Many of you will have seen the notices and obituaries relating to the sad death in October 2005 of Paul Fortier, a very long-standing member of ALLC, who served the Association over many years in a number of different capacities. These included many years on the Committee, as well as Programme Committee Chair and other roles. He was also a very regular attender at ALLC and joint ALLC-ACH conferences. He is sorely missed.
At its meeting in December 2005 the Committee began consideration of how best to pay tribute to Paul's memory, and these discussions will continue at the meetings in Paris in June 2006. Announcements will be made on the ALLC web site and by email.
As reported a year ago, the ALLC and ACH committees agreed at the meetings in Sweden in June 2004 to establish an interim Steering Committee for the new Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO). This group served until the June 2005 meetings in Victoria, when the first Steering Committee proper was established.
The 2005-06 ADHO Steering Committee consisted of 5 voting members. ALLC members were appointed to 1, 2 and 3 year terms, with a view to establishing a regular rotation, although terms are renewable. The voting members appointed by the ALLC Committee were: Laszlo Hunyadi (1 year), Harold Short (2 years), Espen Ore (3 years). John Unsworth and Chuck Bush were nominated by ACH. At its first meeting the Committee elected John Unsworth as Chair.
Non-voting members of the Steering Committee were: Jean Anderson (Treasurer), Marilyn Deegan (Editor, LLC), Julia Flanders (Conference co-ordination), Geoffrey Rockwell (Publications development). Lorna Hughes (President, ACH) and Ray Siemens (Chair, SDH/SEMMI) were invited to retain their status as 'listeners' on the ADHO SC mailing list.
Following the development of extensive proposals for the revision of the ADHO Governnance and Conference protocols at the December 2004 meeting of the ALLC Committee, further intensive work was done at the meetings in Victoria and in December 2005 in Oslo. A parallel exercise was carried out by the ACH Council. The consolidated set of revisions will be presented for final ratification to the Committee and Annual General Meetings of ALLC and ACH at the Paris conference in June 2006.
A web site for ADHO has been set up at:
http://www.digitalhumanities.org
As well as providing a good deal of useful information and links, the
web site gives access to the various ADHO protocol documents. These
can be found by following the Steering Committee links at the very top
of the home page.
The revised Conference protocol was used as a framework document to guide the planning and running of the 2005 conference in Victoria, and has been applied more rigorously as the framework for the 2006 conference in Paris, which will be the first ADHO conference, with the title Digital Humanities 2006. The sub-title retains the 'joint ALLC-ACH' identification.
Two standing committees were established at the Victoria meetings: the Conference Co-ordinating Committee and the Publications Committee. I am delighted to report that Susan Hockey agreed, although retired, to chair the Conference committee, whose other members are Espen Ore (ALLC) and Julia Flanders (ACH). The Publications Committee is chaired by Geoffrey Rockwell, with Edward Vanhoutte as the ALLC and Ray Siemens as the ACH representatives respectively.
The Victoria meetings also decided that an additional standing committee should be established to deal with Multi-lingualism and Multi-culturalism, and invited Elisabeth Burr to chair this committee. It gives me great pleasure to report that Elisabeth Burr accepted the invitation. She has produced a draft protocol which can be found on the Digital Humanities web site at the above url. The ALLC nominated Concha Sanz Miguel as its representative on this committee, while ACH nominated Peter Liddell.
The new contract with OUP was finalised and signed, and took effect from 1 January 2005. The financial arrangements changed with this new contract, as previously noted. It is pleasing as well as reassuring to note that income from the journal increased significantly in the first year of operation of the new contract, bringing us over £35,000 as against income around £20k in each of the three preceding years - 2002, 2003, 2004.
It is also worth noting that while some of the increased income is due to the change in financial arrangments, it is also the case that the trend of falling subscription numbers appears to have been reversed. This seems to be due partly to the marketing efforts of OUP, particularly in consortium deals, and partly to increased individual subscriptions, which seems to owe a great deal to the ADHO developments.
Literary and Linguistic Computing continues to go from strength to strength. One consequence of the ADHO development is to have increased significantly the number of submissions to LLC. In part to help deal with this increase, the Editor - Marilyn Deegan - decided to invite the two Reviews Editors - Simon Horobin and Edward Vanhoutte - to become Assistant Editors. At the same time, reflecting the role of LLC as the official print publication under the ADHO umbrella, she also invited Stephan Sinclair to become an Assistant Editor.
One of the key ambitions in the development of ADHO was collaborative effort to establish an electronic journal for the digital humanities. Julia Flanders was invited to take the lead in moving this forward, and was named as Editor. A great deal of progress has been made. The journal is to have the title Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ), and the first issue will be published soon. 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.
There has been considerable dialogue between Marilyn Deegan as LLC Editor and Julia Flanders as DHQ Editor, and their respective editorial teams, with the intention of establishing a fundamentally collaborative framework, so that the two publications are complementary rather than competitive. A Memorandum of Understanding has been drafted, and this may also be seen on the Digital Humanities web site.
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 will be bringing forward proposals for its adoption as an ADHO publication. This proposal will be considered initially by the ADHO Publications Committee.
The University of Illinois Press has agreed to publish a monograph series in Digital Humanities. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman have been invited to be Series Editors.
Discussions are also under way on publication of pre-prints. Overall, therefore, the ADHO development has provided 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 is at a very early stage.
The preparations for the 2006 Conference at the Université de Paris Sorbonne have gone very well, and we owe a debt of thanks to Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen (Chair) and the other members of the Programme Committee, and to Marie-Madeleine Martinet and Liliane Gallet-Blanchhard (Local Organisers) and their colleagues at the Sorbonne. The other ALLC members of the Programme Commitee were Elisabeth Burr, Alejandro Bia, Edward Vanhoutte, and Jean Anderson (replacing Paul Fortier).
At the June 2005 meetings a proposal from John Unsworth was received, to host the 2007 conference at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaignn. This conference will also run under the ADHO conference protocol, and it will be the second to have the title Digital Humanities. Under the protocol, the ACH Council put forward three names for consideration as Chair of the Programme Committee by the ADHO Steering Committee. Ray Siemens was appointed to this role. ALLC members of the PC include Jean Anderson, Espen Ore, Elisabeth Burr, and Paul Spence.
The TEI Consortium is now well established, and a very successful Members meeting was held in Bulgaria in November 2005. The level of membership subscriptions continues to be a cause for concern.
No CLiP conference was held in 2005. There will, however, be a CLiP 2006 Conference, to be hosted by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London in June 2006, immediately prior to the Digital Humanities Conference in Paris. The Committee agreed once again to make available three bursaries of €500 each to support young scholars who have papers or posters accepted at the conference.
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 Assistant Editors of the journal, who have had a great deal of work to do in dealing with the implementation of the new contract with OUP, along with the introduction of a number of new OUP systems. The journal remains a major scholarly publication of which the Association can feel justly proud.