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Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing Committee Minutes of Committee meeting, April 2002 Committee Meeting of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing held in Pisa, Italy on Friday April 5th, 2002 Present: Harold Short (Chair), Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen (Secretary), Jean
Anderson (Treasurer), Lou Burnard, Elisabeth Burr, Marilyn Deegan, John
Dawson, Paul Fortier, Laszlo Hunyadi, Espen Ore and David Robey. 7. Conferences Item 2: Conference 2002 Wilhelm Ott gave a brief presentation on the state of the arrangements to date. By the previous Wednesday evening there were 31 registrations, 15 of which were non-members. Wilhelm has also been able to obtain a grant of Ä 12 000 from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and is using this to keep the conference fees as low as possible. He also presented the conference bag and showed the Committee the current state of the book of abstracts. David Robey gave an account of the state of the programme. There will be 8 sessions and each session has 3 parallel sessions. Many papers were accepted as posters and there will be more than 20 posters altogether. A separate session has been reserved for these. Poster presenters have been offered the possibility to give an oral presentation of their poster during this poster session. David also noted that John Bradley has made a significant contribution to the conference and the associations in making a database, which will be usable at subsequent conferences also. David Robey also wanted to flag the reviewing process. He said that he was not very confident about it. At present there were three reviewers for each paper and in many cases their reviews were very different. He suggested that the list of reviewers should be reviewed; at present it is rather long and there is scope to cut it down since each reviewer was given an average of only two papers to review. The Committee expressed its appreciation to Wilhelm Ott and his colleagues at Tübingen and to David Robey and the Programme Committee for all their efforts towards the conference. David Robey took up the issue of an Introduction to the book of abstracts. His idea was that the outcome of the road map meeting could possibly feed into the Introduction. Marilyn Deegan continued with the issue of the conference publication. She wondered whether people should be asked again to bring electronic copies of their papers to the conference and the Committee agreed that this was a good idea. These papers would be submitted for consideration; the accepted authors would then get comments from the reviewers and have a chance to revise their papers before publication. Marilyn also mentioned the possibility of a fifth issue of LLC in conference years, since there are usually many good submissions and she felt that it would not be nice to have to turn down many good papers. It was agreed that when the submissions come in a small committee of people
will review the papers again; this will consist of Programme Committee members
and others, as needed.
Apologies for absence were received from Antonio Zampolli, Thomas Rommel and
Michael Sperberg-McQueen. The Minutes of the Committee meeting in June were adopted. It was agreed that the question of John Burrows and honorary membership and the issue of IQLA should be discussed under item 11, Any other business. 3. Chair's report The Chair noted that the Association website is more up-to-date now and is looking much better than previously. He will be mailing an update to members soon and at the same time draw their attention to the Annual General Meeting and the updated website. In conjunction with this it was noted that we still need to try and make an email list of our members. Marilyn Deegan said that the new Association leaflet will have an updated insert with current prices for the journal and a slot for the subscriber's email address. Harold Short and John Lavagnino have discussed the conference protocol and Harold will discuss it with John Unsworth, the new Chair of ACH, on his next visit to Virginia, which is to take place shortly. They will then talk to this year's Programme Committee and come up with suggestions for revisions to the protocol. The Chair noted that all members of the Committee are working under great
time pressures. He appreciates the work put in by everyone for Association
matters, but said that we must be conscious of the workloads on everyone. This
has meant that some of the things that we intended to complete by the mid-year
Committee meeting simply haven't been done. The Secretary noted that although a lot of work had been done on the website some things were still missing from it and she would try to chase people up with regard to those. She also asked the Committee members for feedback re the website and any suggestions for improvement. The Secretary then noted that we do not get any figures on membership from
OUP until the summer and therefore the membership update will be given at the
next Committee meeting. Marilyn Deegan said that she had received a membership
list from OUP and would send it to the Secretary, who will keep up a list,
including email addresses. It was also noted that it would be good to get the
expenses claim form up on the web. The Treasurer began by stating that we have £83 000 in our various accounts so our finances continue to be very healthy. She said that she wanted a note of projected costs for the next year during all the discussions at this meeting, i.e. whenever a proposal is discussed, the expected costs should also be given. The Treasurer is investigating the possibility of getting a debit card for the Association, which would greatly facilitate the payment of expenses during meetings, etc. It was agreed that this was a good idea and should be pursued. 