Thanks, John. (We're drooling over here! What great facilities!)
Cathy N. Davidson
Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies
Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English
Director, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute
Duke University
212 Allen Building
Durham, NC 27708-0003
(919) 684-1964
John Unsworth <jmu2m@virginia.edu>
Sent by: owner-htn@lists.village.virginia.edu
01/08/2003 04:37 PM
Please respond to htn
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Subject: IATH
Back in November, Cathy and Jeffrey introduced their respective centers:
David, Martha and I need to do the same, and then perhaps we can return to
the question of a meeting this summer, its purpose, and possible future
collaborations.
The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) was founded
in 1993, with a three-year, $1.2M grant from IBM (mostly unix equipment,
and one systems administrator) and a commitment of resources from the
University of Virginia. The mission of IATH has always been to support
faculty research in the humanities that uses information technology as an
analytical tool. We have also always put a great deal of emphasis on
scholarly communication--on sharing the results of research, over the
Web. Since humanities research projects tend to take years to complete,
we
have also always placed a significant emphasis on non-proprietary data
standards and on information architecture--in other words, on designing
projects to survive rapid change in hardware and software, while still
capturing and conveying the richest possible expression of the object of
attention and what the scholar knows about it.
At present, we take one new fellow in residence each year, for a two-year
residency. These fellows are UVa faculty in the humanities, and they are
provided by their department with one half-year of teaching release during
the two-year residency, and with student research assistants. IATH
provides a direct budget of $10K/year to each fellow-in-residence project,
and (more importantly) access to shared resources and staff. We also have
associate fellows (no release time, no office space), and networked
associate fellows (same)--in both cases, we work with the fellows as we
can, and we emphasize grant-writing to enable sustained project support at
a higher level.
The staff consists of ten people, including programmers, graphics and
design experts, database and xml experts, administrative support,
grant-writer and technical writer. IATH's technical infrastructure
consists of about a terabyte of disk, half of which is on our main server,
a four-processor Sun 420R. Other servers are, at this point, mostly
Suns;
we also run a dozen or so PCs (now mostly Windows 2000), an NT server and
domain controller, and a half a dozen Macs, now mostly OSX. Nightly
backups, security, and basic systems administration is provided by the
campus computing organization (ITC); application and user support is
provided by IATH staff.
Projects you may have heard of that have emerged from IATH include the
Rossetti Archive, the Blake Archive, The Pompeii Forum project, The Valley
of the Shadow, The Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive, The Dickinson
Electronic
Archives, the Salem Witch Trials project.
J.
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