Inter/Disciplinary Models, Disciplinary Boundaries: Humanities Computing and Emerging Mind Technologies

COCH/COSH 2002 Meeting
at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities
May 26-8, 2002
U Toronto / Ryerson Polytechnic U

Speakers and Abstracts

 

Speakers

Jorge Luiz Antonio (Pontifical Catholic U of Sao Paulo, Brazil) William Barker (Memorial U) Michael Best (U Victoria) John Bonnett (NRC) Susan Brown (U Guelph) Terry Butler (U Alberta) Alan Burk (U New Brunswick) James Campbell (U Central Florida) Martine Cardin (U Laval) James Chartrand (McMaster U) Charlie Clarke (U Waterloo; ISAGN) Patricia Clements (U Alberta; President, HSSFC) Stephen Davies (Malaspina U-C) Dianne Dubrule (Carelton U) Patrick Finn (U Victoria) Paul Fortier (U Manitoba) Alan Galey (U Victoria) Rob Good (ISAGN) Sean Gouglas (U Alberta) Jean-Claude Guédon (U Montréal) Carolyn Guertin (U Alberta) Vivien Hannon (Dalhousie U) Patrick Juola (Duquesne) Bill Kennedy (Rhizomedia) Andreas Kitzmann (U Karlstad) Ian Lancashire (U Toronto) Peter Liddell (U Victoria) Greg Lessard (Queen's U) Clifford Lynch (CNI) Sally-Beth MacLean (U Toronto) Oriel MacLennan (Dalhousie U) Andrew Mactavish (McMaster U) France Martineau (U Ottawa)

Willard McCarty (King's College London) Karen McCloskey (U Toronto) Murray McGillivray (U Calgary) Alison McMahan (Vassar C) Talan Memmott (independent: BeeHive) Orion Montoya (U Chicago) Aimée Morrison (U Alberta) Mark Olsen (U Chicago) Brad Paley (Digital Image Design Inc.) Katherine Parrish (OISE) Daniel Poulin (U Montreal) Rita Raley (U California, Santa Barbara) Dina Ripsman Eylon (U Toronto) Roda P. Roberts (U Ottawa) Jennifer Roberts-Smith (U Toronto) Shannon Robinson (U Toronto) Geoffrey Rockwell (McMaster U) Susy Santos (U Manitoba) Sharon Scinicariello (Case Western U) Richard J. Shroyer (U Western Ontario) Ray Siemens (Malaspina U-C) Stéfan Sinclair (U Alberta) Alan Somerset (U Western Ontario) Alan Sondheim (Florida International U) Marshall Soules (Malaspina U-C) Will Straw (McGill U) Johannes Strobel (U Missouri-Columbia) John Taylor (NRC, Institute for Information Technology) Elaine Toms (U Toronto) Barrett Watten (Wayne State) Darren Wershler-Henry (York) Paul Werstine (U Western Ontario) Bill Winder (U British Columbia)

Abstracts

• Jorge Luiz Antonio (Pontifical Catholic U of Sao Paulo, Brazil)
  The Use of Design as Digital Poetry

  This paper examines the use of design as a way of creating digital poetry by means of two cd roms - Interpoesia and Looppoesia - the first by Philadelpho Menezes (1960-2000) and Wilton Azevedo, and the second by Wilton Azevedo, and some works of "Poem by Nary", by Ted Warnell, among other examples. It intends to show the use of information (sameness, repetition) as a way of making art due to the use of poetic function of the digital language.
      Interpoesia: Poesia Hipermídia Interativa (Interpoetry: Interactive Hypermedia Poetry) theorizes and show experiments concerning the concept of intersign poetry and hiperdesign, joining images, sounds and words, creating the interpoetry, a poetry which deals with information, encyclopedia data, historical and ficcional elements.
      Looppoesia: a Poética da Mesmice (Looppoetry: The Poetics of Redundancy), as a continuation of Interpoesia and a tribute to Philadelpho Menezes, presents the materialization of the idea expressed by Wilton Azevedo: "Taking into account that all the signs communicate among themselves, that is, that there is meaning in everything, we start living a true overdose of messages lacking time and space to enquire their verbal analytical or imagistic or sonorous related to received messages. We only know that we receive them and we use the act of clicking as a way of 'interacting'."
  By the same point of view, "Poem by Nari", a part of "The Room Without Walls", by Ted Warnell (Canada) is a example of several poetic experiments by using the information, the redundancy, the overdose of signs as a way of expressing art. For our purpose, we intend to analyze "VITA4PM", due to the fact it was a tribute to Philaldelpho Menezes, and especially because of the aim of this proposal: to present information as a way of making art. In those three examples, the information is part of work and its function is esthetic, even being an excessive and repeated way of expression.

• William Barker (Memorial U)
  What Are We Looking for in an Electronic Text?

  In this short presentation, I outline very briefly the work two colleagues and I have done with the Book of Emblems (1531 and after) by Andrea Alciato. This is a very basic site, simply organized, with minimal html, put together in 1995 and 1996, and updated regularly. In what follows, I ask what it is that we want from an electronic text. There are a number of initiatives to to create complex new electronic versions of emblem books -- how will these elaborated and complex e-texts answer the needs of readers?

• Michael Best (U Victoria)
  Forswearing Thin Potations: The Creation of Rich Texts Online

  There is a strong, and generally valuable, tradition in academia that scholars should take the established route: to publish in accepted journals and presses as a path to success in the profession. The researchers who are presenting papers at this conference are an exception, however, since they have chosen the electronic medium as a means to publication or as a fundamental tool in their research. By focusing on the experience of developing the technical and scholarly structures necessary for the creation of fully electronic texts of Shakespeare on the Internet, this paper will suggest that the way ahead lies in committing fully to the electronic medium rather than allowing it to be constrained by the expectations of print. Thus I find myself, somewhat unexpectedly, on the side of Falstaff, who proclaims "If I had a thousand sonnes, the first humane principle I would teach them, should be, to forsweare thin potations, and to addict themselues to sacke." In pursuing "humane principle[s]," I argue that we should forswear the limitations both of traditional scholarship and its print manifestation as we brew the rich variety of textual experiences the new medium makes possible.

• John Bonnett (NRC)
  Changing Hieroglyphics to Cuneiform, and 3D Space to Coherent Space:  The 3D Virtual Buildings Project

  Historians face a persistent challenge when teaching high school and university students. Students generally see "history" -- the representation of the past -- as a series of dates, a sequence characterized by events with varying degrees of interest and significance, events sharing little or no relation one with another. In the classroom, a traditional task of historians has been to challenge and then transform that concept, to help them see that historical representations are models, based on evidence, and subject to scrutiny. This presentation describes the efforts of the 3D Virtual Buildings Project to effect that transformation using 3D computer modeling. It rests on the premise that students best learn the nature -- the strengths and weaknesses -- of historical representations by generating historical models for themselves, using photographs, fire insurance maps, and 3D modeling software. Aside from describing our method, this presentation will also describe the weaknesses we have identified in our method, and solutions we hope to test in the future. The core problem is reducing the time students spend in generating 3D models, or by way of analogy, finding a way to translate hieroglyphics to cuneiform. The presentation will conclude with a tour of the project's web-site, where it will briefly describe the architecture we have designed to enable users to retrieve information from a model of a city, or to make 3D space coherent space.

• Susan Brown (U Guelph)
  Between Markup and Delivery; or, Tomorrow's Electronic Text Today

  The delivery work of the Orlando Project, which is creating an intensively tagged online history of women's writing in English from its beginnings to the twentieth century, poses unique challenges to the design of a web site, given the prevailing wisdom on web usability. The complexity of the project's SGML tagging schemas for the intellectual content of our materials answers the need for electronic material to make its semantic content more accessible to search and retrieval, and potentially gives users considerable freedom to determine their way through the textbase. However, this very complexity may be daunting for its primary user community, which will be literary scholars. The paper will describe and (where implemented) demonstrate the project's strategies to date for meeting this challenge.

• Alan Burk (U New Brunswick)
  The Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick

  The Centre, founded in 1996, is both an innovative publisher of electronic texts and a research group investigating selective issues in electronic publishing and digital libraries. The Centre’s Director, Alan Burk, will speak about several of its recent, large publishing initiatives and some of their underlying technologies. These projects include the recently completed Canadian Poetry in English database, a cooperative venture with Chadwyck-Healey, and the almost completed Winslow Family Papers image database. He will then touch on a recent Centre research thread, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Metadata Harvesting Protocol, its application within the Centre, and its possible relevance to the TAPoR project.

• James Campbell (U Central Florida)
  Computer Games as Complicitous Critique of Global Capitalism

  This paper offers an alternative to the prevailing practice of theorizing computer games along the lines of narrative, cinema, and dramatic performance. The Call for Papers for this panel cites Espen Aarseth on the tendency of New Media scholars to fit emergent electronic forms (such as computer games) into paradigms developed by and for pre-digital media (perhaps we could label this the Landow syndrome). Aarseth's metaphor of choice is colonization: he portrays the process as one of a race "to conquer and colonize these new territories for our existing paradigms and theories." I have chosen to take up Aarseth's metaphor and to investigate computer games as prime examples of how a postcolonial and neo-colonized world can be seen from a Northern post-industrial perspective. In fact, I want to look at three specific, immensely popular game series (Civilization, Tomb Raider, and Myst) in their relation to global capitalism/neo-imperialism. In short, I see the Civilization series as manifesting many of global capitalism's self-representations and tacit assumptions, while Tomb Raider and Myst provide subtle and complicitous critiques of the capitalist world that has bred them.
      Civilization provides a uniquely interactive version of many of the assumptions that underlie global capitalism. As a classic God game, the player looks down upon a world from an objective position. At first, only a small portion of the world is revealed but, literalizing enlightenment metaphor, expansion and colonization gradually illuminate the rest of the globe. Of course, a player eventually bumps up against other civilizations and conflict is all but inevitable. But the player moves not only over the world but through time as well, and it is here that the assumptions of an enlightenment trajectory of history fully emerge. Civilizations progress by developing technologies on a sequential basis: although paths may differ, all civilizations nonetheless drive toward such goals as industrialization, internal combustion, and nuclear power. Moreover, the cities of each civilization at the beginning of a game differ stylistically: their graphics reflect different cultures' architectural styles. Once a civilization achieves industrialization, however, its city icons all change to uniform Western skyscrapers. All cultures are working toward the same ends in other words (an assumption also underlying the phrase 'the developing world'): everyone has the right to discover the same preordained path. Western industrialism is the future (whether desired or not), and the goal of the world is a literally enlightened map that has literally become all one color.
      Both Tomb Raider and Myst, on the other hand, exhibit moments of critique of global capitalism even as they are enabled, even created, by it. Lara Croft, the protagonist of Tomb Raider, simultaneously plays and plays with the role of British imperialist. Born to privilege, she only "plays for sport" and seems stylistically elevated above her greedy capitalist employers (who turn out to be, in the first game, quite literally monsters). Myst likewise critiques imperialism while enacting it. We are treated to tours of beautiful depopulated worlds while learning how they have been exploited by the two evil brothers. Playing the role of imperialist collaborator, we must learn to put a stop to the colonization that we enjoy. Tomb Raider and Myst both thus enact their own complicity with neo-imperialism as part of the process of critiquing it.