6. Communications from the Association 1) Journal Marilyn Deegan noted that the former Editor that she had dealt with in OUP has now moved to Blackwell's and has approached her with the suggestion that LLC move to Blackwell's. It was agreed that although we have no real need to move, Marilyn and one or more of the Officers should talk to Blackwell's and see what they can offer. At least we could then go back to OUP and see whether they would be willing to put some more effort into our membership drive. Marilyn noted that the editorial database that she has set up is working very well. The Reviews Editors are working very well. There will also be a conference report by Melissa Terras published in the journal (1500-2000 words) and a longer version of it (5000 words), which could go up on the website. It was agreed that a conference report is a good thing. Harold Short suggested that for this year's conference we connect it to the Road Map meeting. Edward van Houtte, Simon Horobin and Melissa Terras are putting together a young scholar's issue of the journal. Marilyn Deegan said she would need reviewers for this. It would be more of a mentoring process, though. She will get in touch with Committee members when the submissions have arrived. In conjunction with this there was some discussion on the possibility of a graduate track at the conference and it was agreed that in the first instance Harold Short should talk to John Unsworth about this. There was also some discussion on how we could support young scholars. Marilyn Deegan also said that as of volume 17.1 of the journal the Editorial Board will include the Committee, as was agreed earlier. She suggested that regional and linguistic representation be discussed under item 9 on the agenda. Marilyn also noted that she has encouraged electronic submissions to the journal and will set up a web submissions system. 2) Humanist and 3) Computing in the Humanities Working Papers (CHWP) Harold Short noted that these offer two additional ways of disseminating material in our field. We haven't made much use of CHWP so far but we could think of ways of developing it in the context of the changing ways of academic publishing. 4) Web site This item had already been discussed. 5) ALLC Archives John Dawson and Lou Burnard both noted that they have more things for the Archive and will send them to King's. 7. Conferences 1) 2001 The papers from this conference will be published in CHum. 2) 2002 This was already discussed. 3) Road Map meeting The only question that arose here was the question of whether we want a Road Map publication. It was agreed that this would be discussed at the next Committee meeting. 4) 2003 Harold Short noted that appointments to the Programme Committee need to be made early because the conference will be in Georgia in May. Programme Committee members should be appointed before we leave Pisa. 5) 2004 Harold Short said that he had heard two informal offers for this conference. Jean Anderson conveyed Fiona Tweedie's greeting to the Committee. She cannot come to the Tübingen conference, but will try to come to Georgia. Everyone was reminded that we have offered to pay all expenses for one conference to Fiona in recognition of her unpaid work as a Reviews Editor over a number of years. 6) Conference protocol This was already discussed. 8.
Association Initiatives Lou Burnard reported that the Consortium has now been established and that he is optimistic about its work. The TEI guidelines for XML compatibility are at the printers at present and will be out shortly. The Council has met and set up two workgroups, one on character sets and the other on hypertext techniques. The Consortium has a substantial number of members but does need more. In particular, it is lacking in members in Europe. Marilyn Deegan suggested that there should be a 500-1000 word report in the Reviews and Reports section of the journal and a one-page advert for the Guidelines. It was also noted that the TEI website has been substantially updated. 2) Busa Award Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen reported that the final call for nominations will go out to both LLC and CHum and that she has prepared a flyer which Wilhelm Ott has graciously consented to put into the conference pack for Tübingen. 3) Bursaries There were 4 applications for bursaries. Jean Anderson will discuss the applications with the ALLC members of the Programme Committee and then decide how to proceed in the matter. 4) Workshops, 5) Student prize, 6) Project support No one objected to what was on the website regarding these and it was decided that Harold Short will go ahead with publicising these. Adverts will be put in the journal and on Humanist. 7) Humanities education (ACOHUM and CHIME) Elisabeth Burr presented CHIME, the new European network of excellence that is aiming for a European Master's degree curriculum. The acronym comes from Computers and Humanities In a Multilingual Europe. The aim is for a European undergraduate and postgraduate programme taught across Europe in different languages, i.e. within a virtual university. CHIME has a website and it was agreed that there should be a link to it from the Association website.
8. New Initiatives 1) Multilingual coverage We should be thinking of ways to try and keep the dwindling membership in the naturally large communities, e.g. France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. Elisabeth Burr took up the idea of multilingual coverage. A discussion ensued on the possibility of publishing in other languages of the Association. It was agreed that we should give some thought to this and perhaps continue the discussion over email. It was decided that Espen Ore would moderate the discussion on this topic. 2) Digital library developments 3) Cultural heritage: institutions and projects The European Union is keen to fund cultural heritage projects and we should try and take advantage of this. John Dawson mentioned that in Cambridge there is now a big cultural heritage project on nearly extinct languages. 4) Accreditation Harold Short noted that particularly if the CHIME network is successful, we might really want to take a much more active part in this. 9. Committee Meetings It was decided that the next mid-year Committee meeting must be held by the end of December, since the 2003 conference is already in May. 10. Other business The issue of inviting John Burrows to honorary membership was discussed. It was agreed that all recipients of the Busa Award should be invited to honorary membership. It was agreed that Harold Short and Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen would draft a letter to John Burrows inviting him to honorary membership of the Association. The issue of the International Quantitative Linguistics Association was discussed. It was agreed that Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen should draft some proposal concerning them and our conferences and send it to all Committee members before the next meeting in Tübingen. The Chair closed the meeting at 12.40 |
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