Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 447.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 07:12:03 +0000
From: NINCH-ANNOUNCE <david@ninch.org>
Subject: Computer Science & Humanities Conference: Press Release;
Reports and papers Available Shortly
NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
News on Networking Cultural Heritage Resources
from across the Community
Monday January 27, 2003
Humanities Scholars, Scientists, and Engineers
Explore Common Ground in the New World of Digital Technology
http://www.ninch.org/programs/science/2003conference.pr.html
http://www.ninch.org/programs/science/
Transforming Disciplines: Computer Science and the Humanities Conference
Held January 17-18, 2003
Full Report and Papers Available Shortly
For Immediate Release: January 27, 2003
Humanities Scholars, Scientists, and Engineers Explore Common Ground in the
New World of Digital Technology
Humanities scholars, museum administrators, librarians, publishers,
computer and information scientists, technologists, and engineers met at
the National Academies in Washington, DC, January 17-18, 2003, to celebrate
pioneering models of scholarship that employ digital technology and to
address the considerable challenges to further progress.
As the conference, "Transforming Disciplines: Computer Science and the
Humanities," convened, William Wulf (National Academy of Engineering)
suggested that humanists and engineers shared the problem of creating
"macro scale" systems out of billions of minuscule components - with
unpredictable results. If humanists could resolve this problem for
themselves and for engineers, they would usher in a revolution comparable
to the development of Einstein's theories and quantum mechanics at the
beginning of the twentieth century. The necessity - and revolutionary
potential - of cooperative working relationships between humanists and
computer scientists and engineers, and the notion that they might be able
to help answer essential questions in each other's disciplines, became an
important theme of the conference.
Presenters included historians, classicists, art historians, engineers,
media studies professors, computer scientists, and representatives of
cultural and educational institutions. Will Thomas (University of Virginia)
discussed his work with the American Historical Review to create a new
genre of scholarship, playfully titled "a work formerly known as an article."
In the related arenas of teaching and textbook publishing, Richard Baraniuk
(Rice University) offered an ambitious vision of the cooperative
development of a "commons of free teaching materials," based on the
collaborative model of Linux software development.
Taking advantage of the computer as a visual medium, art historian Stephen
Murray (Columbia University) presented a graphic simulation of the
construction of Amiens Cathedral, and Douglas Greenberg (Survivors of the
Shoah Visual History Foundation) gave conference participants a glimpse of
the complexities of indexing and making accessible the videotaped
testimonies of more than 52,000 survivors of the Holocaust.
All of the projects examined during the conference demonstrated both the
rich possibilities and the limits of current technology and led to
speculation about new tools, training, and shifts in disciplinary thinking
that might allow more fruitful relationships between the humanities and
computer science. Participants frequently returned to the problem of
inertia within disciplines-particularly in expectations for promotion and
tenure, minimal training in technology for graduate students, and the lack
of adequate cooperation with university libraries and librarians.
Resisting the general tide of multi- and cross-disciplinarity, Michael
Joyce (Vassar College) sounded a call in favor of the traditional
disciplines and the need to explore all that is not known within those
disciplinary bounds-to "husband doubt, rather than suffocating in
knowingness." Janet Murray (Georgia Institute of Technology) argued that
perhaps lack of total understanding between computer specialists and
humanists is useful, creating a space of play and adaptation in which both
are able to formulate overly ambitious-and creatively valuable-projects.
By the time the meeting adjourned, participants had developed a wish list
of new tools, training, and cooperation, but recognized that they must
balance the desire to experiment creatively with the constraints of
existing tools and models, limited departmental support, and looming cuts
in federal, state, university, and foundation budgets.
"Transforming Disciplines: Computer Science and the Humanities" evolved
from the 1997 Computer Science and Humanities Initiative and a subsequent
September 2000 workshop that began exploring cross-disciplinary
cooperation. The Initiative is supported by the American Council of Learned
Societies (ACLS), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the
National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH), the National
Academies, and Princeton and Rice Universities and is funded by generous
grants from the Carnegie Corporation.
More information about the Computing and Humanities Initiative is available
on the NINCH Web site <http://www.ninch.org/programs/science/>. The
conference Web site <http://carnegie.rice.edu> will soon include more
detailed information about the presenters and links to a variety of digital
humanities projects.
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