Kenneth M. Price received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago and currently serves as Hillegass Chair in Nineteenth-Century American Literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has authored, edited, or co-edited seven books on American literature and textual studies. He has been involved in humanities computing projects since 1995 when he and Ed Folsom began serving as founding co-directors of the Walt Whitman Archive<www.whitmanarchive.org>, a site supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Delmas Foundation, and, most recently, the Institute for Museum and Library Services. The Whitman Archive has also received favorable publicity in outlets such as the Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education. A CD-ROM produced by Folsom and Price, Major Authors on CD-ROM: Walt Whitman, was a Choice outstanding academic book selection in 1997. With Martha Nell Smith, he co-directed a pedagogical project supported by the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, The Classroom Electric: Dickinson, Whitman, and American Culture.
As a member of the ACH Executive Council, Ken would promote outreach in several ways. He would work to increase membership generally, and work with other council members to increase the participation of people of color in ACH more particularly. He would also work to build ties between ACH and such organizations as the American Literature Association and the American Studies Association. In addition he would advocate working with the Modern Language Association with regard to the perceived crisis of the book. Given that the tenure process in many universities is being affected by global changes in the academic publishing market, the ACH should use its position to help envision and clarify new alternatives as the academy redefines measures of quality and definitions of significant publication.
My name is Adrian Miles, I'm employed as a lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, in Melbourne Australia, and as a researcher at InterMedia, University of Bergen, Norway. A candidate statement? Sheesh.
Well, you can probably learn quite a lot about me at http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vlog where I maintain a blog, and at http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/ where I maintain a vog (a video blog). On a professional note, I have a Master of Arts in General and Comparative Literature (though I actually worked in cinema studies) from Monash University, and an uncompleted PhD which I was doing at the same institution. My PhD was going to be on the science fiction film "La Jete" (Chris Marker, 1962/4) and cinematic duration, but in 1991 or 1992 I saw Storyspace presented at a politics and philosophy conference and saw my future on screen. It was, I assure you, an epiphany.
Since 1992 I have been a hypertext theorist and teacher, concentrating on introducing and using various hypermedia tools with my students and encouraging them to discover, test (and break) new possible genres for the expression of learning. This has concentrated on cinema studies, where I still feel that simple hypermedia tools offer the discipline a paradigmatic shift in scholarship. More recently I have orientated my theoretical and applied skills towards desktop networked interactive video, which I regard as an extension of my hypertext research.
I am on the editorial boards of "Text Technology", "Postmodern Culture", and "inFlect". I have been on the program committee of several Digital Arts and Culture conferences, the 2002 ACM Hypertext conference, and was an academic reviewer for the 2001 ACH/ALLC conference. I am also the academic chair of the 2003 Digital Arts and Culture conference, to be held at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, and am convenor of the Nordic Interactive Cinema Network, located at InterMedia, University of Bergen.
I am unsure of what I would bring to the ACH if elected. My academic background is traditional 'high' cinema studies and hypertext. In many respects my research and applied media practice falls to the margins of what I understand to be the traditional disciplines of interest to the ACH.
So, with that in mind, let me point out that I am excellent at establishing, nurturing and supporting knowledge networks and communities, and that I bring would bring a new media critical agenda to the ACH. This may not be a rigorous agenda, but it does represent quite a different attitude to cultural and research objects, and their relation to information technology, than what is ordinarily associated within the ACH. This difference is only that I use new media to make new new media objects and applied pedagogies, so what I study, and how I study, are never stable and lack the solidity associated with an edition, a book, or a manuscript. I do think that the ACH needs to find a language to engage with new media for the skills, resources and expertise within the ACH is of significant value and benefit to the new media community. I also think there is much that new media can offer the ACH, beginning with the greater inclusion of contemporary media forms within computing humanities.
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.
Michael Fraser is currently Head of the Humbul Humanities Hub (http://www.humbul.ac.uk/), hosted at the University of Oxford Computing Services with funding from the JISC and AHRB, and joint co-ordinator of the Computing Services' Research Technologies Service. He has a PhD in historical theology from the University of Durham. Michael has been involved in many humanities computing initiatives, with a particular emphasis on information mediation or resource discovery. For example, as part of the development of Humbul, he is directing the implementation of portal services for the humanities which will enable authenticated 'deep' access to a variety of online databases. He has a general interest in metadata and standards for describing online resources with a particular interest in employing the Open Archives Initiative protocols to develop access to humanities scholarly eprints, trusted electronic texts, and archival descriptions. Prior to his current post he was deputy director of the CTI Centre for Textual Studies where, amongst other things, he edited Computers & Texts and was co-author of the Guide to Digital Resources for the Humanities (West Virginia University Press, 2001). Michael has been chair of the Digital Resources for the Humanities conference Standing Committee since 2001 and was chair of the DRH2000 Programme Committee. He is also a member of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford.
