Full Conference Program

COCH/COSH

Full Program for the Annual Meeting of COCH/COSH at the 2000 Congress of the Social Sciences and the Humanities, May 24-25, 2000 University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada.
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WEDNESDAY,
MAY 24
MERCREDI
24 MAI

Session 1.
9:15-10:30 am
Location:
Humanites Centre 2-29
The Future of the Arts and Humanities Computing Centre
Part I
Chair: R.G. Siemens (Malaspina U-C)
Computing centres serving the Arts and Humanities have seen notable change in recent years, and face a promise of continued evolution -- an evolution concurrent with several influential forces, chief among them the changing perceptions of what constitutes computing in Arts and Humanities disciplines. The several papers making up this panel address both the past and the future of the Arts and Humanities Computing Centre; each speaker will discuss their centre, its history and institutional role, and issues central to its projected future.

Introduction
Ian Lancashire (U Toronto)

Embracing Confusion: The Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick
Alan Burk, Electronic Text Centre (U New Brunswick)

The Text Centre, officially launched in 1996, was born out of part-time labour and a series of prototype projects, including the Web-publishing of an SGML (Text Encoding Initiative) version of an 18th century loyalist diary, searchable full-text back files of a major Provincial newspaper, an electronic scholarly journal, and a Maliseet-Passamaquoddy / English Dictionary. Presently, the Centre is working on a wide range of initiatives in line with its mission to support the University community in the creation, maintenance, and use of electronic texts and images in accordance with publishing standards and best practices.

In the course of this presentation, I will briefly describe three current Text Centre initiatives. First, the Centre is in the process of imaging and Web-publishing one of Canada's major loyalist manuscript collections, the Winslow Papers, resulting in upwards of 16,000 images. For the project, the Centre has developed an extended multi-layered Dublin Core metadata schema to track the archived TIFF images saved to CD and for the purposes of making their JPEG counterparts Web searchable.. Second, the Centre, working with researchers in the United States and Australia, has recently completed a contract with Industry Canada to research and develop metadata schemas to describe and manage a variety of multimedia objects -- video, still image, and audio. The Centre is now looking at building a prototype delivery system along with the necessary metadata to describe some 250 sample multimedia objects. Third, in association with Chadwyck-Healey and a distinguished scholarly board, the Centre is preparing a database of Canadian poetry texts encoded to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines and also to Chadwyck-Healey specifications for inclusion within their LION database. This project, in its first phase, will include the works of approximately 200 poets from the 18th, 19th and early 20h centuries.

In conclusion, I will offer some thoughts on possible future roles for the Centre.

From Language Centre to Humanities Computing: A Natural Evolution
Peter Liddell, Language Centre (U Victoria)

Having its roots in the cognitive/natural approach dichotomies of language learning in the 80s, the UVic Language Centre was well-placed to take advantage of a number of innovations in the 90s. Supporting and developing a wide spectrum of projects -- stand-alone, CD- and web-based -- has led to a number of options. In early 2000 a process was initiated to acknowledge this potential, by broadening the mandate of the Centre. The new role will enable the Faculty to meet its computing needs better, in the spirit of the recently revised Faculty Plan, and in accord with the University's 5-year plan for IT, which is to be released for discussion in February/March 2000.

Session 2.
10:45 am -12:15 pm
Location:
Humanites Centre 2-29
The Future of the Arts and Humanities Computing Centre
Part II
Chair: R.G. Siemens (Malaspina U-C)
Supporting Multimedia in the Humanities
Geoffrey Rockwell, Humanities Computing Centre (McMaster U)

In this paper I will discuss the history of the Humanities Computing Centre at McMaster University and discuss the changes brought about by having to support a multimedia program. The Centre grew out of traditional audio labs and its activities in the late 1980s and early 1990s were focused on developing computer based language instruction and providing facilities for students to access language resources. In the mid 1990s we had to adapt to the growing student use of e-mail and the WWW for entertainment and research. As we started introducing courses in humanities computing and multimedia we also had to expand the labs to include facilities that would support student multimedia development. This has changed the character of the facilities from a delivery environment to a more complex creation environment with MIDI keyboards, CD-burners, scanners, video capture facilities and more. This evolution has been accelerated by the introduction this year of a Combined Honours in Multimedia program that will eventually have 200 concurrent students. In this paper I will try to make the case that humanities computing centres should provide an environment where students can build multimedia not just use it, and discuss the resources and staff needed to support such an environment.

