Apologies to ADHO members who are also on the ACH-EC, and will have
seen a copy of this already. This is a draft of my request for comment
to ACH members; the date indicates when I hope to distribute
it--comments welcome any time up until then.
John
-------
To: All members of the Association for Computers and the
Humanities
From: John Unsworth, President
Date: Monday, June 16, 2003
Request for Comment:
I ask you to read the following carefully: it is a request for
comment on substantive proposals for change in our organization
and in our relationship to the Association for Literary and
Linguistic Computing. I urge you to send your comments to me at
unsworth@uiuc.edu--whether positive, negative, or neutral--by
September 15, 2003.
I'd also like to draw your attention to one recommendation in
particular, namely item 6 on the list below, in which it is
recommended that the ACH transfer status of official association
journal from Computers in the Humanities to Literary and
Linguistic Computing. Because this is likely to be cause for
concern among the members of the ACH, I would like to take this
opportunity to provide some background.
Background:
For a long time now, CHUM has belonged to Kluwer, rather than
to the ACH. The consequences of this are several:
First, because Kluwer owns CHUM, we see nothing of the
institutional subscription income to the journal-instead, we
collect $65/year from each of the ACH members, and then send $50
of that to Kluwer for the CHUM subscription, leaving ACH with an
annual income of about $1500. By contrast, ALLC owns LLC, and
receives a portion of all income to the journal, including
institutional subscriptions, plus 50% of the profits.
Second, Kluwer's requirements prevent us from offering
significant student discounts for ACH membership.
Third, Kluwer appoints the editors to the journal, and is not
required to have the ACH's approval for those appointments-and
while the current editors are long-time members of the ACH
community, the technicalities of this arrangement are cause for
concern, in the abstract.
The editors have noted, for a long time now, that most
submissions to CHUM do not come from ACH members, and we have,
over the years, tried in various ways to address that, without
much success. The bottom line, though, is the bottom line: the
arrangement with Kluwer is strangling the ACH financially. At
last year's ACH Executive Council meeting, I was charged by the
Council to attempt renegotiation of that arrangement with the
Kluwer representative, who was present at the conference. I
presented the case over lunch, and made it clear that if we could
not renegotiate, the ACH would be forced to discontinue its
association with CHUM. I was politely but in no uncertain terms
told that Kluwer was not interested in renegotiating.
In summary, the recommendation in item 6, below, is a response to
an untenable and non-negotiable financial arrangement, and it
does not reflect any lack of appreciation on the part of the ACH
for the editorial work that Nancy Ide and Elli Mylonas, or past
editors of CHUM, have done: quite the contrary. We are grateful
for their hard work, and the ACH executive endorses the
recommendation to part ways with CHUM only reluctantly, after
much discussion, and after exhausting the alternatives. I will
attempt to negotiate a continued discount on CHUM for ACH
members, and I will also attempt to persuade Kluwer to permit the
ACH to republish selected articles from back issues of CHUM, as
part of a library of classic texts in humanities computing that
we would like to include on the ADHO web site.
A recent survey of ACH members, organized by Bill Kretzschmar,
made it clear that members value receiving a print journal as a
benefit of membership, so we have been careful not to lose that
benefit in the proposed transition to LLC. That same survey also
made it clear that many members were eager to see the ACH publish
a free electronic journal: the proposed arrangement will provide
income sufficient for the ACH to do that, in collaboration with
the ALLC. It will also, I believe, present significant new
opportunities for joint publishing ventures in the area of
textbooks, monographs, and edited collections, as well as opening
the way to more efficient and effective web services across both
organizations.
ADHOC Recommendations:
In 2002, at the annual joint meeting of the Association for
Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for
Computers and the Humanities in T¸bingen, Germany, the executive
councils of ACH and ALLC established a joint work group charged
with examining possibilities for closer collaboration between the
two organizations and within the field of digital humanities more
widely. The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium also appointed
representatives to monitor the discussion, and ultimately two
other organizations (the National Initiative for Networked
Cultural Heritage and the Society for Textual Scholarship) were
invited to listen in as well. That group has been referring to
itself as the ADHO (allied digital humanities organizations)
Committee, or ADHOC. Membership of ADHOC was as follows:
Elisabeth Burr (ALLC)
Julia Flanders (ACH, TEI)
Espen Ore (ALLC)
Geoffrey Rockwell (ACH, TEI)
Harold Short (ALLC, TEI)
John Unsworth (ACH, TEI)
Invited additional members:
David Green (NINCH)
Richard Finneran (STS)
Full text of all the working papers produced by the group can be
found at: http://www.ach.org/adhoc/
The work group was asked to present its recommendations at the
annual conference at the University of Georgia in May 2003, and
they have now done so. The executive bodies of both the ACH and
the ALLC have endorsed those recommendations, and the
recommendations have been discussed in the annual general
meetings of both organizations and in the ACH and ALLC panels at
the 2003 conference. Those recommendations, slightly modified to
reflect conversation in the executive councils and the open
meetings, are as follows:
1. ALLC and ACH should more closely coordinate their activities,
especially in the area of publications and other services to
members.
