Lorna Hughes
Biography:
Lorna Hughes is the Director of the Humanities Computing Group at New York University. This group is based in Information Technology Services at NYU, and works closely with faculty and students in all humanities departments at NYU. The mission of the group is to promote and support all aspects of technology in humanities teaching and research. This group has established several interdisciplinary centres for humanities computing at NYU, developed courses and workshops, and developed a number of Faculty humanities computing projects. These projects include multilingual computing initiatives, electronic editions, on-line databases, digital libraries research, and multimedia and video research projects.
For more information about this work, see www.nyu.edu/its/humanities.
Lorna has also developed two graduate courses at NYU: "Museums and Interactive Technologies", which she teaches in the Museum Studies program, and "Computers and Literary Studies" which she has jointly developed with faculty in the English department.
Prior to moving to New York, Lorna ran the humanities computing facility at ASU. Before moving to the United States in 1994, she worked on the CTI Centre for Textual Studies, part of Oxford University's Humanities Computing Unit, and at Glasgow university Computing Services.
Lorna's academic background is in Medieval History. She has an MA in medieval History and an MPhil in History and Computing from Glasgow University.
She has been a member of the ACH executive committee since 1998 and serves on several ACH committees. She is an active member of NINCH (the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage) and collaborates on a number of international humanities computing projects.
Statement:
I've been involved in Humanities computing since 1991, when I started a graduate degree in History and Computing at Glasgow University. Since then, I've worked on humanities computing posts at Glasgow, Oxford, ASU and NYU, and I've developed an understanding of the institutional issues which face humanities computing initiatives at a variety of institutions: US and UK, public and private, well funded and well intentioned.
Through my job at NYU and my work with NINCH and ACH, I've worked on collaborative projects with academic departments, computing centres, museums, libraries, and archives. Recently, I started teaching graduate courses in humanities computing at NYU.
But what most of you will know me from is ACH-ALLC 2001 at NYU. I considered it an enormous privilege to be the local organizer of this event. To me, our annual conference exemplifies all that is best and most useful about ACH - bringing people together from all over the world; collaboration and community building; theorizing, brainstorming, building new alliances, getting projects started and - yes! - having fun.
This is the type of work that is so important for us to be able to accomplish, and why the community of ACH is such a crucial part of our professional "toolkit".
As ACH president, I would work hard to foster this collaborative community, and to explore new ways that we could work together and share resources.
I would bring to the organization a strong administrative background, a long history with ACH, practical abilities and the ability to dedicate time and resources to strengthening our organization.
Some areas I would continue to focus on would include the encouragement of international collaborations, developing the electronic resources we offer to our members, support for graduate students and new scholars in this field, professional development for members, and a re-examination of the concept of regional ACH events for members unable to travel to our conferences. I would also like to continue to explore ways of expanding our membership.
As Humanities Computing continues to evolve as an emerging discipline, it is more important than ever for ACH to support academic research in Humanities Computing. We should do all we can to continue to be a vital, active, and expanding professional organization.
I would consider it a great honour to work on your behalf to continue to make ACH, as our professional organization, the important resource we have come to depend upon as we build our community.
Mark Olsen
I would like to thank the Nominating Committee for asking me to standfor President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. The innovations proposed by John Unsworth and his colleagues on theADHO work group, which were recently accepted by the membership, makethis a particularly exciting time for the ACH. This is a far-reachingand visionary plan which will significantly change the nature of theACH, placing it on solid financial and institutional foundations inorder to make it a more effective professional organization. Thecharge to the future President and to the Executive Councilfor the next two years is to implement this plan as expeditiously aspossible. There remains significant organizational work to coordinate moreclosely the activities of the ACH with the ALLC, as well as with otherrelated organizations such as the TEI-C, STS, and NINCH under theumbrella of ADHO. Of capital importance, in my opinion, is thecreation of the proposed electronic journal, possibly with a printanalog, to augment Computers and the Humanities (Chum)as a viable and respected outlet for researchers in humanities computing. In conjunction with Literary and Linguistic Computing and theannual conferences, the e-journal will be a vital element in fosteringthe development of greater international collaboration among humanitiescomputing organizations outside of Europe and North America by providinga new medium for publication and debate. The ACH has long discussedfostering collaborative software development among the various teamsand projects represented in the association. As the creation of ADHObrings with it a strong emphasis on collaborative activities, Isuggest that this is an ideal time to create a joint SoftwareDevelopment Committee, with significant representation from the TEI-Cand other affiliated institutions, to be charged with facilitatingdevelopment of humanities computing software that can be used to implementand exploit the existing collections of text and other data. Implementingthe ADHO plan requires continuing the important work of the ACH ExecutiveCouncil and will provide a wide range of benefits for all ACH members andhumanities computing in general.
