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Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing Committee
Minutes of Committee meeting, December 2000
Committee Meeting of the Association for Literary and
Linguistic Computing held at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, 15-17 December
2000
The meeting began at 9.15 a.m. on Saturday, broke up for lunch between 12 a.m. and 1 p.m. and finished at 6 p.m. The meeting continued on Sunday at 9.15 a.m. with item 17.
Present: Harold Short, Jean Anderson, Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen, Thomas Rommel, Laszlo Hunyadi, Antonio Zampolli, David Robey, John Dawson and Elisabeth Burr.
1. Attendance
Apologies were received from Marilyn Deegan, Stuart Lee, Paul Fortier, Lou Burnard, Michael Sperberg-McQueen and David Holmes.
The Committee sends its best wishes for a speedy recovery to Paul Fortier.
2. Minutes and matters arising
Re the minutes of the previous meeting, the following corrections were made.
Item 6: To be rewritten as 'Antonio Zampolli was confirmed as President for a further 3 years.
Elisabeth Burr was co-opted for a further year.'
The minutes were accepted as a true record, with the above corrections
Matters arising: There were no matters arising.
3. Chair’s report
The Chair noted that the conference in Glasgow went extremely well and wished to extend the Committee’s thanks to Jean Anderson and her team and the programme committee.
The Chair noted the support he’s getting from the Treasurer and the Secretary. This is an exciting time for the Association and many new ideas are to be put into practice.
4. Secretary’s report
The Secretary noted that we are now getting membership lists from OUP. They have also agreed to organize
ALLC subscriptions by direct debit. The Secretary also noted that new material has been put up on the website, specifically some gaps have been filled. However, some information is still missing and the Secretary asked all members of the Committee to provide any material that they had or addresses that they knew of where such material could be obtained, particularly with respect to information on honorary members.
5. Treasurer’s report
The Treasurer reported that money has not yet been moved to a higher interest account but discussions have been held with the accountant. She has inspected the accounts and has saved us money.
The income per annum from OUP is about 15 000 pounds.
6. Communications from the Association
Journal: We will return to this after coffee.
Web site: There is a postgraduate at King’s who will now put up web pages that the Secretary has sent. It was also discussed and decided that the information that has arisen out of the ACO*Hum project should be put up on the Association web site.
Conference abstracts and attendance database: It was decided that we wish to have abstracts from previous conferences and arising out of that an index of presenters and an index on topics on the website. Materials on the web sites of host institutions should stay there. If an institution wishes to stop they should notify us and we will put it up. Information from ALL past conferences should be put up.
Archives: The archivist at King’s has started to sort out the materials but we need to sort out what exactly we want. Bulletins and conferences are a high priority. There are materials still in Oxford and a dozen or so boxes at Cambridge. Susan Hockey also has some materials she wishes to contribute. These will all be incorporated. It was decided that we will provide a list of what we have so that it can be supplemented by what others might have.
Publicity: Louise Heininck has been ill and thus the progress on the flyer has not been as expected. It will begin in January. The journal is not in the citation index. Marilyn Deegan was going to look into this. We will follow this up. Sponsorship for the web site was raised.
7. Text Encoding Initiative
Antonio Zampolli reported the following: During the first year the consortium was not very active, but now the incorporation is ready and all mechanisms are in place. Lawyers from Bergen, Oxford and Virginia have checked everything. The by-laws have been prepared and the members will be the above and Brown. A board of directors has been agreed. John Unsworth will be chair. A tentative budget has been produced. TEI should be changed to include XML and secondly it should provide software. The membership fees were discussed and it was suggested that the consortium should publish the rates and conditions it has applied to its members.
The Committee gives its endorsement to the work of the transition team. This Committee is happy to waive the one-year meeting. The Committee also wishes to record its thanks to Antonio Zampolli for all his work. It also records its appreciation of the work of the transition team and wishes the Consortium well.
Bergen will set up a ‘European office’; they will be the treasurers. The editors will be Lou Burnard and Steve deRose.
Item 6a the journal: The Committee notes with regret that Stuart Lee and Fiona Tweedie are stepping down. The Committee wishes to thank them for their hard work and wishes them well.
Marilyn has decided to ask Edward Vanhoutte and Simon Horobin to replace Fiona as reviews editors. It was suggested that they might like to have an email address such as reviews@allc.org which would be forwarded to both of them.
The Committee felt that it would be a good idea to review resources produced by projects and individuals if they are felt to be useful and valuable resources. It was also noted that electronic resources that have not been submitted for review should be confirmed first, ie that they agree to being reviewed.
The benefit of regional editors is clear. The suggestion was that these people be called the editorial board and their regions not be flagged in the journal, however they should be advised of what their responsibilities are, eg what region they are responsible for. We would like to include a membership drive role also. These people should be asked to report to the committee in some form and could also be asked to suggest ways of promoting the association in their region and spending money to that end. The Committee encourages Marilyn Deegan to proceed along these lines, but the list should be expanded to include more regions.
The committee wishes to express its appreciation to Marilyn for her excellent work.
The Committee will invite Fiona to attend the Tübingen conference as our guest.