• Martine Cardin (U Laval)
  RETREAUVQ: A Context-based Approach for Archival Finding Aids

  This paper present an overview of an automated finding aid developed on a context-based approach by a team of researcher in archival studies at Université Laval. Such tool provides access to sound archives related to Quebec City's urban life, citizen's daily and domestic life, local community life, religious districts life, since 1910 to 1980. The research is based on the principle that it is possible to assume many contextual standpoints in order to understanding objects. Therefore, there are numerous ways of indexing contents of archival material, just as there are many ways of expressing objects by archive's producers and many ways of researching them by users. By way of a classification of the Society's cultural practices, the automated finding aid highlights the interplay of perspectives within which objects can be conceived. From then, it allows a user to define a specific research's theme in interactive and dynamic modes and to retrieve segments related to it from 800! hours of digital recording originally produced on analog audio tapes by the Laboratoire d'ethnologie urbaine de l'Université Laval. After a short talk about the project, I will present briefly the analytical model at its basis and will end with a demonstration of the product.

• James Chartrand (McMaster U)
  Bertrand Russell on the Web

  The Russell Online Letters Project is a new initiative of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre at McMaster University to adapt technology to support the ongoing research of the Centre. The project will use technology to improve access to the letters held in the Russell Archives and increase the effectiveness of the transcription and annotation processes used at the Centre.
      Accessibility will be improved by creating a Web site that supplies both text and images for each letter together with more meaningful access through structured and full text search of the letters and their annotation. Our site will also widen access by removing geographic boundaries and will raise public awareness of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre.
      During transcription and annotation we will improve the effectiveness of the process in several areas:
      Annotation sources. Informed persons will be able to browse the collection from outside McMaster and submit annotation for consideration, where previously they would have to work within the archives.
      Accuracy. The accuracy of the transcriptions and annotations will be improved through spell checking, controlled annotation (vocabulary and context), and guided input processes ("wizards").
      Training time. Creating guided processes will reduce training time as the application itself will lead transcribers and annotators through their tasks and answer common questions they would normally ask of a trainer or supervisor.
      Consistency. Consistency of information and reduced redundancy will be achieved by providing, as part of the transcription and annotation mechanism, a readily available and normalized source of existing annotation, place names, and person references to draw from.
      Speed. Transcribers and annotators can work from an online image rather than an original document, reducing or eliminating the need for physical retrieval of letters, and once again, the need to work within the archives. As well, the movement of letters through various stages of transcription, annotation, proofreading, and review can be controlled by an automated workflow, increasing throughput and turnaround.
      Using technology raises concerns about ease of use, maintainability, and adaptability, however the use of portable and adaptable technologies like XML/SGML and Java will help ensure that the project will continue to evolve as technology and project needs change.
      Our talk will describe our technological adaptations and how each will aid in the research of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre.

• Charlie Clarke (U Waterloo; ISAGN) and Rob Good (ISAGN)
  Schema-Independent Retrieval from Heterogeneous Structured Text

  The talk will present an algebra for search and retrieval from structured text, including documents formated using XML and SGML. A distinguishing feature of the approach is the ability to model structure independent of a fixed schema. Documents in a database are not required to adhere to a global schema nor are individual documents required to be structured according to any defined schema at all. Nonetheless, queries may directly reference structure across differently formatted documents. Search and ranking may return arbitrary document components specified at query time. The technology has been used in both the Early Canadiana Online digital library project (www.canadiana.org) and the Barren Lands project (http://digital.library.utoronto.ca/Tyrrell).

• Patricia Clements (U Alberta; President, HSSFC)
  Creativity, Culture, and Computing

  A discussion of the impacts of humanities computing on the institutions in which it is conducted, together with some speculations on securing its future, from the point of view of a researcher and administrator.

• Stephen Davies (Malaspina U-C)
  War on the Web:  The Canadian Letters and Images Project

  The Canadian Letters and Images Project is an online archive of the Canadian war experience which tells the stories of ordinary Canadians in their own words and images by utilizing their letters, diaries, photographs, and other related documents. Since beginning in August 2000, the project has collected some 5,000 pieces of correspondence from Canadians across the country. What makes this project particularly unique is that as an online archive we do not keep any of the materials we borrow from Canadians for copying and scanning and then return them to their owners. In this manner we can bring into the public domain materials that would otherwise remain in closets and attics and not be seen by other Canadians.
      As a teaching resource it has proved invaluable in bringing contemporary primary documents into the classroom and creating a new level of accessibility to the past. At the same time though it has pointed out the limitations of funding in Canada for unique projects of this nature. The project has remained funded primarily by donations from private Canadians, for the project falls between the funding parameters of the major funding sources for the past in Canada.

• Dianne Dubrule (Carelton U)
  Teaching Scholastic Courses Requiring Discussion on Line

  It is commonly thought that courses requiring discussion must be taught in classrooms. This paper describes a design for a course taught entirely on the world wide web that has at its core customized online discussion forums.  The design has been implemented in two Carleton University Philosophy courses, Computer Ethics and Information Ethics, open to qualified students across North America..  Evaluations by and of students indicate that the courses have not only met, but exceeded the learning goals of the corresponding classroom course.  The success of the model implies that many courses hitherto assumed to require classrooms can be taught online as distance courses.

• Dina Ripsman Eylon (U Toronto)
  The Response of the Monks to the Medium of Print: Academicians and E-journals

This paper reviews the unique differences between traditional print journals and the emerging new breed of e-journals and their monumental impact on academic publishing in general and on scholarly print journals in particular. These differences are accentuated by using concrete findings from field research and ample examples of existing e-journals in the Humanities.
    Publishing in peer-reviewed, tightly controlled publications is a requirement for promotion and tenure for university scholars. Electronic journals quicken traditional peer-review processes and if extended to involve more reviewers per article and readers' commentary, they may reduce potential partisanship, bias and intrigue. A number of e-journals implement peer review on the Internet, which includes pre and post-publication review systems like the open-discussion model and the staged-discussion model. These new types of peer review methods, more popular with scientific and technical journals, [yet, could as well be implemented in other fields] employ the active participation of their readers in reviewing articles before or after they are published. Some e-journals' preferred method is a combination of traditional and wired reviews. Referees are provided with a review form, allowing them to communicate with the editor electronically or through regular mail.
    In recent surveys of print-journals three important tenets came forward: The globalization of scholarship is of utmost importance; scholarly publication is in a dire financial condition; and a feasible economic solution to its predicament lies in the implementation of electronic and digital media for academic publication.
    Creating affordable access and containing expenses become crucial to the sustenance of academic journals. As production expenses are reduced in shifting to the electronic medium, subscription fees can be reduced or eliminated entirely. In addition, mechanical, advertising, circulation and distribution costs can be either purged or minimized, as well as the salaries incurred for these traditional print activities. In the electronic medium, one Webmaster can handle all the HTML coding involved in preparing an issue for publication. In Canada, many e-journals are affiliated with the International Consortium for Advanced Academic Publication <http://www.icaap.org>, which offers its members free web services such as hosting, coding and web maintenance.
    The freedom, globalization and affordability associated with the Web offer scholars a chance at voicing their opinions devoid of any intervention. As new generations of scholars become more proficient with electronic technology, they will find the Web an added outlet of their expression. Furthermore, the Web's potential of transforming human existence in general is articulated by the words of Dale Spender who believes in the bright future of the Internet: "That the print-culture world is going is abundantly clear. With it go many of the conventions that we have cherished about who we are, what we know, and how we make sense of our universe. Cyber-society will be as dramatically different to us as print culture was to those of the manuscript era. New truths are in the making."

• Patrick Finn (U Victoria)
  Half-Life, Full Theory: Formalizing Video Game Criticism

  “Theorizing Computer Games: Do We Need a New Theory?” To answer this question, I will expand two points. The first involves the we in “do we need,” the second, the nature of the word theory.
      The most straightforward answer to the first question is that we are the members of ACCUTE and COCH/COSH. Following this simple definition, this paper argues that both groups need to come up with new theoretical models to address video games, each for their own reasons. Once we articulate these positions, we find that underlying those primary purposes is a position that involves both groups. 
      For the second point, I will make a distinction between theory that is more broadly formal and theory that is cultural. Our answer to the question of whether or not a new theory is needed will change depending on which of these definitions we apply. 
      The call for papers has a quote from Espen Aarseth sounding rather pessimistic about early attempts to theorize games by transferring existing models to new media. I agree with some of the spirit of Aarseth’s quote, but I believe that a properly instituted form of critique can answer many of his concerns, while providing for new modes of critical participation.
      To respond to Aarseth – we must not deny admittance to all that is past. Any theory we come to use will inextricable be tied to previous work. There is an imminent academic safeguard - work that fails to account for the fundamental differences in a new form of media will be incapable of addressing important issues at stake in that media’s expression.
      An examination of past shifts can provide some insight. When film studies began, many critics transported the types of critique applied in literary criticism and used them to explore theme, tone and imagery in ways that seemed at first to be rewarding, but quickly proved to be less than satisfactory. The solution to this was a new formal theory that took into account the constituent elements of the media and the manner in which those elements affect meaning. Once in place, they foster new modes of thinking, that is, they provide a new critical habitas based on their constitutive elements. These formal components can then serve as testing grounds for theories that migrate from other disciplines, while also fostering fundamentally new questions based upon their own material conditions. 
      This brand of formalism seems to address the new. There is however no reason to assume that more broadly cultural examinations need to be recreated. Instead, “old theories” (such as those based on gender, race or class) need only demonstrate their critique in direct reference to the new modality in order to prove their viability across disciplines. 
      This paper will demonstrate the results of this formulation by looking directly at the popular game Half Life. As an outcome, I will argue that both the ACCUTE we and the COCH/COSH we are compelled to join the critical/theoretical debate surrounding video games in order to live up to their respective mandates as mediators of English studies and Humanities Computing.

• Paul Fortier (U Manitoba)
  Textual Analysis: You Can Get There From Here

  Textual analysis is what critics and scholars of literature do. Michel Butor, an accomplished novelist as well as a critic of literature, stated that the true critic was the person who could not bear that people spoke so little or so poorly about a given work of art. When a person begins to look at possibilities of computer-aided analysis of literature, they find that existing studies tend to pass over evaluations of texts and to focus on aspects which aren't significant to the reader of literature. Even worse, statistical approaches seem founded on a series of utterly false assumptions about literary texts. To this must be added the systematic opposition to anything that smacked of empirical analysis on the part of the theoreticians of literature who dominated the field in the 1970s and 1980s. In point of fact, it is possible to analyse texts with the help of computers. Our students, who grew up with the technology, take to this idea much more easily than we who were trained in a less electronic age. For them information retrieval techniques are part of the landscape. More advanced analysis does seem to require statistical approaches, and here again progress is on the side of the scholar who wants to do textual analysis. Non-parametric techniques, graphical output, outlier analysis all have made great strides in the recent past, and all are appropriate to the type of data and the type of analysis which are done by literary scholars.