Putting Teaching before Technology: A Successful Arts Technology Centre at Alberta
Terry Butler, Technologies for Learning Centre (U Alberta)

The Arts TLC (Technologies for Learning Centre) has been in operation since November 1997. Its mandate is to provide pedagogical and technological support to a potential clientele of 600 teaching staff members in the Faculty of Arts (the University of Alberta's largest academic unit).

Our mandate is to:

assist departments and the Faculty of Arts with general technology issues

guide, advise, and assist teachers in accessing appropriate technology for their teaching

cultivate and develop the knowledge and skills of faculty, staff, and students with respect to technology and teaching

provide input to policy decisions

Our staff consists of a Director, and Instructional Technology Specialist, a part-time Office Administrator, and a cadre of student mentors who provide direct support to teaching staff.
The presentation will share strategies which have been found to be successful for situating a technology centre in the academic organization. It will also explain how we are moving from a service model based upon "early adopters" to one in which

From South of the Border to North: Transitions in Humanities Computing
Scott Gerrity, Language Centre (U Victoria)

In this paper I explore current transitions at the University of Victoria Language Centre as it continues to expand beyond its languages support mission to embrace projects in the large and ever evolving field of humanities computing. These transitions have as their impetus both the quite practical (and administrative) need to reach out to more disciplines in the humanities (a growing trend at many language computing centres), and the less practical but equally important need to anticipate and support--or simply make available--feasible options for future research in humanities computing. Partly at issue is the changing nature of computer driven learning centres and staying current with state-of-the-art possibilities, and opening these possibilities to faculty members. To represent these changes, The Language Centre plans to rename itself soon to include "Humanities" as part of its title. The question of the future of the humanities computing centre is dealt with primarily on a local level; but global implications arise as well, especially in the area of institutionalized support for faculty and staff projects. Discussions in the Language Centre have focused on the need to expand our research and development core, due to an overload of projects and support needs; to investigate options for student coursework in humanities computing; to develop closer ties with the university library and its database access and use; to update technology (analog to digital audio, for example) in our CALL facility; and to continue to expand in the direction of web-based materials vs. stand-alone, in order to offer programs with more global access and free up valuable space in a very busy CALL facility.

Concurrent with the discussion of transitions in the Language Centre, I explore the challenges I face personally moving from instructing languages and literature, and directing a CALL facility at a smaller, predominantly "teaching" university in Washington State to coordinating a major language centre on the cusp of expanding its computing mandate. Face to face with the question of the future of humanities computing (literally, as the main topic for presentation at The Language Centre Coordinator position interview), I have had to change roles and significantly broaden my perspective, from what might be called qualified user to qualified producer. Many of my individual transitions coincide with what is currently happening at the University of Victoria Language Centre, and at other language centres as well.

Session 3:
2:00-3:45 pm
Location:
Humanites Centre 2-29
Software for the Classroom
Chair: Joanne Buckley (McMaster U)
Hybrid Online Courses & Strategies for Collaboration
Marshal Soules (Malaspina U-C)

See abstract at http://www.mala.bc.ca/~soules/hybrid.htm

Half-Baked Software Inc.: Commercializing Humanities Software Ethically
Martin Holmes (U of Victoria)

Over the last two years, the University of Victoria Language Centre Research and Development team has developed a piece of software called Hot Potatoes, which is primarily intended for creating Web-based interactive exercises for language teaching. Released as freeware to the academic community, Hot Potatoes quickly became successful, and now has many thousands of users in over 100 countries world-wide.

