The Fourth Annual Summer Seminar on Methods and Tools for Electronic Texts in the Humanities will be held at Princeton University, New Jersey on June 11-23, 1995. The seminar is organized by CETH and co-sponsored by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), University of Toronto.
Seminar Directors:
Susan Hockey, CETH, and
Willard McCarty, CCH
The Summer Seminar will address a wide range of challenges and opportunities that electronic texts and software offer to teachers, scholars and librarians in the humanities. The focus will be practical and methodological, with the immediate aim of assisting participants in their teaching, research, and advising. The seminar will cover the demonstrable benefits of using electronic texts, typical problems and how to solve them, and how software fits or can be adapted to common methods of textual study. Participants will work on their own projects and will be given the opportunity to present them at the end of the Seminar.
In response to demand, we are expanding the Seminar in 1995 to provide a maximum of sixty places. There will be plenary sessions throughout and six parallel tracks devoted to specific areas of humanities computing. Participants attend all plenary sessions and select one parallel track for more detailed study.
The six parallel tracks will cover textual analysis, TEI/SGML, scholarly editing, hypertext, tools for historical analysis, and the design and planning of an electronic text center. Each track will allow for intensive work on participants' own projects, opportunities for both hands-on experience with current software and extensive discussion.
Throughout the Seminar, the instructors will provide assistance with designing projects, locating sources for texts and software, and solvingpractical problems. Ample computing facilities will be available. A small library of essential articles and books in humanities computing will be on hand to supplement printed seminar materials, which include an extensive bibliography. Special lectures will describe current research in the field and address research topics as well as the role of the library in the use of electronic texts.
The Seminar is intended for faculty, students, librarians, technical advisers, and academic administrators with direct responsibilities for humanities computing support. It assumes basic computing experience but not necessarily with its application to academic research and teaching in the humanities.
Schedule
Sunday, June 11 6p.m. Registration, reception and introductions.
Monday, June 12 a.m. (Plenary) Survey of existing archives, inventories and other current resources. p.m. (Plenary) Creating and capturing texts in electronic form. Introduction to text markup, surveying ad hoc methods.
Tuesday, June 13 a.m. (Plenary) Introduction to basic tools: concordances and text retrieval. Demonstration and discussion of TACT. p.m (Plenary) Overview of the Text Encoding Initiative and the Standard Generalized Markup Language.
Wednesday, June 14 a.m. (Plenary) Large textual databases. ARTFL. Dartmouth Dante Project, Oxford English Dictionary. p.m. Parallel tracks.
Thursday, June 15 a.m. (Plenary) Electronic Editions and Scholarly Publishing (panel). p.m. Parallel tracks.
Friday, June 16 a.m. (Plenary) Introduction to structured databases. p.m. Parallel tracks.
Monday, June 19 a.m. (Plenary) Hypertext for the humanities. p.m. Parallel tracks.
Tuesday, June 20 a.m. (Plenary) Overview of digital imaging techniques. Demonstrations. p.m. Individual project work.
Wednesday, June 21 a.m. (Plenary) Institutional support for electronic texts (panel). p.m. Parallel tracks.
Thursday, June 22 a.m. (Plenary) Discussion on the limitations of existing software. Advanced analytical tools and lexical resources. p.m. (Plenary) Presentation of participants' projects. 6p.m. Cocktails and banquet.
Friday, June 23 a.m. (Plenary) Presentation of participants' projects. p.m. (Plenary) Concluding discussion of basic questions.
Parallel Tracks
1. Textual Analysis
An intensive study of textual analysis tools and their applications. Indexed
interactive retrieval vs batch concordance generation. Practical experience of
TACT and Micro-OCP. Applications of these tools: stylistics, corpus linguistics,
literary criticism, historical research.
Instructors: Susan Hockey, Willard McCarty
Susan Hockey is Director of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities. She has taught courses on humanities computing for nineteen years and is the author of A Guide to Computer Applications in the Humanities, SNOBOL Programming for the Humanities, and the Micro-OCP manual.
Willard McCarty has been active in humanities computing since 1977. With its founding director, Ian Lancashire, he helped to set up the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto, of which he is now the assistant director. Since 1990 he has taught a series of graduate courses in humanities computing at Toronto.