  See also Santos and Fortier

• Alan Galey (U Victoria)
  A Kingdom for a Screen, Pixels to Act: Designing an Electronic Critical Edition

  Henry V's ironic Chorus reminds us that even though ideal representations belong to the "heaven of invention," our imperfectly-mediated dramatic texts, whether enacted by players or pixels, provide opportunities for invention of a more worldly kind. If  traditional print interfaces for dramatic texts already negotiate between media as dissimilar as page and stage(s), in what specific ways can an electronic user interface create a new venue for engagement with Shakespearean texts?  My paper will explore issues of user interface and editorial theory as I have attempted to engage them in my Master's thesis, The Taming of a Shrew (1594): An Electronic Critical Edition.

• Jean-Claude Guédon (U Montréal)
  Surfaces

   

  Electronic Publishing and Scholarly Initiative

   

• Carolyn Guertin (U Alberta)
  From Complicity to Interactivity: Theories of Feminist Game Play

Adventure games like Myst and Crystal Key incorporate an experiential dimension into the aesthetics of their forms where the player's goal is to explore the spatial coordinates of a place and unravel its secrets. This mapping of space is an affirming impulse for territorial conquest, but it does not foreground characterization or produce, Justine Cassell argues, constructs of the self (311). In stark contrast to these narrative game spaces, feminist games tend to problematize spatial exploration and interactivity, privileging constructs of the self, participatory engagement and political/theoretical frameworks within the game play. I will examine two such games. Natalie Bookchin's The Intruder is a retelling of a story by Jorge Luis Borges, re-enacted in 10 games, that addresses the question of violence as a modus operandi in twitch games. Diana Reed Slattery's Glide is an exploration of a visual language used in Slattery's print novel The Maze Game. To play, we must learn the Glide language in order to understand the possibilities in the trinary logic of the glyphs cast by the oracle, and to become dancers in our own right in the maze game. The negotiations between our interpretations of the three glyphs—representing situation, transformation and larger context--produce true interactivity in Glide whereas the sordid triangle in The Intruder only locks us into predetermined courses of action where we are doomed to mimic the brothers' gestures. I will examine how the interactive nature of these games calls for their own theoretical frameworks distinct from their conversations with print-bound narrative.

• Patrick Juola (Duquesne)
  The Case for Humanities Mathematics: When Computing Doesn't Work

  As an (inter)discipline, one of the major applications of "humanities computing'' has been the use of computer technology and computer models to the humanities. Unfortunately, these uses have often been more extensive than the understanding of the underlying and supporting mathematics behind
  the technologies. Although ``mathematics'' has long been a part of humanities, most humanists think of ``mathematics'' as arithmetic, and are not necessarily aware of the high-order generalization, abstraction, and modeling more typical and relevant to her field. As a simple example, the tree-structured model of the Text Encoding Initiative may produce as large a change in textual studies as the Chomskian structure trees did in linguistics --- but only after thirty years did linguists go beyond these structure trees to an examination of their limitations.
      The papers describes several examples of humanities principles and their (modeled) solutions, including the guiding principles of security theory and the Poisson limit and the Enigma Machine and "the theorem that won World War II.'' In each case, the intellectually interesting bit of the solution is not the particular model, nor the (relatively simple) mathematics necessary to implement the solution in a computational context. Instead, it is the problem analysis and description in terms of these varied but simple mathematical principles.
       Underlying these and other examples is the need for the ability to go beyond the calculations the computer can perform, to what a computer cannot perform. There is a strong difference between training needed to use a prepackaged commercial program, the skills necessary to write a program, and the knowledge of when such a program is relevant, important, or even appropriate. Pedagogically , a curriculum in "humanities computing'' should cover not only the use and development of software, but also criteria for evaluating the appropriateness and correctness of particular tools and/or techniques in the light of domain expertise within the humanities. We have developed one such method to incorporate these tools, used at Duquesne University in the Computational Mathematics Master of Science degree.
  This paper describes this program, along with some of the apparent strengths and weaknesses of this method.

• Andreas Kitzmann (U Karlstad), 
  Remembering the Present: The Use of Computer-mediated Communication in Contemporary Memory Practices

  Media and memory are closely linked to one another, especially if we think of media in broader terms, which is to say as formal or material arenas for representation and expression. Scholars are often fond of quoting Plato when considering the impact of new media on culture and society. As is well known Plato expressed concern over the effects of the medium of writing on human memory (and by implication morality, ethics, intelligence and the general state of humanity altogether). Since then there have been countless debates and ruminations regarding the potentially radical effects of media technologies on the nature of memory and representation. The resulting discourses range from the euphoric to the despondent and cover a wide collection of mediated environments - starting with the spoken word and the written page and moving through to the telegraph, the camera, the radio, the television and the computer, to name only a few prime exemplars.

  This paper will focus on the role of the World Wide Web in contemporary "memory practices" and the manner in which the computer is becoming a central tool with which record and represent one's passage through life. Part of the approach will be comparative in the sense that current practices such as web cams, on-line diaries and autobiographical home pages will be compared to earlier forms such as family portraits, snapshots, vacation pictures and home movies. On central concern here is the appropriateness and efficacy of such comparisons.

  My aim is to consider and respond to a number of key questions.

  1. Is computer-mediated communication (with the web being my primary example) changing the formal and aesthetic structures of remembering? If so, what are some of the key features of such transformations?
  2. How do earlier debates regarding the relationship between memory, orality and literacy relate to multimedia computer environments such as the World Wide Web? Are such conventional modes of inquiry at all relevant or is it necessary to construct alternative theories and approaches?
  3. How do the types of phenomena currently observable on the Web affect the genres or categories of autobiography and "life-writing"? What do such potential effects indicate about the nature of identity, subjectivity and self-representation? And again, does it make sense to use such academic discourses surrounding earlier genres (such as the written autobiography) in theorizing the "new" practices of self-representation on the web?

• Ian Lancashire (U Toronto)
  Humanities Computing and Research Innovation

  [Note: the full text of this talk is available via this link.]

  Foreword: A Progress Report on The Lexicon of Early Modern English

  Supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, LEME will replace the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database (EMEDD) eventually and cover English-language lexical works, printed and manuscript, from the late 15th century to 1700. The EMEDD includes 16 works from 1530 to 1656, including five large books by Thomas Thomas (1587), Florio (1598), Minsheu (1599), Cotgrave (1611), and Blount (1656). See http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/english/emed/emedd.html.  LEME supplements R. C. Alston's authoritative bibliography of printed works and, for the first time, surveys manuscript sources for Early Modern English. These appear to make up 20% of the over 700 texts so far identified. About 275 texts exist from 1558 to 1625, 58 of which are manuscripts.
      None of these works can be scanned into electronic form. All are entered and proofread manually. Only by tagging these texts can search engines extract English wordentries from so many differently formatted kinds of text, from hard-word glossary, bilingual lexicon, grammar, and herbal to general informative treatise. The LEME tagging system is consistent with how speakers in the English Renaissance appeared to understand their language. Because only a few persons then thought that lexical definitions existed, Early Modern English wordentries had many varied structures.
      LEME intends to be a general reference work not only for English but for other languages, Classical, European, and even aboriginal. The following two papers, by LEME research assistants, illustrate some of the varied applications of Early Modern English language texts to literary and linguistic studies of the period.

• Peter Liddell (U Victoria)
  Computing Technology: What Do We Know About Taking the Learning to the Learner?

  Ten years ago, experts on communications and education began predicting the end of the institutions of education as we have known them for centuries. Perlman (1992) wrote of the urgent need to apply the benefits of technology  to radically reform the ‘education industry’ in the US, which he claimed outstrips the GDP contribution of the automobile industry; Postman (1993) surveyed the self-fueling technology myth and concluded that the only antidote was for  educators to wage a heretical guerilla war, using the lessons of history to undermine the blind faith in a future sustained only by technological progress. Noam predicted in 1995 that post-secondary education would rapidly devolve into a division between, on the one hand, fact-based and professional training courses controlled by the edutainment industry and a small number of academic partners, and delivered through technology, and on the other a bricks-and-mortar rump for humanists and their ilk to conduct seminars and negotiate meaning in a physical forum. Otherwise, universities would do no more than act as gatekeepers of educational standards.
      What Nancy Kaplan called “these jeremiads” of educational technology, of course had their counterparts preaching the “glad tidings” of technology as one more important tool in the long process of evolving education.  After the biblical tone of the opening rounds of the EdTech debate, it is time to review the scene. No doubt there have been casualties, some collateral damage, and the occasional victor, but the rhetoric has become less bellicose in recent years, as the capabilities of the technologies and, more importantly, the demands of their human users have become clearer.  In this contribution to the panel discussion, the presenter will attempt to paint a global picture of trends and opportunities in the current climate of retrenchment and aspirations.

• Greg Lessard (Queen's U)
  Language Acquisition and Use

   

   
• Clifford Lynch (CNI), http://www.cni.org/staff/clifford_index.html
  Authenticity, Authority and Integrity in a Digital Environment

  There is the sense that digital information published on the Web not only lacks credibility but that the Web itself is an environment filled by what some have called "pervasive deceit".   As a result, many believe that there has to be demonstrable proof before accepting claims of authorship and document integrity.  This is not normally true for physical artifacts, such as books and journal issues.  People tend to accept these at face value. 
      In his presentation, Clifford will examine this current distrust of the digital world as well as the expectations that somehow information technology may provide solutions.  Central to the discussion will be the drawing of some comparative differences between the world of bits and the physical world of information carrying artifacts.  This will lead into a characterization of the concepts of integrity, authenticity and authority as they relate to information objects in the physical and digital worlds. Attempting to define these concepts in a digital context naturally leads to a series of difficult questions.  Clifford will talk to these, in the course of which he will touch on the role and potential of emerging technologies, such as digital seals and signatures, to support authenticity and integrity.
      In addition, the ability to preserve digital information, and issues of authenticity and integrity over long periods of time are critical questions, and Clifford will discuss some of the emerging developments  in digital preservation.
      These questions are critical both as our existing scholarly communications vehicles migrate to the net and also as we develop new modes of authorship specific to the digital medium, and grapple with the legitimacy of these new genres of works as contributions to scholarship.

