for a Digital Scholarship R&D team that supports faculty projects and for the Scholars' Lab, which combines the services of the former UVA GeoStat and Etext Centers. She has been active in digital humanities for more than a decade, working at IATH on the Rossetti Archive, at SpecLab on Temporal Modelling and the IVANHOE game, and most recently as Research Scientist at ARP on the Juxta collation tool and the NINES project. For NINES, she conceived and designed Collex, a search engine and faceted browser that federates resources from scholarly projects, presses, journal providers, and libraries through a common metadata standard and allows end users to create online collections and exhibits.
Bethany has a master's in Education from Wake Forest University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, where she wrote her dissertation on designing algorithmic tools for interpretive scholarship. Her most recent publications are a chapter on an open-source catalog system for an ACRL book, "Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Research Libraries," and an article on NINES for "Romanticism on the Net."
As a member of the ACH Executive Council, Bethany would work to strengthen the organization's outreach and advisory role in fostering local institutional support for digital humanities, addressing matters of peer review and tenure, and creating a healthy, policy-driven culture of open source. As we build greater coordination among humanities computing centers and deeper awareness of our work in traditional disciplines, the ACH must communicate the hard-won experience of its members to scholars and administrators undertaking new initiatives.
Stéfan Sinclair is Associate Professor of Multimedia at McMaster University in Canada. His research activities focus on software design and development for the digital humanities. He has created or contributed to the creation of several online tools such as HyperPo (text analysis tools at http://hyperpo.org/), TAPoR (text analysis portal at http://portal.tapor.ca/), BonPatron (French grammar checker at http://bonpatron.com/), the Humanities Visualization Project (at http://humviz.org/) , SatorBase (French literary database at http://satorbase.org/) and the Monk Project on data mining (at http://monkproject.org). Sinclair participated in the creation of the M.A. in Humanties Computing at the University of Alberta and currently teaching a range of topics including programming and visualization in the Multimedia programme at McMaster University.
Sinclair would like to build on his experience as member of the ACH Executive and Executive Secretary between 2004 and 2007 by focusing on two major areas. First, he would like to continue contributing to the web presence of the digital humanities through initiatives co- sponsored by the ACH. Two examples are the availability and exploitability of past Digital Humanities Conference abstracts and the Humanist archives. Second, he would like to be active in promoting the involvement of students in the ACH. This includes demonstrating the benefits of ACH membership to students, involving students meaningfully in ACH committees and business, and contributing to student-oriented activities like the jobs database and the mentoring programme.