2. Text Encoding Initiative and SGML
Using the Text Encoding Initiative's application of the Standard Generalized
Markup Language. Topics covered: document structure and SGML elements, document
type declarations, SGML entities, TEI core tags and base tag sets, TEI header,
additional tag sets. Processing TEI-encoded texts.
Instructor: C.M. Sperberg-McQueen
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is Editor-in-Chief of the Text Encoding Initiative. In 1985 and 1986, he served as a consultant for humanities computing in the Princeton University Computer Center; since 1987 he has worked at the academic computer center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is now a Senior Research Programmer.
3. Scholarly Editing
Computer tools for the preparation and publication of scholarly editions. Topics
covered include: the transcription and computer imaging of primary sources; the
collation of multiple witnesses; the use of the Text Encoding Initiative
guidelines for scholarly editions; the making of hypertext electronic editions for
network and CDROM distribution.
Instructor: Peter Robinson
Peter Robinson is Executive Officer for the Canterbury Tales project, head of the Text Encoding Initiative workgroup on Textual Criticism, and developer of the textual collation program Collate. He is based at Oxford University Centre for Humanities Computing.
4. Hypertext for the Humanities
An introduction to developing hypertexts for the humanities. Building and using
HyperCard stacks and World Wide Web documents. Discussion of design and use of
example hypertexts and an examination of their role n humanities research and
teaching.
Instructor: Geoffrey Rockwell
Geoffrey Rockwell is the head of Humanities Computing at McMaster University and teaches courses on humanities computing. Previously he was a Senior Instructional Technology Specialist at the University of Toronto.
5. Tools for Historical Analysis
A survey of the methods most frequently used by historians in their computer-aided
teaching and research, focussing on database and statistical processing. Other
topics covered: linguistic content analysis and promising new developments in
corpus creation and image processing. Discussion throughout of real historical
problems and datasets and on the problems as well as the prospects of historical
computing.
Instructor: Daniel Greenstein
Daniel Greenstein is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Glasgow University, and head of the University's arts computing unit. He has published in early national American history, the history of higher education, and is the author of the recent textbook, A Historian's Guide to Computing.
6. Setting up an Electronic Text Center
The practical aspects of setting up and managing electronic text centers. Topics
covered: hardware and software for stand-alone and networked resources, collection
development, personnel and training, budget, licensing, and institutional
relations. Ample time will be available for participants to discuss developments at their own institutions.
Instructor: Anita Lowry
Anita Lowry is the Head of the Information Arcade, a new facility for electronic texts and multimedia in the University of Iowa Libraries. She co-founded and directed the Electronic Text Service, which was established in 1987/88 at Columbia University. She has long been active in the Association for Computers and the Humanities and has written and spoken widely on electronic texts in libraries.
Dates
June 11-23, 1995
Cost
$1275. Nonstudents
$1075. Students
Fee includes tuition, use of computer facilities, printed seminar materials, opening reception, lunches (Monday to Friday both weeks) and a closing banquet.
Payment is requested at the time of acceptance.
Location
Princeton University, in Princeton, New Jersey, was founded in 1746 and is the
fourth oldest college in North America. Among the University's attractions are the
library system, which houses about five million printed books, 34,000 journals,
manuscripts and papyri; and the Princeton Art Museum. The town of Princeton,
located midway between New York City and Philadelphia, offers a variety of shops
and restaurants.
Accommodation
Accommodation is available in Princeton University student housing facilities at
a cost of $25 per day for bed and breakfast.
CETH will assist participants in finding hotel accommodations if preferred. Commercial rates vary.
Application
Application requires two parts: a cover sheet and a statement of interest. Current
students applying for the reduced rate must also include a photocopy of their
valid student ID. E-mail submissions must have the subject line "SummerSeminar
Application."
Applications will be reviewed by a committee consisting of members of CETH's Governing Board. Send e-mail applications to ceth@zodiac.rutgers.edu, or send postal applications to CETH, 169 College Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08903. The fax number is (908) 932-1386.
The cover sheet must include the following information:
Your statement of interest should include:
Application Deadline
February 21, 1995
Notification of Acceptance: March 21, 1995