• Sally-Beth MacLean (U Toronto) and Alan Somerset (U Western Ontario)
  Shakespeare on the Road: Tracking the Tours with the REED Web Project

  This paper (and accompanying Internet demonstration) will show an important application of the Records of Early English Drama (REED) Patrons and Performances Multimedia Research Tool – a “beta” version of which will be available on the internet by the time of the conference.  The Research Tool will make available for the first time our cumulative database of itinerary, performance and venue information for professional (usually patronized) performers of all kinds, which has been cumulatively built from successive REED volumes.   Retrieving and analysing information from those volumes, moving from county to county, borough to borough can be tedious, but a database can complete such tasks in microseconds; the powers of analysis and comparison that become available to a researcher allow one to transcend space and time.  One may calculate averages, look at “typical” results, and proceed from these to analyse individual localities and companies.  The project is also researching and making available new pictorial, topographical and archaeological data about the provincial playing venues that were used by professional companies.
      The analysis is by patrons’ troupe(s), and the results are compiled from various boroughs, allowing us to plot and compare the fortunes of individual troupes and the extent of their activities. The data currently comprise less than half the anticipated total record set. In the dataset, over 500 companies are recorded fewer than ten times, only thirty-five companies recorded an income of over £10, and many companies have a total recorded income of a shilling or less.  “Playing” (including minstrelsy and other activities) was often a local event, a sometime thing: the overall environment for playing comprised a lot of locally-based activities, and a smaller number of well-organized itinerant companies. We are  particularly focussed here on Shakespeare and the King’s Men. King James’s performers (often his trumpeters) were second only to Elizabeth’s in total number of performances, being recorded a total of 141 times.  We will trace tours of the King’s Men in England outside London and give details about the performance conditions they enjoyed in the boroughs and households that they visited. The aim of presenting these data is to demonstrate the value and capabilities of the research tool, as it progresses towards completion.

• Oriel MacLennan and Vivien Hannon (Dalhousie U)
  Up There and Out There: Collaboration and Co-operation in Electronic Edition

  The Kuzmin Collection, created by John Barnstead of Dalhousie University, makes available a growing collection of artistic works by the early 20th century Russian poet and author Mikhail Kuzmin in the original Russian and in English translation, accompanied by critical works, illustrations, and other related resources. 
      Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936) is a significant and multifaceted figure in the history of modern Russian art and letters, noted particularly in poetry as a link between Symbolism and Acmeism and as the creator of the first body of free verse in Russian. In 1906 his novella Wings was the first to treat the theme of male homosexuality in Russian literature. Trained in composition under Rimsky-Korsakov, Kuzmin also had a substantial and diverse career as a composer and dramatist, in genres ranging from cabaret and puppet theatre to ballet and opera. His connexions with leading figures in the artistic world of the time resulted in numerous portraits and original cover illustrations for his works, now exceedingly rare.
      Kuzmin's work, diverse, eclectic, innovative, and widely acknowledged by leading lights of his time, has been sadly neglected at home and is not well known in the West. Traditional publication of his complete works, given the small and scattered international specialist audience and today's cutthroat publishing climate, would be utterly prohibitive. Electronic publication, on the contrary, is well within our grasp, given time and modest resources, and further allows for multimedia presentation of Kuzmin's musical and dramatic works.
      This diversity in the body of Kuzmin's work, in its multiple forms of expression, can only be approached in a scholarly way by involving individuals from many disciplines. Expertise in language and literature, music, art, and theatre, and the technical resources, including specialist knowledge as well as the requisite hardware and software, to preserve and present these materials in the most advantageous form, are all indispensable. Also, because of the number of people involved and the years required to complete the work, there is an overarching need for institutional commitment, organization, and institutional support. We present here a perspective of this large undertaking which will illuminate these support requirements.
      Collaboration between interested faculty and staff in various departments at Dalhousie -- Academic Computing Services, the Killam Library and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences -- has led to the formation of our own Electronic Text Centre, a service whose nature and methods have been described previously to some in this audience, and which is the focus of support for the Kuzmin Project. We will discuss the pedagogical benefits which stem from this cross-border work. For example, Dalhousie students in the Russian Department learn and practise transferable skills (translation, russifying computer keyboard layouts, TEI/SGML/XML markup etc.). International exchange students have worked on this project in eight-week IT placements as part of the Canadian section of the Canada World Youth Kaliningrad programme.
      A project of this magnitude, of a visionary nature, is inevitably a work in progress. Considerable text, some images, and resource material, are now available. We have embarked on collaborations with the Dalhousie Music and Theatre Departments to add songs, composition, and performance, of growing complexity, using various media and appropriate software. More textual material and images will also be added in the coming years.
      A diversified collaborative approach will be the key to successful completion of this project.

• Andrew Mactavish and Geoffrey Rockwell (McMaster U)
  Multimedia Education in the Arts and Humanities

  In this short paper, we draw upon McMaster University's BA programme in Multimedia to illustrate how the scholarly treatment of multimedia theory and practice unsettles boundaries that have traditionally defined the fields of the arts and humanities as non-technological, non-vocational, and even non-practical. Rather than hierarchically organize theory above practice, and critical thinking above technical skill, we have sought to bring these elements together in the belief that one strengthens the other. As such, the programme builds interdisciplinarity between departments and faculties, encourages creativity in students who might see writing critical essays as something less than creative, and asks students to think critically about new media technologies and about their use of them. And, of course, it is increasing enrollments and applications to McMaster University.

• France Martineau (U Ottawa)
  Bases d'Analyse Verbale pour la Variation Diachronique

  Cette communication porte sur la constitution d'un corpus de textes électroniques sur le site du Laboratoire de français ancien à l'Université d'Ottawa (http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/lfa et l'élaboration d'un outil d'interrogation. Depuis 1996, le Laboratoire de français ancien offre aux usagers du Web des textes d'ancien et de moyen français. La présentation permet un va-et-vient entre les manuscrits d'un même texte, l'édition critique et des bases d'analyse grammaticale avec outil d'interrogation sur des aspects de la langue (variantes dialectales, valence du verbe, discours rapporté). Nous nous attarderons à la présentation de la Base d'analyse verbale du Chevalier au Lion, conçue de façon à rendre compte des variantes orthographiques, lexicales, morphologiques mais aussi grammaticales entre les différents manuscrits de ce texte. Nous montrerons ainsi comment cette base permet de rendre compte de variantes liées au verbe penser. Toutefois, les études diachroniques sur le français à des époques postérieures doivent se fonder sur des corpus en majorité composés de textes littéraires dont la langue a subi la standardisation associée à leur époque (on pense entre autres à Frantext ou l'ARTFL), Le projet « Variation historique et grammaire du français québécois » permet maintenant une analyse moins diffractée du français. Ce corpus est constitué de correspondance écrite en français familier (entre membres d'une même famille, par des soldats peu éduqués, etc.), au Québec, en Acadie et dans les régions du Nord-Ouest de la France durant les 17e, 18e et 19e siècles. Ce type de corpus est, à notre connaissance, inédit. Il permet de suivre diachroniquement les variations dans un français populaire ou familier et de comparer les variantes dialectales pour une époque donnée. Nous discuterons des problèmes de constitution du corpus, de saisie électronique des textes (protocole pour l'instabilité des variantes orthographiques), de l'installation de fenêtres pour comparer les variantes, des limites des outils d'interrogation sur des textes non standard (par exemple, comment utiliser des logiciels de concordance ou de semi-lemmatisation lorsque l'orthographe est si instable). Si le tempos le permet, nous présenterons un logiciel de semi-lemmatisation développé par Achim Stein (Stuggart). 

• Willard McCarty (King's College London)
  Knowing Things by What Their Mockeries Be: Modelling in the Humanities

  This is a time of growth and institutional success for humanities computing: graduate programmes, academic appointments and substantial grants for work in the field are no longer only the stuff of dreams. We have survived times of neglect, scorn and promotional hyperbole to see what we do start to become a regular, even an especially featured part of our employers' mission-statements. In other words the front-lines of the revolution are now clearly where they have always belonged: within us, on the mental field of conflict, where we join a common scholarly effort, ongoing since the beginning, to grapple with the epistemological problem. How do we know what we know? What does computing have to do with knowing -- or more precisely, as I will argue, with imagining knowledge? In this talk my aim is to bring to your attention these and related questions and the strong disciplinary kinships on which we can rely for help with them.

• Karen McCloskey (U Toronto)
  Evolutions Of A Literary Analysis:  From Toposator to SatorBase

  This paper outlines the progression of a literary analysis of jealousy in the epistolary novels of the Eighteenth-Century French author Claude Crébillon, emphasizing the adaptation of a database for this purpose. Originally Toposator was developed in France by Eric-Olivier Lochard for the international SATOR group (Société d’Analyse de la Topique dans les Œuvres Romanesques). Its goal was to house an inventory of narrative building blocks called topoi from pre-Eighteenth-Century French narratives. For reasons which will be developed during the presentation, the software evolved into SatorBase (adapted by Stéfan Sinclair and SatorCanada) which is currently accessible on-line and will be demonstrated.
      The challenge of my study was to adapt to the changes of the collective project and to the incomplete nature of the growing database in order to advance my personal research. I will demonstrate the ultimate effectiveness of the database by illustrating its application to this individual project. The originality of SatorBase lies in the fact that it affords the researcher a unique perspective. For example, it enabled me to consider the conventional use of jealousy in surrounding texts, thereby establishing a base on which Crébillon’s innovation builds (making this innovation more evident) and aiding in a more complete understanding of the author and his place in literary history.

• Murray McGillivray (U Calgary)
  Digitizing Sir Gawain

  This paper presents the work of the Cotton Nero A.x. Project, an international team project to produce an electronic edition of the famous poems of British Library MS. Cotton Nero A.x., *Pearl*, *Cleanness*, *Patience*, and *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight*. The edition will present new high-resolution photographs of the fragile manuscript and surround them with XML-based transcriptions, notes, glossary, and other introductory and ancillary materials. The paper concentrates briefly on the current phase of the work, the preparation of a detailed transcription using a new Document Type Definition for manuscript transcription that blends approaches from traditional paleography with concepts taken from recent work on document representation.

• Alison McMahan (Vassar C)
  Game Theory and Computer Games

  In the eighties academic discussions of interactive fiction focused on hypertext, and to a lesser extent, hypermedias.  The emphasis on hypertext led to an emphasis on multiform plot structure as the basis for the analysis of  interactive fiction.  For a while – a decade or so – this was a productive approach.  Some of the most popular computer games, such as Myst and its sequels, are graphic hypertexts.  Structurally similar games such as Blade Runner, Star Trek Borg, Blair Witch I through IV, used the same remediation approach as Myst and Riven:  the idea in these games is to present the user/player with a multiform plot version of a literary or cinematic text and encourage the user to have not only a point of view on the game but a “point of action” – in other words, to play a part in the story.
      Recently, however, a new approach has begun to emerge, promoted by such scholars as Espen Aarseth.  This is the game theory or ludology approach, an approach that focuses on the kinds of computer games mostly ignored by the narratological theorists, the games that remediate not movies or TV shows, but board games, card games, and games of chance.  (I include first person shooters and most simulations in this category, first person shooters because they remediate survivalist type games and simulations because they remediate human systems which are based on rules, even if no way to win or lose the game has been specifically defined).
      In this paper I propose to analyze a simulation game such as SIMCITY or MONOPOLY TYCOON using the original game descriptions as they were outlined by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstorn in their seminal work Theory of Games and Economic Behavior  as well as subsequent critiques and updates of that work by such authors as William Poundstone.  The point here is to see if game theory is really relevant to the analysis of computer games as Aarseth has argued, by doing one micro-case study.