8. ACO*Hum project
The fourth year project is nearing its conclusion. Officially the project finished at the end of October. The work group has created a five-part resource: a database of courses that involve computing in humanities in higher education; guidelines to good practice; training and retraining; student awareness; recommendations. The intention is that all these are incremental. These should go live on Monday. The suggestion was also made that this be used as a base for information to be placed on the association website. Perhaps we could develop a teaching and research section of the website.
A discussion ensued on what we wish to do with the website in the long run. The general feeling was that this kind of activity should be supported.
Money for further work at Oxford: up to 5000 pounds was agreed upon.
Money for work at King’s: up to 8000 pounds was agreed upon.
9. Conference 2001
It seems to be going extremely well. The bursary applications will be forwarded to the PC members. Registration should be as soon as possible.
10. Busa Award
The committee is eager to hear the decision.
11. Funding and other initiatives – introduction and general discussion
David Robey and Antonio Zampolli and Thomas Rommel will discuss: conference 2002, association constitution and projects.
Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen, Elisabeth Burr and Jean Anderson will discuss: workshop and postgrad competition; some kind of protocol for workshops is urgently needed; the key characteristics of the postgrad competition should be spelt out.
Harold Short, John Dawson and Laszlo Hunyadi will discuss: bursaries, conference protocol, special projects; we need to identify the areas where the protocol is out of step with current practice; the bursary scheme seems to be working reasonably well, but flexibility should be built into the scheme, ie if more than 5 equally deserving ones, then the programme committee members should submit the suggestion to the Committee.
A suggestion was made that we could plan to have a few people presenting what they perceive to be the road ahead for humanities computing and then draft a document from it. This would help to focus the conference more clearly and it would encourage inviting representatives from funding agencies to talk to researchers. We could also discuss having more invited speakers at our conferences.
A suggestion was made that the following items be included in a discussion on the road ahead: a database of work in progress, perhaps more methodological than previously; a bibliographical database; a survey of the field (a road map).
Sunday, 17 December: items 12-18 were discussed in the order that follows.
17. Conference protocol
The version we have has been in operation since 1987. Harold Short will write up the results of the discussions and then send it around to the Committee members before sending it to Allen Renear.
Guidelines for editors of special issues should not be in the protocol – it is a journal issue rather than an association issue. Clarity is needed on the role of the journal editor with respect to the special issue.
Procedure for publication: Anyone who would like to have their paper considered for publication, should bring the paper to the conference. Authors should, however, have the right to make revisions in the light of the feedback from the conference.
The special sessions section needs to be rewritten.
The plenary speaker section also needs to be rewritten.
Papers by invited speakers are the responsibility of the local organizers in consultation with and subject to the prior approval of the programme committee. Other plenary papers are up to the programme committee.
In section 7 of the Constitution b) and c) sections should be switched around.
Poster sessions for the conference should be reviewed along with everything else.
Call for papers (section 11) should emphasise that it is the responsibility of the programme committee.
12. Workshop programme
Marilyn Deegan has written a draft protocol for the workshop programme based on discussions between herself, Espen Ore and Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen. It was discussed by Elisabeth Burr, Jean Anderson and Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen on the Saturday and they felt that Marilyn’s proposal could be accepted as is. The guidelines for workshop presenters should be drafted by those who gave the first workshop. The Committee agreed.
14. Postgraduate competition
Jean Anderson reported on the discussions that Elisabeth Burr, Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen and she had had on Saturday. It was agreed that Jean will write up the results of those discussions, including the Committee’s input, and will present it to the Committee.
16. Conference 2002
The topic of the conference will be new methods and approaches in computing in the humanities, but papers on other subjects will not be excluded; there will be no difference in quality between papers and posters, all are refereed; space should be allowed in the programme for unrefereed demonstrations; the focus should be on text, but this must be discussed with ACH; a report on issues that came up should be given at a final plenary session.
The road map meeting is to take place before the conference. This would involve 10 people or so, each of whom would be asked to prepare a paper and talk about where they saw the future in their particular field of computing in the humanities; the outcome of this would be presented at a plenary session at the 2002 conference. The meeting would be a cost to the association, there would be some need to fund an initial planning meeting; estimated total costs 5-6000 pounds. This initial meeting would have to be in late 2001 or early 2002.
It was agreed that Harold Short, David Robey and Antonio Zampolli will discuss the matter and present a concrete suggestion with costs to the Committee by email, for the Committee to make a decision on.
Call for papers: The Committee felt that we should not be exclusive, but the theme should be something looking towards the future, so it should include the things we currently say but emphasize that we are particularly interested in receiving papers on new advancements and the future.
The Committee invited David Robey to Chair the Programme Committee for the conference in Tübingen 2002 and he accepted.
The Committee agreed that we should invite representatives from funding agencies to the conference. It was also agreed that this should be done at the 2002 conference since from the point of view of the ALLC members, the funding agencies concerned should have a strongly European point of view. Harold Short will discuss this with Allen Renear as soon as possible and should he be agreeable it will be left up to the Programme Chair to organize it jointly with the Chairs of the two associations and the local organizer.
(Items 13, 15 and 18 were left to be discussed at the following meeting.)
19. Other business
There was no other business.
The meeting finished at 11.15 on Sunday.
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