Further to last year's report, the ALLC and ACH committees gave final
ratification to the governance protocol for the Alliance of Digital
Humanities Organisations (ADHO) at the Paris meetings in July 2006. The
Conference protocol and annex was also ratified. Work is continuing on
additional Annexes for the Conference Protocol, to cover such things as
guidance to Programme Committee Chairs, to Local Hosts, and to proposers
and presenters. There are also draft protocols on Publications and on
Multi-lingualism and Multi-culturalism. These documents can be seen
on the ADHO web site at:
http://www.digitalhumanities.org
following the Steering Committee links at the top
of the home page.
Over the past two years there have been discussions with the Canadian digital humanities organisation SDH-SEMI (Society for Digital Humanities/ Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs), which has expressed interest in becoming a constituent organisation within the ADHO umbrella. The Paris meetings authorised formal discussions, which have been taking place over the past year. At its May 2007 meeting, the SDH-SEMI Council voted to make formal application for admission to ADHO, and this will be considered by ADHO and the two founding organisations (ALLC and ACH) at the Illinois meetings. Details of the decision and, if approved, of the basis of admission will be posted on the ADHO web site.
The 2006-07 ADHO Steering Committee consisted of 5 voting members. The voting members appointed by the ALLC Committee were: Harold Short (1 year to run), Espen Ore (2 years), Elisabeth Burr (3 years). John Unsworth and Chuck Bush were nominated by ACH. The Committee elected John Unsworth to serve a second year as Chair.
Non-voting members of the Steering Committee were: Jean Anderson (Treasurer), Marilyn Deegan (Editor, LLC), Julia Flanders (Editor, DHQ), Susan Hockey (Conference Co-ordination committee), Geoffrey Rockwell (Publications committee), and Elisabeth Burr (Multi-lingual and multi-cultural committee). Lorna Hughes (President, ACH) and Ray Siemens (Chair, SDH/SEMMI) were invited to retain their status as 'listeners' on the ADHO SC mailing list.
The print journal - Literary and Linguistic Computing - continues from strength to strength, both in terms of the quality of its contents and the financial benefits it creates. The income for 2006 was nearly £43,000, up from £37,000 in 2005. One consequence of this healthy growth is that ALLC income is already above the level that had been reached prior to the new contract and the revenue sharing that takes place within the ADHO framework. This seems to be due partly to the marketing efforts of OUP, particularly in consortium deals, and partly to the collaborative framework fostered by ADHO.
The development of the new electronic journal Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) continued through the year, and the first issue was released in Spring 2007. Further information can be found on the Digital Humanities web site at the url given above, and you can follow the links from there to the DHQ web site where much more information is available.
Humanist continues to prosper and remains an important forum for discussion on a wide range of topics. Willard McCarty continues to edit the discussion group and it has now been adopted formally as an ADHO publication.
In the new Digital Humanities monograph series to be published by the University of Illinois Press, the Series Editors - Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman - have commissioned the first titles.
Discussions are also under way on publication of pre-prints. Overall, therefore, the ADHO development continues to provide the kind of impetus to new publication opportunities that was a major objective in the discussions which led to its establishment. Much remains to be done, however, and the identification and exploration of new opportunities remains at a very early stage.
The 2006 Conference at the Université de Paris Sorbonne was very successful, and the Programme Committee and the local organisers are to be congratulated. The former was chaired by Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen and the local organisers were led by Marie-Madeleine Martinet and Liliane Gallet-Blanchhard.
Preparations for the 2007 conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are well advanced, and both the academic programme and the local arrangements look excellent. Ray Siemens chaired the Programme Committee; ALLC members are Jean Anderson, Espen Ore, Elisabeth Burr, and Paul Spence.
At the Paris meetings, ADHO and the Associations accepted a proposal from Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen to host the 2008 conference at the University of Oulu, Finland. Information about the conference and the host university can be found at: http://www.ekl.oulu.fi/dh2008/. The Programme Committee is to be chaired by Thomas Rommel.
The TEI Consortium continues its work, and the release of the new version of the Guidelines - P5 - is expected soon. The level of subscriptions continues to cause concern. As part of its continuing support for the TEI, the Association agreed to fund an 'internationalisation' project which will develop TEI materials in a number of languages; this also contributes to the multi-lingual, multi-cultural agenda of the Association and of ADHO more broadly.
A successful CLiP conference was held in June 2006 at King's College London, immediately prior to the Paris Digital Humanities conference in Paris. Three ALLC bursaries were awarded to the students with the most promising papers.
I would like to record my appreciation for the work carried out for the Association by the Officers and the elected Committee members. Particular thanks are due to the Editor and Associate Editors of the journal, which remains a major scholarly publication of which the Association can feel justly proud.