• Talan Memmott (independent: BeeHive)
  CodeWork://serration in practice

  'Codework'? One could say it is a form of electronic literary work in which the protocols and structural aspects of the supporting technology, from which, to which the work is applied are explored and exposed within the body of the text. Our orientation at the terminal has transformed the linguistic landscape. Through the introduction of specific technical and lexical terms and ideograms into daily use, our attachment to the Internet apparatus alters common language. The "." is no longer simply a decimal or full-stop (as if it ever was). The syntax of the mark expands to indicate blocks and breaks in location, performing as a gateway ideogram through to the next protocol or location of mediation. Extensions and gateway ideograms such as "." ":" "/" are loaded indicators of the various negotiation points in a User's procession through the apparatus.
      That these signs and ideograms are adopted into post-literary practice is indicative of a number of things. For the practitioners of electronic literature it signals a naturalization of the signs - in which the technical ideogammatics [signs, scripts, codes] of the apparatus are registered as legitimate sytactic and inscriptive extensions to electronic textuality. In this regard, the extension is seen as an opening into the electrate - complicating inscription by permitting variability, substitution and other forms of experimentation. 
      Across the web, around the world there are many practitioners of this peculiar form - Giselle Beiguelman from Brazil, Eugene Thacker, Mez from Australia, JODI, Brian Lennon, Ted Warnell. In fact, much of my own work may fall under this heading.  The work varies in complexity and technological scale, so any discussion of 'codework' must consider literary objects ranging from elaborately hypermediated, interactive selections to simple text documents. The common thread is that that the works make use of e-mergent ideograms and processes. 
      Though the subject of the work may not directly relate to a critique of network technologies, the method itself provides commentary on the apparatus. The document reiterates its location, its position within an electronic environment, on the web, the Internet, the terminal and exploits the native modes of inscription. The focus and practices may vary but a level of consistency between the works of any these artist/writers can be discerned. The appropriation of email correspondence is fairly common in what is being discussed here as 'codework.' The use of email lists for the source and distribution of some of the work places the Author at a fulcrum, as processor or mediator between dispersals across the apparatus - playing a game of hot potato with digital information.
      Brian Lennon's "RE_WORKINPR" is an excellent example of this technique. In this work Lennon uses a collection of email messages from a multi-directional discussion to present us with some of the problems of being online. Through a parsing method that leaves the primary transmission of the appropriated email in shambles -- words are removed, passages repeated - Lennon explores network identity and authority by deconstructing the formal aspects of email exchange. There are passages in which every alphabetic character has been parsed out of the document, leaving various brackets, ciphers and ideograms for gleaning. Other passages offer hypercritical poetical texts that may originate with Lennon himself - we cannot be sure in this mish-mash of messages. The most significant attributes of this work are found in its exposure of typical email formatting as something pregnant with narrative information, the observation of patterns in email correspondence, and in its concern with time - being (too much) online. 
      Since much of the source text does not originate with the creator of the work - borrowed from email lists and correspondence -- it is difficult to locate the author as Author. The author plays the role of Scriptor in this regard, molding the text to meet intent. Though the text of RE_WORKINPR may not originate with Brian Lennon, the appropriated correspondence in the work does not carry as much intentional weight as the commentary constructed through it - its orchestration. Lennon uses the formal devices of email -- headers, subject lines, timestamp -- to serve as data in support of his general concerns. Blocks of dates and timestamps from multiple emails, sometimes only minutes apart reinforce the critique by providing concrete examples of a serious attachment to the network. These examples, coupled with the heavy parsing and exposure of a formal syntax within the email document produce a multi-track masterpiece of 'codework' that is both poetical and critical.
      Ted Warnell's "Berlioz" is also comprised of a collection of email messages mish-mashed together and made dynamic. Over what appears to be a greenish over-compressed digital image, units of text appear and disappear from the screen through User interaction. What is interesting about this work is that the appropriated email dialog is rendered unreadable by the design. "Berlioz" hides its own textuality beneath a sfumato of painterly, or musical intent. Areas of clustered unreadable text occupy the screen, functioning more as color mass than as literary units. In painterly terms, the alphanumeric, diacritical and encoded characters carry the pigment and Warnell has applied them aptly -- with a painter/composer's hand. The musicality of the work is rendered in a de-sonified sense - through User interaction, harmonies are struck between the various masses of text. The User controls, conducts the emergence of the text.  More rigid than Berlioz, Warnell's "VIRU2" also demonstrates the use of text as 'mass'. Areas of red, black and blue text mark a stark white screen, drip, and flood the screen in strokes reminiscent of paintings by Clifford Still. In the lower right of the screen there is a gray, barely visible genetic sequence - GGTCAA -- and the only directly readable text is a fictitious JavaScript that lists the functions tumor(), and mutant().
      The script, the genetic code, the masses of texts that may as well be masses of genetic matter collide and overlap to form a strange ecology of contexts. Clicking on the genetic sequence resets the page, reordering the genetic sequence and "mutating" the screen. The experience is clinical. Both VIRU2 and Berlioz allow the User to initiate a reordering of the screen, but the functionality of VIRU2 is abrupt, operating properly through the regeneration of the entire document. The sequencing of Berlioz is subtler by device. Warnell is known for his minimalist approach to hypermedia, but don't let that fool you. There are complexities to his constructions that make one toss away a literal, literary reading and give into the simple, yet stunning visual and interactive aspects of the work. There - is the poetry. 
      In my own work, "Lexia to Perplexia," the phenomenology of network attachment is explored in something of an inter-hyper-active state. At one level the piece is interested in the sort of serration, and commingling of the superficial text with the textuality of the apparatus. Certain syntactic attributes of the apparatus are used throughout - the "*" as a wildcard, the prefix "ex" becomes "exe" - and there is the development of some rather playful neologistic terms for certain phenomena of network identitification. The work introduces terms such as "Metastrophe," "Intertimacy," and "Narcisystem" into the vocabulary.
      At another level the work promotes the notion that the textuality of post-literary hypermedia is an expanded field of words, visuals, interaction - a hypersensual mise en scène. Many of the arguments in "Lexia to Perplexia" are presented through visual means or diagrammatic animations that are triggered by User interaction. There is a tight integration between the functionality of the piece, the visual logic, and the superficial text. Indeed, the "text" is distributed thoughout with the hopes of constructing a performative language application. In all these works there is a serration of common language with code[s] (of sorts), an encoding of the common, slippage between information structures, forms of attachment and identification. Substrate technical verbiage and syntax jut through and are re-purposed - consumed by the potentialities of the apparatus, again - applied and incorporated, within. with:out. The electronic apparatus, the Internet, the web, these heavily scar all of the texts I have referred to. They suffer better for this. Perhaps it is a posthuman fate that we inscribe across various protocols and strata -- attached here and there, amongst devices. Text is boring without *.(s)trop(h)e -- we progress through electrate mannerism.

• Orion Montoya (U Chicago), with Mark Olsen (U Chicago) 
  Implementing South Asian Dictionaries: Characters, Glyphs and Textual Objects under PhiloLogic

  The Digital Dictionaries of South Asia (DDSA) project is a collaborative endeavor based at the University of Chicago to create and disseminate electronic dictionaries in twenty-six modern literary languages of South Asia. At least one multilingual dictionary is being selected for each South Asian language; in the case of more frequently taught languages, a monolingual dictionary is also chosen. This effort includes widely spoken languages such as Hindi and Bengali, lesser known languages such as Divehi and Sinhala, as well as classical languages such as Sanskrit. The results of this project are available free of charge via the World Wide Web. 
      The ARTFL Project, also at the University of Chicago, is providing lead technical support for the DDSA and the related Digital South Asia Library at the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago. The South Asian dictionaries pose significant technical and editorial challenges that we had not encountered in previous work on reference materials in European languages under PhiloLogic, ARTFL's full-text retrieval and analysis system. 
      PhiloLogic is a modular system based on a hierarchical object model in which all elements of textual databases, from words to documents, may be considered to be objects with attributes. Under this model, a textual database is really a set of coordinated or related databases, typically including an object database, a word forms database, a word concordance index mapped to textual objects, and an object manager mapping text objects to byte offsets in data files. Each of these databases is stored and managed using its own subsystem. The implementation of the South Asian dictionaries required simply the addition of new fields in the object management and word object databases to handle different types
  of character encoding.  
      The characters contained in these dictionaries proved to be particularly problematic, since they combine a a number of different South Asian languages, English or other European languages, and a wide variety of romanizations developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Since many of these characters are not included in the ASCII character set, we represented them internally either with ISCII (the Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange) or with SGML character entities. ISCII is an Indian government standard that covers ten Indic scripts derived from Brahmi, and takes its versatility from that common linguistic origin and phonetic similarity. A glyph from one script corresponds phonetically to a glyph from each of the other scripts; in ISCII all of these glyphs are assigned to the same slot in the upper 128 ASCII characters. The question of which script to use arises only at display time. We entered and stored the various romanizations as SGML entities. For display, both the ISCII and the SGML may be converted on demand to Unicode. 
      The contents from all textual objects in the dictionaries are indexed as they appear in PhiloLogic word indexes and extracted as ISCII, ASCII or SGML character entities to build the associated object databases. This allows us to adopt several different representations of the data for searching and display. SGML character entities in the primary word object database may be searched as whole entities or in a secondary "search field" which contains a simplified representation. There is, in principle, no limit to the number of fields and representations that can be built around the primary object indexes, allowing for great flexibility in configuring search and display characteristics. 
      DSAL has already released a number of dictionaries under this model which are being heavily used. We are planning two major extensions of PhiloLogic: internal use of Unicode in either the texts themselves or in the object databases and Java/Javascript translation systems to allow users to input native scripts and/or Romanizations as part of queries. 
      Related WWW sites:
          DSAL: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/  
          DDSA: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/
          PhiloLogic: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/philologic/ 

• Aimée Morrison (U Alberta)
  Nerds Heroic and Social: Cinematic Video-gaming and the Domestication of Computing