I have been involved with the ACH for nearly 20 years in variouscapacities. I served as the Technical Review Editor and as a member of theEditorial Board for Chum for a number of years in the late 1980s andinto the 1990s. I have also served as member of the Executive Council, andas Chair of the Program Committee for the annual ACH/ALLC conference in1997. As Assistant Director of the ARTFL Project at the University ofChicago since 1988, I have been involved in a wide variety of humanitiescomputing activities nearly all of which have involved intensecooperation. The ARTFL Project itself is the result of an internationalcollaboration and much of our activities are centered on maintaining anever-expanding set of collaborations with commercial and academicorganizations on the Chicago campus, in North America, and abroad. Whilesupporting our original mission as a project for research in Frenchliterature and history, ARTFL is now also involved with projects as varied asmaintenance of a South Asian digital library, creation of multi-media forlanguage instruction, and software development for access to largecollections of text and images used by many projects. I received a PhD inFrench History from the University of Ottawa in 1991 and have publishedextensively on humanities computing as well as in French history.My recent work includes a study of the structures of therenvois in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert,an analysis of author gender differences in French literature in theEarly Modern and Modern periods, and work on theater performancesin Paris during the French Revolution as well as on the history ofthe idea of "tradition" in France.
The ADHO plan represents a dramatic new vision for the future of theACH which I would be honored to help carry forward as President ofthe Association.
Mark
Olsen
mark@barkov.uchicago.edu
CV
available:
http://barkov.uchicago.edu/mark/mark.cv.html
Julia Flanders
I have been active within the humanities computing community since 1994, when I first attended the annual joint ACH/ALLC conference. My research interests are chiefly in text encoding and digital editing, both through the Brown University Women Writers Project where I have worked for over a decade, and through the Text Encoding Initiative, with which I've been closely involved for the past few years. My academic background is in English Literature, and I'm pursuing a PhD at Brown University in my spare time.
For several years I have been on the ACH executive council, and I've been involved in efforts to increase ACH membership and to improve what ACH does for its members. I've worked with the group that developed the ACH jobs database, which I currently edit, and I've helped organize the ACH mentoring service. These efforts are important to me and I would like to see them continue. More importantly, though, during the past two years as Vice President of ACH, I have worked with the team that has been exploring ways of bringing ACH and ALLC into a closer and more fruitful relationship. In the next two years, ACH will see some significant changes and new possibilities as a result of this new relationship: new publications, better relationships with related communities, and increased funding for new ACH activities. There is an important opportunity here that ACH should not waste: ACH needs to offer more benefits to its members, and it needs to raise the quality of its communications--its web presence, its online publications, and its conference. I am eager to help bring these changes about, and to help the ACH community explore some new possibilities that will make ACH as an organization more valuable to its members.
