You're receiving this email because you were appointed by Peter Low, in
a letter date May 24, 1999, to a "New Media Planning Committee" intended
"to explore ways in which we can capitalize on the dramatic successes we
have achieved at the University in the area of humanities computing." This
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newmedia@lists.village.virginia.edu
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This planning committee is co-chaired by Steve Plog and me (John Unsworth).
Its other members are:
J. Milton Adams, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Edward L. Ayers, Virginia Center for Digital History
Johanna Drucker, Director of Media Studies
Alan D. Howard, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Laurie P. Kelsh, President's Office
John W. Lloyd, Curry School of Education
Worthy N. Martin, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Jerome McGann, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Jeffrey Plank, Development
Glen O. Robinson, School of Law
Kenneth Schwartz, School of Architecture
Timothy M. Sigmon, Office of Information Technologies
Kendon L. Stubbs, University Library
In the May 24 letter, the Provost asks us to consider:
1. the desirability (and, if so, its nature and scope) of an undergraduate
and/or graduate degree (or concentration) focused on skills needed to
develop applied computer applications relating to teaching and research
by person who work in the various substantive disciplines addressed in the
College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and perhaps in other
Schools;
2. approaches we could take and structures we could develop that would
lessen the effect of School, Department, and disciplinary barriers that
inhibit cooperative effort;
3. the integration of your recommendations with the Media Studies
initiative now being undertaken in the Library and the College;
4. the personnel, budgetary, and space implications of initiatives we
might undertake; and
5. the feasibility of undertaking a major private fund-raising initiative
focused on this area.
With respect to the first question, it would be desirable for members of this
committee to attend the faculty/graduate student seminar on humanities
computing as an academic discipline, since the curricular charge for this
planning committee will emerge from that seminar. The seminar will meet
in Clemons Library from eleven to one o'clock on Fridays throughout the
fall semester. More detailed schedule information, as well as background
readings, meeting minutes, contact information and related links, can be
found at:
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/hcs/
and an overview of the seminar and its invited speakers is included at the
bottom of this message.
Given that the planning committee awaits the consensus that will emerge
from the seminar (a consensus I hope committee members will help to form),
our activities as a separate entity will be somewhat limited during the
fall. Nonetheless, Steve and I would like to meet once or twice, to discuss
planning grants and to gather some preliminary information on the implications
of the different models we might plan.
If you are on Corporate Time, please let me know that; if not, please give
me an idea of when you might be available to meet in September and in October.
I don't expect we will meet more than once in each month, and we may not
meet again after that until the end of the year.
Steve and I thank you very much for your time and attention, and we look
forward to working with you on this project.
John Unsworth
---------------------Humanities Computing Seminar------------------------
Faculty and graduate students with an interest in technology will meet on
Fridays throughout the Fall semester in an attempt to answer the question
"Is Humanities Computing an Academic Discipline?"
The traditional scholarly fields that comprise the humanities have, over
the last decade, become increasingly involved with information technology,
and humanities computing has begun to present itself as a discipline in
its own right. In more local terms, the University of Virginia is already
internationally recognized as a leader in the field of humanities
computing, but at present the University offers no graduate (or
undergraduate) degree in this field. Participants in this fall's seminar
will discuss the nature of humanities computing (Is it, in fact, a field
of scholarly inquiry?) and whether the University should offer a degree
program in it.
The seminar ties into activities already underway in the University's
Libraries (in particular, the Library Digital Centers), its division of
Information Technology and Communication (in particular, the Teaching +
Technology Initiative), its individual departments and Colleges, and
several of its research institutes (in particular, the Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities and the Virginia Center for Digital
History). Moreover, it continues, in a narrower and more sustained
discussion, the Faculty Senate's 1998-99 discussion of information
technology's impact on the University.
Eight outside visitors have agreed to participate in the seminar by
presenting essays for discussion:
Espen Aarseth, Dept. of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen
Lou Burnard, Humanities Computing Unit, Oxford University
Susan Hockey, Department of English and Canadian Institute for
Research Computing in Arts, University of Alberta, Edmonton
Stuart Moulthrop, Communications Design, University of Baltimore
Willard McCarty, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's
College, London
John Nerbonne, Humanities Computing, University of Groningen
Geoffrey Rockwell, Humanities Computing Center, McMaster University
John Slatin, Department of English, University of Texas at Austin
These outside participants are each connected with programs that teach
humanities computing as an an academic discipline at the University level.
They approach this discipline from a fairly broad range of perspectives:
Aarseth has a recent book from Johns Hopkins on considerations of genre in
electronic texts and games; Lou Burnard is Manager of the Humanities
Computing Unit at Oxford University Computing Services and the European
Editor for the Text Encoding Initiative, which produced the markup
standard most widely used in encoding literary and linguistic texts; Susan
Hockey was the first director at the Center for Electronic Texts in the
Humanities and was for thirteen years the chair of the Association for
Literary and Linguistic Computing, and she is currently providing
technical direction for the Orlando Project, a history of women's writing
in the British Isles; Stuart Moulthrop is a theorist, historian, and
author of hypertext, internationally known for his own hypertext fiction,
and editor of the oldest electronic journal in the humanities; McCarty is
a classicist and long-time host of the oldest and largest email discussion
group in the humanities, Humanist; Nerbonne's background and interests are
in linguistic computing; Rockwell's training is in philosophy; Slatin is
in the English Department at University of Texas at Austin, and is well
known in the computers and writing community.
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http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m
804-924-3137