  Recent repurposing of video game narratives as high-budget Hollywood films, most notably the CGI-enabled Final Fantasy and the pneumatically-enhanced Tomb Raider, have led many critics within and without the academy to proclaim a synergy between gaming and movie entertainments.  To address gaming in the context of its cinematic depiction is to tackle not the thing itself, but the narrativization of the thing itself, all the while remaining mindful of the Heisenbergian reality that neither discourse—gaming or cinema—emerges from their relationship unchanged.  While an analysis of the relationship between video gaming and movie-making certainly shows that the cinematic representation of gaming moves in lockstep with advances in CGI (computer graphics interface) technologies, with the techniques and images of both demonstrating increasing overlap, the characterization of gaming in the movies also reflects broader public conceptions of computing technology.  Video gaming in cinema, that is, tends to push the envelope of the technically possible while exploring and narrating the relationship of computing technologies to human identities and social relations.
      In this paper, I concentrate on the latter relationship between movies and videogames, looking especially at video-game narratives of the 1980s as a coherent body of work both articulating and adhering to standards of representation particular to that decade.  I show that the depiction of video games and game-players in this period served to rehabilitate the reputations of hackers and nerds by construing their activities and skills as socially beneficial, and to domesticate the technologies of gaming (and personal computing) firstly by glamourizing these in brilliant visual displays, and secondly by narratively marking video game heroism as corollary to real-world heroism.
      The ‘nerds heroic and social’ of my title are unique to 1980s cinema.  While later movies such as those mentioned above are familiar to most, video games and cinema have a much longer history together than is generally taken into account.  Arguably, 1973’s Westworld is an early video-gaming movie.  In this film, visitors to a wild-west theme park interact with robotic characters under the direction of a central computing facility.  Soon, however, the robots run amok in a fit of technological hubris that sees the lascivious, decadent, and silly tourists systemically gunned down by their own fantasies made real.  This pessimism toward and distrust of computing technologies—of leisure as well as war—is typical of movies produced throughout the 1970s.
      Video games begin to appear more frequently and more realistically, though, in the early age of the personal computer.  At that time, the characterization of gaming and the computers on which it depends becomes much more positive, and skill with gaming and computers begin to denote heroism and worth of an iconoclastic, individualist sort well-suited to the me-first-ness of the 1980s.  1983’s War Games, for example, opens with Mathew Broderick’s character David Lightman achieving record scores on a local arcade video game—using the same skill, David subsequently changes his grades on the school network, and, by hacking inadvertently into NORAD systems, starts a ‘game’ called Global Thermonuclear War.  The rest of the movie narrates David’s battle to hack his way back out the problem.  In 1984’s Last Starfighter, Alex Rogan, another teenage protagonist with videogame skills finds he’s been recruited to actually fly the missions his favorite game has simulated; nothing less than the fate of known and unknown civilizations depends on him.  1983’s Tron, too, establishes the derring-do and importance of its hero Flynn by showing him surrounded by accolytes at an arcade game he has not only conquered but also designed.  Later in that film, Flynn parlays his gaming skills into a ‘real life’ foray into computer circuitry.  As with WarGames’ Lightman and Last Starfighter’s Rogan, Tron’s Flynn operates from the position of outsider, defeating organized military, interplanetary, and corporate behemoths (respectively) through sheer computer skill.
      In the 1980s’ take on video games in film, uniformly young, white, geeky, male, misunderstood geek-types achieve a form of public heroism via virtuosic performances at video games.  Games are played publicly in arcades, to cheering crowds who gather excitedly as the scores creep upwards.  Beyond this already unlikely linkage between gaming and public adulation, skill at arcade games translates directly in all three films into real world heroism/skill sets. 
      This representational trend reaches its culmination in 1999’s The Matrix.  In this film, the distinction between the playing of video-games, emphasizing mastery of imaginary universes and controlled conditions, and real world activity is erased in the plot’s central revelation that known reality is, essentially, a videogame.  Protagonist Neo manifests virtuosic skill at ‘playing’ this game, demonstrated in a scene that shows his training in a simulation of martial arts.  In this scene, the mise-en-scène, shot composition, editing, and choice of soundtrack emulate for the viewer as much as for Neo late-90s video game environments.  From this Baudrillardian collapse of the real (cinematic or diegetic) into a simulation of a simulation (a movie scene that looks like a video game that looks like nothing but itself), the mutually-imbricated relationship of movies and video games moves into its next phase, in which the products of the one becomes nearly indistinguishable from the stories of the other:  it is this phase that gives us Lara Croft as a fleshed-out (if you will) narrative agent rather than first-person shooter, and the computer-generated actors in Final Fantasy.  While their time may be passed, though, the video-gaming films of the 1980s are important markers of more than cutting-edge graphics generation; they domesticated computing as leisure activity, and articulated a new form of narrative heroism (however short-lived) in which young ‘hackers’—along with their gaming skills and their computers—were marked as both socially valuable and socially competent.  Narrative analysis of the role of gaming in Hollywood cinema helps us to understand the position of gaming activities and technologies in the social imaginary.

• Mark Olsen (U Chicago)
  Mapping Textuality: Physical and Virtual Geographies

  Text may be localized in a number of frequently complimentary ways. It is both the expression of ideas that exist in a mental landscape of other texts or ideas and physical entities which are produced, distributed, stored and consumed in particular locations. The interaction of location and textuality, at the personal level, is no where better illustrated than in the open stack library, where the joy of "discovering" related items is facilitated by the physical and intellectual proximity of texts. A "geography of textuality" might, at its broadest conception, examine the creation of formal or informal mental maps that aid in the navigation of knowledge as well as the impact of physical geography in the creation and consumption of text.
      I would like to illustrate a general discussion of textual mapping with an overview of the results from two ongoing projects which make extensive use of computer analysis of text and textual metadata, with results that speak to both the physical and virtual geographies of textuality. The first is an analysis of a mental map of knowledge as found in a statistical analysis of the cross-references (renvois) in Diderot's Encyclopédie. The second is an analysis of the locations and scale of the theatres in which plays were performed in Paris during the decade of the French Revolution.
      Our statistical analysis of the renvois and classification of knowledge found in the Encyclopédie resulted in a series of conceptual maps based on the strength of relationships between nodes, which we compared to Diderot's general model as presented in the famous Systeme Figure as well as other contemporary classification systems. We found significant differences between Diderot's idea of how he was organizing knowledge and what is revealed in the far more diffuse organization represented by the renvois system. The creation of such maps of knowledge was clearly envisaged by Diderot in the Encyclopédie: 
      l'ordre encyclopédique général sera comme une mappemonde où l'on ne rencontrera que les grandes régions; les ordres particuliers, comme des cartes particulieres de royaumes, de provinces, de contrées; le dictionnaire, comme l'histoire géographique & détaillée de tous les lieux, la topographie générale & raisonnée de ce que nous connoissons dans le monde intelligible & dans le monde visible; & les renvois serviront d'itinéraires dans ces deux mondes..
      To date, we have created only maps of the largest regions, but as Diderot indicates, we can concentrate on smaller localities.
      The street map of Paris during the French Revolution may be an equally important level of textual mapping. As part of a team that has developed a database of about 92,000 play performances in Paris during the French Revolution, I have been extending this database to include the location, size, and some additional architectural data for the more than 60 theatres in operation during this period. Theatres in Paris at this time were concentrated in two districts, around the Palais Royale and along the boulevard near the ancient Temple prison. Initial examination of the daily repertories of these two districts, with divergent histories and clienteles, shows significant differences in genres, revolutionary content
  and even most frequently performed authors. Urban geography may be an important aspect of the consumption of text as performance, opening the examination of the interaction of urban cultural space and revolutionary politics.
      The creation and use of physical and virtual textual maps may provide useful analytical tools, allowing the researcher to better visualize the localization of text, placing it into a spatial context and seeing continuities and juxtapositions more clearly. This in turn may lead to the creation of textual databases containing metadata which provides location information. Databases being produced by Alexander Street Press in conjunction with the University of Chicago contain a considerable amount of localization data. North American Women's Letters and Diaries, for example, (currently 14,700 documents, with a
  final projected size of over 40,000) provide extensive metadata relating to the location and setting the composition these texts. The broadest implication of such ideas, the creation of conceptual "maps" of the texts on the World Wide Web remains a laudable, if finally unattainable, goal which may be informed by far more restricted studies in humanities computing.

  See also Montoya and Olsen.

• Brad Paley (Digital Image Design Inc.)
  Special Presentation: Illustrative Interfaces: Using Perceptual and Cognitive Cues to Capture and Manipulate Ideas

  Abstract information can be more easily understood when it is cast in concrete visual representations. Three case studies of delivered, working systems are discussed: The design of a handheld wireless device for Goldman Sachs; the interactive part of the Mind'space exhibit in the Workspheres exhibition, which ran from February 12 to April 22, 2001 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and TextArc, a text analysis tool that has also been recognized as fine art.
      A design approach based on the multiple abilities of the human brain is presented. This approach suggests an "information processing pipeline" through which input is successively refined by sensory, perceptual, cognitive, symbolic, linguistic, and structural processes in the brain. The approach also suggests that behavioral, emotional, and social processes, while not strictly part of information processing, are equally valuable in the design process.
      This list of differing abilities is offered not as mind science, but as a design checklist that can guide design and provide a framework for critique. The case studies are discussed in the context of this checklist: design features are related to the brain processes that inspired or explain them.
  

• Katherine Parrish (OISE), http://www.meadow4.com/moolipo 
  How We Became Automatic Poetry Generators

  As the ripples of successive waves of cybernetic theory continue to impact a culture increasingly obsessed with the machine and its inner workings, it is beginning to dawn on us that the control we have always feared relinquishing to the machine has never been our gift to give. What we think of as individual conscious agency is as much a construction as the author we keep killing off. This realization manifests itself in the rhetoric around developing typologies in digital poetics. Consistently, these new categories seek to define texts by determining the locus of their control. This is particularly evident in discussions around algorithmically generated texts that use randomness in their processes. Randomness takes us right into the heart of the relationship between author/programmer/algorithm/text/ reader. Digital poetic practitioners and others have used randomness to seemingly opposite ends. For some, randomness is a tool that liberates the author from authoritative discourses, internalized codes of which she is unaware, and places control of the text firmly in the hands of the individual subject. Others deliberately construct chance operations in the writing process in an effort to expel themselves from the text, to write themselves out. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles asserts that pattern and randomness are bound together in "a complex dialectic that makes them not so much opposites as complements or supplements to one another" (Hayles 25). The relationship between authorial control and its relinquishment as it is realized in textual production involving random procedures is characterized by a similar supplementarity. Operating in this splice, these procedures point to an emergent posthuman subjective agency. 

• Daniel Poulin (U Montreal)
  The LexUM/CanLII Project: Using Computers and the Internet to offer a better access to Law

  The production of law, whether by legislation, judicial ruling or learned opinion, rightfully carries great prestige. Very little of this aura shines, however, on the publisher who compiles up-to-date versions of legislative texts and indexes, filters and formats judgments and doctrine. The production of law eclipses its distribution, which expresses itself only relatively modestly and then in the margins of the development of standards. Nonetheless, this presentation focuses specifically on the ways law is made available and circulated. We will report on some of the progress achieved in this area in Canada, particularly with respect to the development of free publication.

