Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 43.
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: Mon, 03 Jun 2002 11:51:40 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <w.mccarty@btinternet.com>
Subject: apologies for the silence then flood
Dear colleagues:
My apologies for the total silence from Humanist for the last week,
followed by the virtual tsunami about to hit you. I was attending the
conference of the Consortium for Computers in the Humanities / Consortium
pour Ordinateurs en Sciences Humaines (COCH/COSH), in the Congress of the
Social Sciences and the Humanities, at the University of Toronto. See
<http://web.mala.bc.ca/siemensr/C-C/2002/Program.htm> for details. The
COCH/COSH event, ably organized by Ray Siemens, gave abundant evidence that
(as more than one speaker remarked) humanities computing has come of age --
and that Canadian humanities computing, from British Columbia in the west
to Newfoundland in the east, has the full and much deserved attention of
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Technologies
de l'esprit / Mind Technologies, a full day of the conference co-sponsored
by SSHRC, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and others, offered a
rapid survey across many different projects and thus provided a good
overview of the variety.
The conference programme shows such variety but cannot of course give you
any idea of quality or qualities. Although I know many of the participants
and their good work, I was surprised as well as delighted by the overall
impression of vitality. Roughly this came from two sources: the fruits of
efforts over many years by senior people in the field and new research by
young scholars, including one entering PhD student. (Our young turks are
scarily competent! :-) Papers ranged from reports on projects that have
benefitted from computing -- the
without-this-I-wouldn't-have-been-able-to-do-that kind -- and
demonstrations of maturing and matured resources, to considerations of
questions in humanities computing itself. Some of the papers, that is,
could easily have been given in conferences on modern language study or
history, for example. It is in the nature of humanities computing, I would
think, that the range of material presented to us is interdisciplinary. In
other words, I find it a very healthy sign that people are not simply
decamping to their disciplines-of-origin but wisely cultivating multiple
audiences. If this is a tendency that selects for the young scholars, who
need all the exposure and help they can get, then so much the better for
humanities computing.
Now for that tsunami I promised you....
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/,
willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk, w.mccarty@btinternet.com
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