2. This coordination requires an umbrella organization (ADHO).
ADHO would have regional chapters (ALLC/Europe, ACH/North
America, and others to be created), and it might also have
international affiliates (e.g., the TEI Consortium) not as
closely coordinated.
3. The regional chapters might also have regional or national
affiliates - i.e. other organisations whose goal is the promotion
of humanities computing.
4. Individuals would be part of the AHDO umbrella by virtue of
belonging to a regional chapter or one of the affiliated
organisations. ADHO would strongly promote close collaboration
and new collaborative initiatives among its member organisations,
with the aim of providing the greatest range of benefits to the
organisations and their members.
5. ADHO itself would be governed by a Council with two
representatives from each regional chapter, and one from each
international affiliate. The Council should do its business
principally by email and conference calls, and that business
should include the administration of ADHO-level activities, the
oversight of ADHO-level finances, etc..
6. ACH should move its print publishing activities to Literary
and Linguistic Computing (LLC), which belongs to ALLC, and the
editorial board of this publication should have equal
representation from ALLC and ACH (and other regional chapters,
when they exist). Computers and the Humanities (CHUM), which
belongs to Kluwer, would then no longer be the official journal
of the ACH.
7. ADHO should sponsor a free electronic journal: this journal
might republish "best of" LLC (or articles from past issues of
CHUM, if Kluwer were willing), but in the main, it should not
duplicate the content of LLC.
8. ADHO should work to coordinate a publishing program that makes
the most of the possibilities for synergy among discussion lists,
pre-print archives, peer-reviewed electronic and print journals,
books, and web sites. As part of its publications program, ADHO
should provide reviews (and/or peer-review) of born-digital
humanities resources, including software.
9. Membership in an ADHO regional chapter should be by way of
subscription to LLC, and (after funds are provided for central
ADHO activities, such as publishing) income from subscriptions
should be divided among regional chapters, proportional to the
percentage of total ADHO membership each chapter represents.
10. The ACH/ALLC joint conference should be open to new regional
chapters and/or international affiliates, and should include them
as equals in the ownership and planning of the conference.
Regional chapters might hold their own meetings, and any regional
chapter could host the joint annual conference.
11. ADHO should mandate the highest practical level of
multilingualism for publications and communication by ADHO or its
regional chapters.
The members of the ADHO Committee were unanimous in making these
recommendations, and the executive bodies of the ALLC and the ACH
have been unanimous in endorsing them. The request for comment
from the membership of both organizations is the next stage of
this process.
Next Steps:
Assuming that response to this request follows the pattern
established in the open panels and the members' meetings ta the
2003 ACH/ALLC, the next stage will be to formally discontinue the
relationship between ACH and CHUM, and send the membership list
of ACH to Oxford University Press, for inclusion in the next
round of renewal notices, which would be received by members some
time in January. When the ACH sends out its ballots for
election, in October, we would include a notice informing members
that if they wish to remain a member of ACH, they will need to
subscribe to LLC, when invited to do so by Oxford. We anticipate
that the subscription form will allow the subscriber to identify
himself or herself as a member of ACH or ALLC, and probably to
identify as a member of both, for some additional fee, in order
to receive communications and benefits of both the ACH and the
ALLC.
Although the practicalities of this transition focus on
publications, the members of the ADHO work group will continue to
work on all of the topics outlined in the eleven points above,
and in the coming months, will propose specific language for
bylaws to govern the ADHO organization. That language would need
to be approved by both the ACH and the ALLC executive committees
before ADHO could come into existence, and therefore, before it
could manage the commmon account for its constituent
organizations, or own the journal. At least up until that time,
the journal would continue to belong to ALLC; at some point after
ADHO exists, we anticipate that the ownership of the journal
would be transferred to ADHO. ACH and ALLC have, and would
retain, individual bank accounts (ours is ably managed by Chuck
Bush, at Brigham Young University). In the future, income from
ADHO might be transferred to those accounts, according to the
formula outlined above, or the ACH and the ALLC might simply bill
ADHO for expenses.
I hope you will carefully consider these recommendations, look at
the working papers on the web, and let me know whether you
support or oppose them. Thank you.
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