• Rita Raley (U California, Santa Barbara)
  The Object as Code

  Object-oriented programming, performed most commonly with the languages C++ and Java, claims as its basic operational advantage the idea that a software object can sustain its state over time --essentially, that the object's state and its functional features remain integral in multiple data structures. An object in this context, then, is understood to be modular. Its source code can be isolate and it can easily move around and maintain its behaviors throughout the various components of a software program. Further, the object's data and functions can be changed without these modifications affecting its communication with other objects; its structure is in this sense two dimensional, with a "public" interface and "hidden" components. This language of programming invites certain theoretical questions, with particular respect to the domains of hypertext and net.art (which I will group together as hypermedia). First there is the problem of the digital object as object. An object is usually thought as that which can be perceived, whose state and behaviors are somehow visible. What is the relation, then, between the hypermedia object and the found, kinetic, tactile, or otherwise "physical" art object? In one sense, hypermedia is a kind of object in that it puts on displays for the user-viewer, whose reactions and responses it then incorporates within its field of performance. But what is the meaning of the object in this context? What is its function? In what sense is it epistemologically constructed as a means to insist upon or instantiate, as it were, the materiality of the medium? There is a second line of inquiry available here. The software object operates along with other objects within a program that distributes value across its data fields and structures. That is, the structure of a program is more transvalued than it is hierarchical. What is the relation, then, between value and hierarchy in a programming language and Saussure's theory of language, which deals with both? In what sense is there either transfer or equivalence between an object-oriented language and Saussure's language, both of which connect to the question of value? This paper will treat these themes with particular reference to the emergent genre of "code poetry."

• Roda P. Roberts (U Ottawa)
  The Bilingual Canadian Dictionary

   

• Jennifer Roberts-Smith (U Toronto)
  Re-Tuning English Renaissance Poetry

  Under "tune, n.", the Oxford English Dictionary lists, first, "1.a. A (musical) sound or tone; especially the sound of the voice." The examples for this sense, including those from the Early Modern period, imply that a "tune" is "(musical)" in that it involves varying pitch. (Shakespeare's "Melodious discord, heavenly tune harsh sounding," is a representative example). Subsequent senses of the word reprise this interpretation: the OED, like most of us moderns, thinks of "musical" as "pitched." But George Puttenham, in his "The Arte of English Poesy" (1589), complains that any syllabic elision ("as to say twixt for betwixt gainsay for againesay: ill for euill"; 135) or expansion ("as to say: I-doen, for doon, endanger, for danger, embolden, for bolden"; 135), "consequently alters the tune and harmonie of a meeter as to the eare" (134). Puttenham is clearly thinking of syllable-count here, and consequently of rhythm rather than pitch when he uses the word "tune."  He adds to his list of tune-altering transgressions, "wrong ranging the accent of a sillable by which meane a short sillable is made long and a long short" (135). Again, musical rhythm, that is, rhythm related not only to syllable-count, but to syllables spoken with regard for some kind of timing, is at stake here.
      A preliminary survey of lexicographical works from the Early Modern period reveals that many other authors (including Blount, Bullokar, Cawdrey, Cockeram, Cooper, Elyot, Florio, and Thomas Thomas) go so far as to use the words "accent" and "tune" synonymously. Shakespeare himself associates "tune" with "time" in "As You Like It," when two Pages, accused of "untunable" singing, object, "You are deceiv'd, sir, we kept time, we lost not our time" (5.3.37). In this paper, I explore the benefits of electronic access to the contextual Early Modern usage of the word "tune" and make some preliminary suggestions about the implications of the word for the art of Early Modern English poesy.

• Shannon Robinson (U Toronto)
  Reading the Dirty Bits: "Dirty Words," Medical Jargon, or Invective? John Florio's World of Words (1598, 1611)

  John Florio was compiling his Italian-English dictionary at the same time as a controversy in the world of medicine. There were those who believed that texts should be written in the vernacular, as opposed to Latin, so as to make them accessible. However, there was also concern that descriptions of sexual organs, coitus, and conception would be used for pornographic purposes. The medical writers tended to describe genitals and sexual organs much in the way Florio's explanations do: i.e., by using metaphors of the everyday (tool, stones, purse etc.). In a sense, this way of conceiving imbues even the mundane with sexual overtones. It's a curious kind of projection.
      Besides treating the taboo and salacious topic of body parts, Florio also provides an abundance of vocabulary relating to whoredom (traffic of said body parts). Florio does not merely gloss "whore" but  adds, abundantly, a string of synonyms to it. This suggests invective rather than explanation. The term "whore" appears often as the last explanation in a series for a word or phrase, often of a metaphoric kind. For example, a certain phrase can refer to a worn-out horse, and also an overridden whore. Florio does not exclude what we would assume to be a "colloquial" or "slang" explanation, possibly because he did not share the conceptions that we have now. This is something we should look into: had English speakers begun separating certain kinds of speech into the "proper" and the "improper" by 1598? Canting language certainly existed, for thieves, but was there consciousness, in the English Renaissance, of sexual slang?

• Geoffrey Rockwell (McMaster U)
  TAPoR: Building a Portal for Text Analysis

  TAPoR will build a unique human and computing infrastructure for text analysis across Canada by establishing six regional centers to form one national text analysis research portal. This portal will be a gateway to tools for sophisticated analysis and retrieval, along with representative texts for experimentation. The local centers will include text research laboratories with best-of-breed software and full-text servers that are coordinated into a vertical portal for the study of electronic texts.  Each center will be integrated into its local research culture and, thus, some variation will exist from center to center.

  See also Mactavish and Rockwell.

• Susy Santos and Paul Fortier (U Manitoba)
  Testing the Appropriateness of a Corpus: A Statistical Approach

   As new corpora become available, the person deciding to acquire one, or choosing among several possibilities has legitimate concerns about the appropriateness of the texts included, given the purpose for which the corpus is intended to be used. The Trésor de la Langue Française corpus is a case in point.
      Constituted in the late 1950s and early 1960s as an aid to dictionary making, this corpus is now being promoted and used as a representative sample of French literature. The names of the authors included and the titles of the texts by each author are known. The importance of the authors and texts to literature scholars at the time can be measured in terms of the number of lines devoted to each in the Oxford Companion to French Literature (1959). Similarly the MLA Online Bibliography provides information on the number of publications concerning each author and work, up to the very recent past. It can be taken as reflecting current interest in the texts. If one desires more precision, the MLA data come divided into the periods 1963 to 1990, and 1991 to the present. For this paper, frequencies were derived for the one hundred and twenty-eight novelists represented in the Trésor de la Langue Française corpus.
      The data, whether three sets or four, fall into a pattern quite familiar to people who work with word frequencies in natural languages: a large number of very low frequencies and a very small number of quite high frequencies. These data do not form the familiar bell-shaped curve typical of the Gaussian distribution.
      Since the data are not in a Gaussian distribution, Pearson's product-moment correlation analysis cannot legitimately be used on them. Similarly these data would produce a very high proportion of predicted values smaller than five in a contingency table for a chi-squared analysis, so this method cannot be employed. The usual way of handling such a problem (grouping the data) is not appropriate, since it is the treatment of individual authors which is of interest. Spearman's rank correlation analysis avoids these two problems; it has been chosen as the primary analytic technique and applied in pairwise fashion to the data, and to four subsets of the data. At the same time, outlier analysis provided by the software used identifies authors whose distribution varies the most from the trends in the data.
      Dividing the data chronologically into four periods with similar numbers of authors in each provides somewhat smaller, but still strong, correlations among the sets of data, and because the number of items is smaller, the reliability of the results is somewhat diminished. The advantage to such a subdivision is that it shows when the choices made for the Trésor de la Langue Française corpus are more reliable (the earlier rather than the later periods) and what type of authors tend to be under represented in it (women authors).

• Sharon Scinicariello (Case Western U)
  Li Chastels de Savance: Designing a Virtual Environment for Learning Language and Culture

  This presentation addresses the pedagogical and technical issues involved in designing a virtual environment that encourages language learners to collaborate in the acquisition, evaluation, and synthesis of cultural information.  Based on the design of a medieval château-fort, li Chastels de Savance is a multi-user interface to a database of resources (including text, graphics, audio, and video).  Queries on the database are linked to objects within the Castle.  For example, clicking on a medieval harp can lead the learner into a "room" stocked with resources on early music and performance practice.  Learners use real-time audio to communicate with each other as they collaboratively explore the environment and complete learning activities.  This presentation outlines the pedagogical choices that inform the construction of the Castle environment, the construction and use of the resource database, and the use of the environment to support in-class, distance, and continuing education.  It concludes by discussing the extension of this environment to support interdisciplinary learning in the humanities.

• Richard J. Shroyer and Paul Werstine (U Western Ontario)
  Broken Lines: the Printing of the Shakespeare First Folio and the Digitizing of the New Variorum Shakespeare

  The New Bibliographical reconstruction of the printing of the Shakespeare First Folio curiously resembles our recent experience with the scholarly community that evaluated  a electronic prototype of a volume in the New Variorum edition of Shakespeare (NVS).  What the New Bibliographers discovered was that scholars were in error in reading the Folio as if the printing represented how Shakespeare himself wanted his lines to be read. What we very recently discovered is that today's scholars make the somewhat analogous and equally false assumption that whatever selections a particular web browser makes from a richly encoded text accurately represents how that text has been encoded.

• Ray Siemens (Malaspina U-C)
  Canadian Humanities Computing and the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities

  What lies at the intersection of computational methods and humanities scholarship -- humanities computing -- is of growing importance, an importance that is seen both in the rise of contributions made by such approaches to field specific research and research dissemination, and in its representation in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum of a growing number of institutions. Even so, there is no single resource available to introduce this field's concerns and to serve its curricular needs. Edited by myself, Susan Schreibman (U Maryland) and John Unsworth (U Virginia), the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities is, thus, advanced as much out of pragmatic necessity, to address the unmet needs of a growing area of inquiry, as it is out of curricular service, to serve those needs by offering a selection of specially commissioned articles representative of the central concerns shared by all those interested in humanities computing.
      Aimed specifically at serving students and instructors in upper level undergraduate courses, those at the graduate level, and interested leaders both within and outside academe, the Companion will provide a representation of the field and its curricular concerns that documents the field's evolution, its current state, and its potential future.

