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| Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing Committee Minutes of the ALLC Committee Meeting held at the University of Bremen, Germany on December 14th - 15th, 2002 Present: Harold Short, Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen, Jean Anderson, Elisabeth Burr, Paul Fortier, Laszlo Hunyadi, Espen Ore, Thomas Rommel The Chair opened the meeting at 11.25 by welcoming everyone to the meeting and thanking Thomas Rommel for organizing this meeting and for his hospitality. 1. Attendance Apologies for absence were received from Antonio Zampolli, Lou Burnard, John Dawson, Marilyn Deegan, David Robey, and Michael Sperberg-McQueen. Antonio Zampolli is not well and the Committee sends its best wishes for his speedy recovery. The timetable of the meeting over the following two days was discussed and agreed upon. 2. Minutes and matters arising The minutes of the previous meeting were accepted as an accurate record of the meeting. With respect to Matters arising, the Chair reported that work on the Association archives has resumed at King's. He has received a list of items and it need to be decided which of the said items should be kept and which not. The remaining 30 boxes that are with John Dawson will be moved next week from Cambridge to King's and Harold Short will speak to Lou Burnard regarding the material he has. With respect to the student prize, the Chair reported that he had spoken to Marilyn Deegan and Edward Vanhoutte about the possibility of offering those contributing to the special issue of LLC (put together by Edward Vanhoutte and Simon Horobin) the possibility of applying for the student prize. With respect to multilinguality, the Chair noted that this has not yet been discussed but we should discuss it in the context of other issues on the agenda today. Co-opted members (7): Discussions in Tübingen suggested that no one person seemed to stand out. Problems with the website (8.4): Paul Vetch has investigated how we might overcome this. Road Map Meeting (9.3): David Robey and Harold Short have discussed this and thought that it needed to be discussed at this meeting. David Robey does not feel that the range and quality of the submissions to the proceedings justifies calling it "New Directions". Programme Committee 2003 (9.4): Simon Horobin agreed. Workshops (10.4): A submission was made by Edward Vanhoutte and a colleague. There was, however, a bug in the submission system. The submission should be available by the end of the meeting. Links to other conferences (13): We could put some up, but we need to decide what to do. 3. Chair's report Most of the things the Chair has been involved in have been related to the issues we need to discuss under item 9, so we will return to those later. The issue of the journal is also important and we will return to that later. The Chair pointed out that we now have the opportunity to go in a variety of directions and we need to consider what we can do. 4. Secretary's report The Secretary reported on the updates on the website. Regarding membership, she pointed out that we do need to know more about our membership, especially in view of the items we need to discuss later today. We definitely need a list and a regular mechanism for obtaining an update of that list. She will work on it. 5. Treasurer's report The treasurer reported that finances are in a better shape than ever.
We have 6. Communications of the Association 1) Journal The Editor's report notes that the journal has been running well, but there have been some problems with the OUP Editor. 2) Humanist Humanist continues to thrive. Willard is frustrated that many people who know things are too busy to respond to it. It does take quite a lot of time to stay in touch with it. 3) Computing in the Humanities Working Papers (CHWP) It is there but not very active. We need to think about whether we need it and in what format. 4) Web site The Secretary already reported on this. Espen Ore also pointed out that the linking problem means that you could not reference a page inside the site. 5) ALLC Archives One of the key electronic materials we could archive is al the electronic material related to conferences, as is the written material related to our conferences.
The committee broke for lunch at 12.40 and reconvened at 14.15. 7. Conferences 1) 2002 and Road Map Meeting outcome It was already noted that the 2002 conference proceedings are on the normal schedule. The Road Map Meeting definitely left us with a need for a further meeting. The publication that was discussed would be a concrete outcome. Laszlo Hunuyadi thought the meeting a good event and the effort put into t worthwhile. He also thought we could continue both the work and a review of what is happening in our field. Espen Ore pointed out that the ACOHum book gives us a good basis for this. Perhaps we also need to recognize that there may be a reason for there not being any really new directions. Jean Anderson noted that that at present our field is not really about new technologies and new directions but more about building bridges and paths, about drawing new people in. Harold Short noted that John Unsworth is compiling a book with Blackwell, a Humanities Computing Companion, which is relevant to whatever we might want to produce; John, in turn, is interested in anything that we might do. Antonio Zampolli has money for the Road Map publication. We need to see what the Digital Companion is like. Perhaps we would actually need more time to do a good job. Antonio did one on Language Technologies and Harold promised to send the Committee the bibliographic details on it. Perhaps our contribution could be organised around methods and tools rather than subjects. A lengthy discussion ensued and the outcome was that we all need to reflect on this and return to the discussion in Georgia. We need to discuss what sort of publication we might want to have: a digital publication? And a separate paper publication? 2) 2003 We might actually want to have a longer discussion and arrive earlier (eg the day before IQLA). The Secretary will sound people out by email. The Chair will write a letter to Committee members regarding the necessity of being at the conference and send it out next week. 3) 2004 We are well ahead of schedule on this since we have a Programme Committee Chair and the ALLC members. At our meeting in Finland we decided we wanted to do things to support the conference. Firstly, we want to address the question of computing in multilingual humanities, perhaps also by having a Unicode workshop. A topic for the conference could be Computing and the multicultural and multilingual heritage. Secondly, we want to address the question of translation, including machine translation and parallel corpora. There are EU programmes geared towards these issues. To support the Tübingen conference we had the Pisa Road Map Meeting. Perhaps at the December meeting next year we could have a major part of the agenda on the 2004 conference. Jan-Gunnar Tingsell should be invited to both committee meetings and funded to the mid-year meeting in Hungary. 