Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 146.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2001 07:32:28 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: after the (Australian) wine
In a posting to Humanist 15.138 Francois Lachance asked for a report on the
symposium at the University of Newcastle, NSW (Australia), "A Practicable
Future for Computing in the Humanities: An International Symposium",
<http://www.newcastle.edu.au/department/lc/symposium/>. He wanted to know,
"after the wine", if one of us would enlarge in particular on Allen
Renear's talk. I am happy to report that the wine (officially tasted on a
scheduled tour of wineries in the Hunter Valley), as some of you will have
the experience to suspect, was very good indeed. So, of course, was
Allen's talk, but I will leave the reporting on it to him. This note is
rather about the format of the Symposium and, following on from it, about
related activities in Australia I was fortunate enough to encounter. Allow
me then to comment on these things before domestic cares attenuate the
afterglow of sustained exposure to humanities computing (and the humanists
who engage in our work) in New South Wales and elsewhere Down Under.
There were in brief two sessions per day for three days, in each session
(except for a special one Tuesday morning, which featured two
presentations) one lecture of 30-40 minutes followed by about 90 minutes of
discussion. The wise generosity of time allotted to discussion meant in the
end that the lectures could function as provocation to deeper and more
widely ranging debate -- not as statements to which there is no time to
respond. If only all symposia and conferences were thus! I realised
afterwards what I had been missing at conferences for so long -- the chance
to engage with attendees not just over dinner etc but also in the less
distracting environment of a session.
Unfortunately I was not able to get down to Melbourne and so had no
opportunity to see at first hand the activities at RMIT, esp in hypertext
<http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/>, and at the University of Melbourne, esp in
multimedia <http://www.meu.unimelb.edu.au/>.
Thanks to an invitation from Greg Dening I was able to visit the Centre for
Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University in Canberra
<http://www.anu.edu.au/culture/>, where I was shown the almost completed CD
for People of the Rivermouth, a project of the Academy of Social Sciences
in Australia <http://assa.edu.au/projects_peopleriverhtml.htm>. Rivermouth
is exemplary for the application of multimedia technology to major
ethnographic work on a rich, complex and very old culture of which few of
us have any idea. While in Canberra I was also able to visit the National
Gallery of Australia, which has produced a multimedia document on a very
moving installation at the Gallery, The Aboriginal Memorial, for which see
<http://www.nga.gov.au/> (Collections --> Aboriginal & Torres Strait
Islander art --> The Aboriginal Memorial, best viewed with IE). Through
lack of coordination on my part I did not get to visit the Australian
Scholarly Editions Centre <http://idun.itsc.adfa.edu.au/ASEC/> at ADFA in
Canberra, though the Director of the Centre, Paul Eggert, attended the
Symposium in Newcastle. On the work of the Centre, see in particular the
Just In Time Markup (JITM) scheme
<http://idun.itsc.adfa.edu.au/ASEC/aueledns.html>, developed by a research
team including Graham Barwell (Wallongong), who also was at the Symposium.
Further notes on humanities computing work in Australia would be most
welcome. Omissions indicate nothing more than the limited scope of my
experience.
And, in case anyone is wondering, allow me to reassure you that those of us
fortunate to arrive before the Symposium began and to remain Down Under
afterwards tasted various wines on several other occasions as well.
Yours,
WM
-----
Dr Willard McCarty / Senior Lecturer /
Centre for Computing in the Humanities / King's College London /
Strand / London WC2R 2LS / U.K. /
+44 (0)20 7848-2784 / ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/
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