• Stéfan Sinclair (U Alberta)
  Humanities Computing Resources: A Unified Gateway and Platform

Much work has been done in recent years to standardise the encoding and representation of texts for a variety of purposes and programs: SGML, TEI, and Dublin Core are a few examples. Ironically, far less attention has been paid to the harmonisation of the relevant text-analysis tools (Eye-ConTact <http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~grockwel/ictpaper/ictintro.htm> by Geoffrey Rockwell and John Bradley is a notable exception). As text-analysis migrates to the web (with first generation tools such as TACTweb <http://tactweb.humanities.mcmaster.ca/> and HyperPo <http://huco.ualberta.ca/HyperPo/>), the need for establishing a common framework for the interaction of modules is urgent.
    The Humanities Computing Resources project has several purposes. For the end-user, it provides a single login point to a variety of resources (available on the same server or via other servers through compatibility protocols). Information such as e-mail addresses can be updated once and applied to multiple nodes in a central database (more sensitive information such as financial data is not currently within the purview of the project although a generic privacy statement is provided). Navigation between the resources is greatly simplified since users can quickly display a list of available public resources as well as the resources to which they have been granted access. This compilation of resources is also a useful way of promoting modules that might otherwise be more difficult to find.
    For the programmer, the Humanities Computing Resources project is a platform that provides an API (Application Programming Interface) for common tasks. For instance, instead of writing several lines to query a database for a user's last login, a programmer can, in one line, call a function that will perform the desired task. More importantly still, the Humanities Computing Resources project defines an XML-based standard protocol for communication of data between modules. This essentially makes the Humanities Computing Resources project an extensible platform since modules can easily be added to the system while ensuring compatibility with other modules.

• Stéfan Sinclair, Terry Butler, Sean Gouglas (U Alberta)
  The MA in Humanities Computing

• Alan Sondheim (Florida International U)
  Codework and Beyond

  "Codework" - intermingling of computer and text, programming as source or catalyst, eruption of the surface from hidden structure of code.  "Code" can refer to just about anything that combines tokens and syntax to represent a domain. In a sense, natural language encodes the "real," gives us the ability to move in environments constantly undergoing transformation. In a narrower sense, code refers to a translation from natural language to an artificial, strictly-defined one; the syntax of Morse code, for example, has no room for anomalies or fuzziness. Computer programming generally requires strictly-defined codes which stand in for operations that occur "deeper" in the machine. Most users work on or within graphic surfaces that are intricately connected to the programming "beneath"; they have little idea how or why their machines work.
      For thousands of years, writers have, again in general, taken their tools - taken writing itself - for granted. The computer and Internet, however, have opened up a whole (and indefinable) world of possibilities. These range from writing itself to multimedia, and from writing-on-the-surface - traditional writing or hypertext - to texts, dynamic or static - that reflect the bones, the molecules and atoms - of programming and protocols - even the bones of the user's computer, which may be accessed by various programs. 
      I see codework as at least one future of writing - in part, it's prosthetic, an uneasy combination of contents and structures. Using the metaphor of a tree, codework can be placed within a very rough taxonomy as follows 
      - a - Works using the syntactical interplay of surface language, with reference to computer language and engagement. These works may playfully use programming terminology and syntax; they don't necessarily refer to specific programs. Examples include multi-media and hypertextual works - they're the leaves and bouquet of the tree, the efflorescence. I think of Mez's work in this regard, some of Antiorp's style (but see below), and some of the Internet Relay Chat jargon endemic in various chats.
      - b - Works in which submerged code has modified the surface language - with the possible representation of the code as well. Here we have the potential for continuous surface deformations. They're the tendrils and branchings of the tree, half surface and half root. Some of my own work fits here, as does the work of Ted Warnell. The language becomes increasingly unreadable at times; it's the result of a group of processes and catalysts which may or may not be reworked. (I think of Talan Memmott's work between a and b here.) 
      - c - Works in which the submerged code is emergent content; these are both a deconstruction of the surface, and of the dichotomy between the surface and the depth. I think of antiorp's and jodi's dynamic sites for classic examples. These works are the rhizomatic roots of the tree (I recognize the botanic problem here). In order to understand what's going on, it helps to look at source code (which can be part of the content). c can also refer to aleatoric or randomized work - haiku, language, or other poetry/poetic generators. Sometimes the work only appears randomized and sometimes it's entirely out of control. I think of John Cayley's work here.
      All of these categories move between static productions (which may or may not be the residue, reworked residue, or simulacrum of programs and/or program output) and dynamic processes - movement on the screen, within or without the traditional window or other framework. Sometimes the computer crashes, especially with category c - and that's part of the work, part of the process. 
      I'm excited by all of this. It leads to vast uncharted domains (if that's still a usable term) of new and future literatures - domains which recognize the vast changes that have occurred in human/ machine interaction - changes that affect the very notions of community and communality. Some of this work depends on network distribution; some of it works primarily with a lone user at his or her computer. The works themselves may often be created through collaboration; no one really knows if Antiorp/Integer/etc. is one or many people, Mez uses a pseudonym, and I work with a number of "emanants," characters who are part me, part themselves, part machine.

• Marshall Soules (Malaspina U-C)
  Computer Gaming and Protocols of Improvisation

                  There is nothing so practical as a good theory. (Kurt Lewin.)
  It was McLuhan’s contention that societies needed to keep an eye on its artists to discover the impact of new media on culture. Artists, in McLuhan’s view, not only test the limits of the new technologies in experimental ways—their extensions--they retrieve older media and configure new uses for them. This paper argues that there is always room for a “good theory” in the practical development of new media, and computer games are no exception.
      While computer games are credited with driving the rapid expansion of powerful multimedia desktops, and to a lesser extent the broadband deployment of the web, most of them trade on timeless principles of storytelling, performance, and audience engagement. Two influential texts—Computers as Theatre, by Brenda Laurel, and Hamlet on the Holodeck, by Janet Murray—suggest that computer games refigure tried-and-true methods of  narrative and engagement (agency and interactivity). Laurel, for example, harkens back to Aristotle for a theory of dramatic engagement which has seen numerous challenges in the dramatic and performance theory of the 20^th C.
      In contrast to the largely structuralist analyses of agency and interactivity by theorists as Laurel, Murray, and Mark Bernstein (of Eastgate Systems), this paper explores some alternate paradigms of performance which reflect usefully, it is hoped, on the practical aspects of computer game design. More specifically, the concept of protocols of improvisation is advanced to suggest that a mode of highly-engaging and challenging performance—improvisation—typically occurs within a matrix of constraints.  As a mode of performance, improvisation privileges the expressive power of the individual within a community of players. If one approaches the design of computer games with a view towards encouraging improvisatory activity, what features might one consider?
      The anthropology of performance articulated by Turner, Schechner, Chaikin, Brook and others, emphasizes the voluntary discipline required of improvised performance, and the need for frames to establish the playing space. The boundaries of these performance frames are of particular significance, and crossing these thresholds of experience—these liminal zones—retrieves important elements of ritual (as in rites of passage) and play. Victor Turner was especially intrigued by the neurophysiology of play, the heightened activity in the limbic system, and the role of play as a translator of experience. To what extent do the protocols of computer games engage the performative aspects of play? How are participants enjoined to combine what is—the indicative mode—with what could be—the subjunctive mode?  What do contemporary theories of the brain suggest about the dialogue of peptides occurring when emotion is translated into cognition: the place where the game occurs?
      To what extent do computer games encourage improvisation by participants? The practice of jazz musicians—as theorized by Bailey, Gates, Chernoff, Albert Murray, and others—concludes that riffing, spontaneous appropriation, repetition and revision, signifyin(g), and idiomatic vernaculars are important elements in the engagement of players. How might these protocols be retrieved by the designers of computer games? Are machine languages capable of translating these expressive behaviors into schemes of agency and interactivity?
      Finally, the intent of this paper is to contribute to the dialogue about performance through the human-computer interface, and to suggest that there are indeed theories—whether ancient or new—which game designers could use to animate their creations, and their play.

• Will Straw (McGill U)
  The Internet and Urban Visuality

  This paper, presented jointly with Janine Marchessault of York University, discusses the embryonic attempt to provide resources on urban visual culture through websites related to our MCRI project, "The Culture of Cities."

• Johannes Strobel (U Missouri-Columbia), http://fs-infowiss.phil.uni-sb.de/~hans/ 
  Mindtools -- or, Computers as Thinking Tools for Teaching Humanities and Social Sciences

  Mindtools are computer software-applications in the category 'learning with computers'. Mindtools want to use the computer to extend and supplement the skills of the human being. The focus is not on "how to use computers", but on "why" and "now that we have all this information, what does it mean?" Mindtools are applications that require students to think in meaningful ways. These cognitive tools include databases, spreadsheets, semantic networks, expert systems, computer conferencing, multimedia, computer programming, and microworld learning environments. Although not necessarily designed to support learning, they can all be used as mindtools, especially in the representation of knowledge and fostering critical thinking of individuals.

• J. Taylor, J-A Beraldin, G. Godin, L. Cournoyer, F. Blais, M. Rioux, and J. Domey (NRC, Institute for Information Technology)
  The Role of Heritage in the Development of NRC’s 3D Imaging Technology

   

• Elaine Toms (U Toronto)
  Food for the Mind: TAPoR as Canada's Digital Library in the Humanities

   

• Barrett Watten (Wayne State)
  Information Theory and the Poetics of Truth: From Text to New Media

  In this paper, I will discuss the relation of information to truth in textual and new media forms. To begin with, I will take up several lengthy texts that feature "maximal information" generated by the Language School of poets (Clark Coolidge, Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, myself). Theories of probability associated with Information Theory (after Claude Shannon) will allow me to hypothesize a "truth function" of these texts based on the alternation of information  and noise. "Information" tends toward the communication of meanings grounded in textual metalepsis (referring to the unfolding form of the poem as a whole), while "noise" indicates blanks that defer such communication but set up its necessary conditions. In information theory probability, the past history of a series of events contributes to the probability of an event occuring in the present (unlike classical probability). If one tosses a coin ten times in the classical theory, the probability of heads is still 50% on the next toss; in information theoretical probability, the past history of events changes the probability of the next toss being heads. So, in the works of the Language School under discussion, the past history of "meaning" or "reference" or "nonsense" or "noise" in a given text sets up a way of predicting the likelihood of "meaning" or "reference" or "nonsense" or "noise" in the text as it unfolds. I will extend this thought experiment on the "possibility of textual meaning" to any series of encounters with information, such that any real-time experience of searching through forms of "maximum information" tends toward "meaning" in this way.

• Darren Wershler-Henry (York), http://www.commonsgroup.com/people/principal_darrenhenry.html, and Bill Kennedy (Rhizomedia), http://www.thescream.ca
  Apostrophe: Working Notes

  See: http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/traced/guertin/apostrophe.htm.

• Bill Winder (U British Columbia)
  Grammar Checking Online: The Wild, Wild Web Programming Environment

  This talk describes a project to create an online, semi-automatic grammar checker for French at UBC. The components of this project would allow students to submit their compositions electronically (email or web form) and allow both semi-automatic (instructor assisted) and automatic correction of certain kinds of repetitive composition errors. In the course of the correction cycle, instructors would compile a database of student errors. A corrective grammar, built as a response to the error database, would be used to generate automatic mini-lessons and exercises designed to teach the specific grammar points raised by errors.
       In this talk we will consider the programming issues that such projects bring to the fore. In particular, we will concentrate on the particular hurdles of an applied NLP that mixes several programming environments, such as prolog, coldfusion, and java.

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12 August 2002; 55