Web Site: http://www.stg.brown.edu/staff/julia.html
Edward Vanhoutte
Edward
Vanhoutte (evanhoutte@kantl.be /
http://www.kantl.be/ctb/vanhoutte/)is
co-ordinator of the Centrum voor Teksteditie en
Bronnenstudie - CTB(Centre for Scholarly Editing
and Document Studies)
His research interests include text-encoding and markup of modern manuscriptmaterial (prose and epistolary material), electronic scholarly editing,genetic editing, and the history of electronic editing. He is the co-editorof the DALF guidelines for the description and encoding of modern manuscriptmaterial which is documented as an extension to the TEI and is used for theconstruction of a growing textbase of modern (19th & 20th century)correspondence material. See http://www.kantl.be/ctb/project/dalf/.
Next to writing a book on the history of electronic scholarly editing, he iscurrently co-editing two special issues of Literary and Linguistic Computingdevoted to young scholars in IT and the Humanities, and one issue on Nordicapproaches towards electronic editing. He is preparing a collection ofessays on the edition of correspondence material (Epistolaria) and haspreviously edited several collections of essays on genetic and scholarlyediting (e.g. Paralipomena, Antwerp: AMVC 2001), Flemish literature (e.g. Deene leeuw is de andere niet. Zeven maal De Leeuw van Vlaenderen herlezen,AMVC: Antwerp, 2003) and historical linguistics (e.g. Talig Erfgoed. DeZuidelijke Nederlanden in de 14de eeuw, Gent: KANTL, 2002). Amongst his mostrecent publications are the text-critical reading edition of De Leeuw vanVlaenderen (The Lion of Flanders) by Hendrik Conscience (Tielt: Lannoo,2002), the text-critical reading edition in bookform (Antwerp: Manteau,1999) and the electronic-critical edition on CD-Rom of Stijn Streuvels' Deteleurgang van den Waterhoek (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press/KANTL,2000) which he prepared together with Marcel De Smedt. Edward Vanhoutte isalso a food writer and mainly reviews cookery books. Full publication listsee http://www.kantl.be/vanhoutte/pub.htm.
As Vice-President of the ACH, he wants to concentrate on the continuousapproach of the ACH and the ALLC, the future of the ACH publication CHUM,and the involvement of young scholars of all continents in the field ofHumanities Computing.
Miranda Remnek
Miranda Remnek has worked with e-texts in the humanities since 1994-95, whenshe took courses at the University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center, andthe Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities. In 1997-98 she helpedfound and coordinate the work of the University of Minnesota’s ElectronicText Research Center, where she launched three projects: Women's Travel Writing,1830-1930 (http://etrc.lib.umn.edu/womtrav.htm), Early Modern French WomenWriters (http://etrc.lib.umn.edu/frenwom.htm), and Early Nineteenth CenturyRussian Readership and Culture(http://media.library.uiuc.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=rusreadtc). Theseprojects had an important teaching mission: to introduce uninitiated facultyand students to the challenges and possibilities of creating and usingdigital humanities texts.
In her new position as Head of the Slavic & East European Library at theUniversity of Illinois she will also serve as coordinator of the Library’snew E-Text Working Group. Her other interests involve the promotion of Slavicdigital initiatives. As co-chair of the new Working Group on DigitalProjects of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies she is spearheading an international registry of digital projects in the Slavic andEurasian field. On a recent visit to St Petersburg, Moscow and Siberia sheinitiated US/Russian collaboration on a digital newspaper preservationproject, and also met with faculty and librarians to discuss various otherpossibilities for cooperation. Some of these involved projects alreadyunderway at Illinois including the production of image databases for use inteaching, the creation of customized digital humanities texts, and theapplication of analytical mechanisms like interpretive encoding and topicmaps.
Stéfan Sinclair
Stéfan Sinclair (PhD, Queen's University at Kingston) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. His activities as co-director of the Masters of Arts in Humanities Computing at the UofA include administration of the programme, teaching of graduate seminars, and thesis supervision. This intensive involvement with a Humanities Computing curriculum offers a rich opportunity to experience a wide range of computing activities in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Fine Arts.
Stéfan's research interests include twentieth Century French literature, computer-assisted text analysis, and literary databases. Among his research projects are SatorBase (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, see www.satorbase.org ) and the TAPoR project (funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation; he is the Research Director at the UofA for this six university initiative, see www.tapor.ca ). In the context of TAPoR, Stéfan will continue the development of his HyperPo: Text Analysis and Exploration Tools.