Michael brings to the ACH expertise in raising awareness of, and facilitating access to, online scholarly humanities resources. He is a firm believer in freedom of access to scholarly research, its online dissemination, aggregation and re-presentation. He has a broad understanding of both the humanities and online technologies. He believes that the ACH should be proactive in encouraging humanities researchers to make more use of online eprint archives on the one hand whilst, on the other, promoting the public understanding of humanities research. He is also keen to promote the ACH as an international organisation, especially within Europe, and to encourage collaboration with other European initiatives. Michael's personal web page is at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mikef/
After abandoning a biochemistry PhD and turning to history and philosophy of science, I spent ten years in academic publishing, mostly at Routledge. Initially working on books, for about six years I was digital publisher, devising and managing large-scale projects, including the Arden Shakespeare CD-ROM (1997), the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (1998) and projects with the Public Record Office, the British national archive.
Through the same period I have also been an intermittent member of ACH and conference attendee. Since 1998 I have served on the standing committee of the Digital Resources for the Humanities (DRH) conferences in the UK, where I have been keen to further develop the relationship between publishers and the humanities computing community.
I now work at Semantico, a private company providing online services for the publishing and related industries, where I manage clients' projects, provide digital publishing consultancy and do some data modelling. I recently managed the creation of Oxford Reference Online for OUP, and of Statesman's Yearbook World for Palgrave/Macmillan. As a sideline, I'm also in the process of editing a Victorian diary using TEI.
If elected to the ACH Executive, I would:
Nancy Kushigian, Ph.D., MLIS.
If elected to the Executive Committee for the Association for Computing in the Humanities, I would endeavor to serve as a liaison between practitioners of scholarly computing in the humanities and the world of digital libraries. Ten years ago, scholarly humanities computing and library information systems were distinct. Today, SGML/XML technologies allow, even demand, collaboration.
Currently, I serve as manager of Margaret B. Harrison Department of Preservation and Digital Initiatives at the University of California, Davis University Library. I also serve as bibliographer in the fields of English Literature and Classics. In this capacity, I work closely with colleagues at the California Digital Library, serving on the Online Archive of California Working Group, and serving as liaison for UCD to CDL Electronic-Scholarship initiatives. Currently, I am chairing a group of UC librarians implementing TEI in library projects. I also serve on the UC Collection Development System committee, considering access and research issues as they pertain to electronic, full-text resources, both commercial and openly accessible.
In 1995, I received a Master's program in Library and Information Science at Michigan, where I worked on the Humanities Texts Initiative's American Verse Project. In 1996, when I came to UC, Davis, I launched the British Women Romantic Poets Project. Involvement with that project has led to opportunities to become involved with the TEI Consortium and to work with other librarians on the Digital Library Federation's "TEI in Libraries Best Practice Guidelince." I also work in a consulting capacity with librarians and scholars throughout the state of California who are implementing text-bases or and other SGML/XML other digital projects. Most recently, I have co-edited and published a hybrid textbase/scholarly anthology with Stephen Behrendt at Nebraska, Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, published by Alexander Street Press earlier this year.
One great information challenge confronting research libraries is the necessity to collaborate with scholars as they create humanities computing resources. The life cycle of printed scholarship in the humanities involves scholarship, then publication, then purchase and dissemination by libraries. This model is fast proving economically unworkable for digital scholarship and text collections. The digital library community is attempting to create new, collaborative, models for the creation and dissemination of academic scholarship. Scholarly computing activities at Virginia, Michigan and other places represent such collaborations. ARL's SPARC initiative, Project Muse, and The California Digital Library E-Scholarship Initiative, provide other collaborative models.
My goal, if elected to ACH executive committee, would be to foster dialogue in ACH about this collaborative process. I would do this by working to disseminate information about humanities scholarly computing in digital library organizations and initiatives with which I am involved and by promoting the active participation of digital librarians in ACH. Humanists need to have a more pronounced vision play a more active role, not only in the creation of digital scholarly sites, but also in lobbying for and ensuring their accessibility and survival over the long term. Within ACH, I would like to foster discussion about these "digital library issues" as they relate to humanities computing.