4) Conference Protocols: working party The Chair noted that we need to talk about this in the context of wider issues, so we should return to it later. At this point we returned to the previous item, ie conference 2004. It was decided that by the conference in Georgia we should know the ACH members on the Programme Committee, the theme of the conference, and the keynote speaker. It was also discussed that we should have a speaker from the EU with a reception and a keynote speech. 8. Association Initiatives 1. TEI Harold Short attended a Board meeting in Chicago in October. The main problem is still the fact that there are not enough subscriptions. The main problem is the small amount of European subscriptions. The rates are $5000 for a University, $500 for a project and $50 for individuals. The suggestion was made that individual members could get the guidelines on CD rom. We could think of the projects that we have and push them to join at the project level. Espen Ore pointed out that a lot of the work on the translations of the TEI has been done on TEI Lite. The coffee break began at 13.45 and the meeting resumed at 4.05. 2. Busa Award Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen reported that the Busa Committee had not discussed the proposals yet, but were due to do so in the new year. 3. Bursaries The Treasurer reported that there was only one application for a bursary so far, but the deadline is the end of January, so hopefully there will be other applications. 4. Workshops Edward Vanhoutte proposes two multi-day workshops in humanities computing with special training in text encoding and text editing, to be held at Rhodes University in Grahamstown and the University of the Western Cape. Hopefully we should get more details before the end of this meeting. It was also put forward that we should try and have a workshop at the next Clip meeting in Florence. 5. Student Prize This item was already discussed. 6) Project Support There have been no applications. 7) Humanities Education (ACOHUM and CHIME) CliP (Computers, Literature and Philology) started in 1998. Elisabeth reported on Clip and at Duisburg (2001) the idea came up that we should form a European network of Excellence. This didn't get funded in the 5th framework. A new application will be made for the 6th framework, IST, Information Society Technology. The proposal must be submitted in April next year. The project has partners from all over Europe. The focus of CliP has been Romance philology but it has now expanded. The Executives reported that they had offered CliP 3 bursaries of €500 + 1 year subscription to Literary and Linguistic Computing each, aimed at young scholars. The organizing committee awarded them to the 3 students with the highest ratings for their papers. Harold Short presented them. The Committee agreed that this had been a good idea. With EU funding CliP was able to organise simultaneous interpretation between Spanish and English. It was suggested tat the ALLC should take an active role in CliP. A lengthy discussion ensued on what we can and do should do in practical terms to support a multicultural and multilingual agenda. 9. New Initiatives 1) ADHOC working party The Chair presented the background for this. The Document Framework
paper outlines the headings under which discussions were held. This is
a good opportunity for the Association to be looking ahead and think about
how to take forward the activities that it is interested in. membership
is falling. Now might be a good time to have a broader humanities computing
grouping. We should build on what we have and emphasize the European aspect
of the ALLC. We could look towards some kind of umbrella organization
with as Australian chapter, a European chapter, a Japanese chapter, etc. One of the reasons why the ALLC has a very good deal with the publishers is that we own the journal and we get a good deal on it. ACH do not own their journal and have no role in the appointment of the Editor; they get 15% of individual subscriptions and that is it. John Unsworth feels strongly that the link with Kluwer has to be broken. This could mean that energy could go towards an electronic publication. We could think about having an annual international conference that could go outside Europe/North America. We also need to think about how we could link the conferences of related associations to our activities and initiatives. It is clear that all of this needs a lot of thinking in terms of multilingualism. We also need to look at the document from Blackwells and the questions and replies that it contains. By lunchtime tomorrow we need to decide whether we want to take this any further. The meeting ended at 17.15 and reconvened on the 15th at 9.00 am. The meeting began with a lengthy discussion on the Blackwell material. It was agreed that we would continue discussions with Blackwell and that we would leave it to Marilyn Deegan as to when to informally notify OUP about such discussions. Everyone will visit the Blackwell site and look at the web publication and review the OUP sites. Everyone will read the documents and think about the issues in detail. It was also agreed that we will discuss this further in Georgia. It was agreed that the Officers and Marilyn will negotiate with Blackwell informally and formally, as necessary. The Officers will take steps to check up on the financial state of the companies and the legal background. The Committee wished to express its thanks to Susan and Martin Hockey for their invaluable advice on the issue. The Chair returned to the issue of workshops. A workshop was proposed for August-September for 20-30 participants; it would include topics such as manuscripts, digital imaging, electronic editing, and markup. It was agreed that this workshop should go on. It was also agreed that Harold should coordinate this. [The Chair then returned to item 9.1] It is clear that the financial and organizational issues are the most tricky and difficult ones. The question is really what we want to achieve. 2) Multilingual coverage Multicultural and multilingual issues were discussed. It was agreed that we could have our web pages and our calls for papers in at least English, French, German and Spanish. The Secretary will get estimates of the cost of getting the web pages translated and deal with the matter. It was also agreed that the call for papers for 2004 could be in other languages than English. The conference website should also be in the language of the hosting organisation. The Programme Committee should discuss the issue of the Call for Papers in other languages. 3) Digital library developments These issues had been discussed in other contexts and time ran out to discuss them further. 10. Any other business The idea was put forward that we might have an additional Committee meeting in march in Oulu to discuss Chime matters and to prepare for the bid. The Committee expressed its thanks to Thomas Rommel for his hospitality. The meeting finished at noon. |
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