Stéfan's role with the M.A. in Humanities Computing makes the entire spectrum of activities of the ACH immediately relevant to him. However, as a member of the ACH Executive Council, Stéfan would want to focus on two areas especially. First, he would endeavour to establish a mechanism for peer evaluation of software developed by humanists. Though potentially an important and valuable form of scholarship in Humanities Computing, software development lacks any relevant means of assessment, and is therefore usually an unrecognised supplementary activity. The pressures to publish articles and books are already substantial. It is only by providing a mechanism for evaluating and recognising the quality of software that we will motivate some researchers in the humanities to develop code; this in turn would very likely benefit the larger Humanities Computing community. Second, Stéfan would work at promoting the value of integrating Humanities Computing into undergraduate and graduate curricula. This not only includes demonstrating the increasing need for Humanities Computing scholars in academia, but also the need for individuals familiar with various forms of Humanities Computing in the private sector. Humanities disciplines are often ineffective at demonstrating the value and relevance of their research and teaching activities. As a field steeped in both scientific and humanistic traditions, Humanities Computing has a distinct advantage in being able to appeal - potentially - to a broader audience. The better the case we can make for the value of Humanities Computing, the more numerous and higher quality our students will be, and as a result, the better we will be as a discipline. Of course, this is a long, arduous process (already well underway) that involves many people, but Stéfan would look forward to working with the ACH to find strategies for furthering this objective. He would benefit from his experience of sitting on the Executive Councils of the COSH/COCH and SATOR scholarly associations.
Ross Scaife
My name is Ross Scaife. I received a PhD in Classics from theUniversity of Texas in 1991 and I am currently an associate professorat the University of Kentucky. I've been involved in humanitiescomputing projects since about 1995, especially as a principaldeveloper of the Suda On Line Byzantine Lexicography project and as aco-creator of Diotima: Materials for the Study of Women and Gender inthe Ancient World. My personal interests generally cluster around thefollowing topics: the evolution of scholarly communication and itsevaluation, open access for broad audiences, scholarly collaboration,and interoperability of projects.
In 1998 I began the Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication(www.stoa.org) and I continue to serve as its co-editor. Roughlytwenty projects have been published at the Stoa, or are now underactive development, ranging from the simple to the relatively complex. But it's just as important to me that the Stoa has played a strong rolein building up and supporting a community of engaged and ableIT-oriented scholars in Classics. To that end we've regularlydisseminated information about markup practices, intellectual propertyissues, useful tools, XML publishing environments, and so forth. Mostrecently in June we teamed up with the Center for Hellenic Studies inWashington, DC to stage a week-long workshop attended by twenty-threepeople with on-going or incipient projects in electronic publication.
ACH meetings have proven quite valuable to me as windows into currentprojects and practices in other disciplines of the humanities, and forletting me spend time with some talented and friendly people. As amember of the ACH executive committee I would gladly work to see morewidespread participation in this organization, so that it becomes evenmore diverse, lively, and informative. I am also ready to help the ACHwith outreach, that is with spreading the news about how our work canenrich the overall texture of scholarly life for all humanists,including the most traditional.
Ray Siemens
Has there ever not been an exciting time to be involved inHumanities Computing? Since my own first taste, some 15 years ago now,of the fascinating work and the sense of community shared by those whoidentify themselves as computing humanists, what has typified myexperience in the area is the enthusiasm and optimistic sense ofpossibility that few other disciplines enjoy. The nature of myexperience has only been further reinforced by ongoing participation inorganisations that support and foster the work of our community --organisations such as the ACH (of which I've been pleased to serve asExecutive Secretary for the past two years) and COCH/COSH (the CanadianLearned Society dedicated to Humanities Computing, of which I amincoming President [English]). And it is this experience, attitude, andcommitment to the positive sense of community we share that I would hopeto return to ACH as elected member of its Executive Council.
Past work, in brief: Some of you may know me in the context of my workwith several Humanities Computing organisations, others in my role asco-editor (with Susan Schreibman and John Unsworth) of the forthcomingBlackwell Companion to Digital Humanities, and others yet inconjunction with my academic work that explores humanistic concerns,specifically those of early modern literature in English, through a lensprovided by computing technology. Details of this work, and beyond, canbe found via my webpage, athttp://web.mala.bc.ca/siemensr/www/siemens.htm and a CV, which isavailable at http://web.mala.bc.ca/siemensr/cv.html.
David Gants
David Gants is the Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing at theUniversity of New Brunswick, a joint appointment with the Department ofEnglish and the Electronic Text Centre. He received his Ph.D. from theUniversity of Virginia where he was the Assistant Coordinator of itsElectronic Text Center and a graduate fellow at the Institute for AdvancedTechnology in the Humanities. David has strong research interests inearly printing technologies, publishing history, and the development ofthe book trade in the British Isles. Since 1996 he has served as theElectronic Editor for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson(http://uk.cambridge.org/literature/features/cwbj), a scholarly editionthat will be published as complementary digital and print resources in2005. He is also the director of the new Early English Booktrade Database(http://dev.hil.unb.ca/Texts/Gants/EEBD) which is designed as ananalytical and bibliographical augmentation to the mainly enumerativeEnglish Short-Title Catalog, and serves on the Advisory Board for theOxford Edition of Edmund Spenser.
As a member of the ACH's Executive Committee David would work to increaseawareness of three scholarly and professional issues in particular.First, he feels that as a community of computing humanists we need tocontinue our efforts to integrate technology into the classroom: byseeking outreach opportunities among our departmental colleagues, whooften recognise the value of computer-assisted pedagogy but find itdifficult making that first step; by challenging our undergraduatestudents, who frequently hold simplistic or misinformed views of digitalresources; and by offering greater training and support to our graduatestudents, who will take these new approaches into their own classrooms.Next, David wants to reinforce the important advances made by others inour discipline to ensure that full value be given to scholars in thehumanities who pursue non-traditional research avenues such as programmingand other types of resource development. Decisions on tenure, promotion,and funding must derive from a full and accurate assessment of acandidates complete intellectual contributions, not just the traditionalmeasure of print publication. Finally, David seeks to address the currentproblems that have beset academic publishing and scholarly editing.Serious financial difficulties as well as an inability to design adequatecost-recovery strategies have led presses to curtail significantly theirearlier ventures in electronic publishing. David would like to see theACH, ALLC, library and professional organizations, and the major academicpresses initiate a serious and coordinated dialogue to design newpublications that take full advantage of emerging technologies. He wantsto see the work of editorial and hypertext theorists expanded and employedas the seeds for fresh modes of scholarly publishing.
Stephen Ramsay
Stephen Ramsay is an Assistant Professor of English and HumanitiesComputing at the University of Georgia. Before being appointed tothat position, he worked as Assistant Director for the ElectronicText Center and as a Senior Programmer for the Institute forAdvanced Technology in the Humanities and the Virginia Center forDigital History. He is an Associate Editor for the journal TEXTTechnology and the principal editor for its online component.He is a member of the External Board for the TAPoR Project, and wasa member of the local committees for the ACH/ALLC meetings inVirginia and Georgia. He has lectured widely on subjects related tohumanities computing, software design, and literary theory, and hasbeen an active member of the ACH for several years. He is currentlyworking on a book that explores the intersection ofcomputer-assisted text analysis, software design, and literarytheory. His most recent work, "Toward an Algorithmic Criticism"appears in the current issue of Literary and LinguisticComputing.
He writes: It gives me great pleasure to be nominated for a positionon the ACH Executive Council. The ACH has been an importantorganization in my professional life. I consider the annual meetingto be my "home" conference and I am very grateful for the communityof scholars it supports.
We're all familiar with the changes that are afoot with the ACH andthe ALLC. I believe these are good changes, and I believe theypresent us with a number of opportunities for expanding theinfluence of humanities computing, welcoming young scholars into thefield, and disseminating the results of our research moreeffectively. I would very much like to be a part of this process,and I think I can bring experience as both a scholar and as ascholarly technologist to the job.
I have been active in recent efforts to establish a peer-reviewprocess for humanities computing software. I think this is an areain which the ACH can provide important leadership, and I would liketo continue that work with other members of the Council.
Chris Ruotolo
I began my career in humanities computing as Associate Director of theUniversity of Virginia Library's Electronic Text Center. While at Etext,I managed several internationally-recognized text encoding projects,including the Early American Fiction project and the Japanese TextInitiative, of which I was technical director. After several years ofworking on document encoding, I became interested in methods of contentdelivery and online reading technologies. I developed the process forconverting Etext's public TEI collections to multiple ebook platforms. Ialso collaborated with Cathy Marshall on a pilot project in whichelectronic course materials were distributed to undergraduate and graduatestudents on hand-held computers for use in the classroom. I am deeplyinvolved with the Text Encoding Initiative and currently serve as Chair ofthe Task Force on SGML to XML Migration. I've also done quite a bit oftechnology training in digitization and text encoding and teach regularworkshops in XML and XSLT for the Association of Research Libraries.
I feel that I can bring a fresh, outreach-oriented perspective to the ACH.While much of the research done by scholars in humanities computing istheoretical and speculative, my interests tend to be more pragmatic. Asan academic librarian, I'm interested in how the work being done inhumanities computing is to be collected, preserved, shared amonginstitutions, and disseminated to other scholars. This is particularlytrue in my current role developing "information communities" to facilitateelectronic collaboration between scholars; one of our current projectsinvolves distributing digital resources on CD to developing countrieswhere internet access is poor. As humanities computing seeks to gain afirmer institutional foothold in academia, it is increasingly importantthat we seek to communicate and disseminate our work in a way thatwelcomes and engages the "traditional" humanities scholar. This goal isat the heart of my professional and academic work.
Susan Brown
I am an Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, near Toronto in Canada. My involvement in humanities computing grows out of my participation since 1993 in what has become known as The Orlando Project (http://www.ualberta.ca/ORLANDO/). This soon-to-be-completed project turned to text markup to devise new ways of producing, ordering, and representing literary historical knowledge in order to produce a history of women's writing in the British Isles. I have also used technology, mostly web-based materials and conferencing systems, in my teaching. As a specialist in Victorian writing, I am deeply interested in the relationship between technological and cultural change.
I have attended ACH/ALLC conferences when possible over the last decade; have served as an assessor for ACH conferences, for Computers and the Humanities, for Text/Technology, for Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) on technologically-oriented projects; and have assisted in SSHRC program development in the area of HC. I am a member of COCH/COSH (Canada's Consortium for Computers in the Humanities).
My interest in humanities computing can be summarized by Marshall McLuhan's assertion that "we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." We need a vibrant humanities computing community because we need to develop tools for ourselves, or we will find that tools produced by others are shaping the questions we can ask as well as those that we can answer. For this reason I believe that this inter- and multi-disciplinary community also needs to retain strong links to its various disciplinary foundations in the humanities. If elected to the Executive Council, I would seek to foster such links, and to devise new ways of making the relevance and potential of humanities computing more evident to our less technologically oriented colleagues, in order to foster further dialogue from which new tools to serve those disciplines may emerge. Because the participation of women in the HC community is significantly lower than the proportion of women in the humanities generally, I would also work to increase female membership and participation. My interests also extend to developing metadata standards, electronic publishing and peer review, digital libraries and text preservation, teaching technologies, and mechanisms for funding and institutional support. As a member of the council I would raise such issues as appropriate, but above all work so that ACH continues to address the wide range of issues of concern to its diverse membership.