Along with this success came overtures from the business community regarding commercial use of the software, along with some pressure and encouragement from various quarters suggesting that it might be worthwhile to develop a business based on Hot Potatoes. The two principal developers, Stewart Arneil and Martin Holmes, approached the university's Innovation
and Development Corporation for advice, and with their help set up a company, Half-Baked Software Inc. The company is part-owned by the university, and its main purpose is to develop the commercial potential and spin-offs from Hot Potatoes. Some of the profits are channelled back into the university and the Language Centre to support further development; at the same time, the principals are able to make some money themselves, doing extra programming work, and running the company. In its first six months, Half-Baked Software turned over nearly $30,000 from contract programming work, sale of commercial licences for Hot Potatoes, and the release of a CD-ROM. Meanwhile, both Half-Baked Software and the university remain committed to keeping the basic version of Hot Potatoes free for non-commercial academic use.

This session will relate our experiences in setting up the company, explain our philosophy in keeping it small and firmly under our control (the "nanocorp" model), and discuss some of the successes and pitfalls we have encountered during the first year. The presentation may be useful to anyone who is considering small-scale commercial exploitation of software (or any other intellectual property) created at their institution. We will also discuss the differences between commercializing a Humanities project and the kind of science or engineering project that is more typically taken from the academic environment to the commercial market.

And ACTION!: Digital Video in the Humanities
Andrew McTavish (McMaster U)

It used to be that, to include digital video (DV) in scholarly multimedia, the only recourse for academics was to hire professionals, not necessarily because we had neither the skill to create DV nor the desire to learn it, but mainly because of cost. Producing DV has, until recently, been very expensive, and the audience for it limited by costly and resource-intensive delivery modes. But now, faster, more versatile, and less expensive technologies for the creation and delivery of DV are coming down the pipeline from professional to prosumer and consumer, meaning that we find ourselves in a more likely position to create and use DV in our research and instruction. The result is that new media technologies like DV are slowly being included as tools and topics of research and instruction in humanities computing.

For the most part, though, when scholars say "humanities omputing," they are generally referring to electronic texts and their technologies of production and delivery. It stands to reason that, since text is a core component of humanities scholarship--whether as the artefact under study or as published research--the prominent media type in humanities computing has been text. But as new technologies develop for the creation and delivery of multimedia documents, so too does scholarly interest in the digitization and application of multiple media types.

A general consequence of this expansion of interest is the need for scholars wishing to practice multimedia to learn new technical skills and develop new grammars of expression. Most humanities scholars are quite adeptat creating textual documents, and many employ visual images in their print and digital publications. But how good are we humanists at creating and including other rich-media elements such as DV? To compound matters, most of us work within an environment where text is the privileged media. Although humanities computing has been challenging assumptions about textual technologies in the humanities, the advent of DV might make us wonder how bringing visual technologies to instruction and research intersects with the terms of this challenge.

This paper explores the production of DV for humanities instruction. It uses the example of a digital lecture series being developed at McMaster University as a springboard to an examination of visual technologies within the primarily text-centred model of humanities instruction and research. The major parts of this paper are:

1) Description of Topics in Multimedia, Digital Lecture Series:
Topics in Multimedia is a digital lecture series being developed at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario for the instruction of multimedia in the humanities. The project is organized around a set of topics, each with a subset of mini-lectures comprised of digital video, graphics, and animation. This section will include a very short demonstration of Topics in Multimedia and form the practical basis for the more theoretical section that follows.

2) Analysis of the Qualities of DV: Every media type has its own qualities that make it better suited to some uses over others. Film and video, for instance, are essentially linear media, meaning that they do not easily allow for user-explorative reception in the same way that hypertext does. Yet, video makes it possible to create dynamic interactions between audio-visual elements, meaning that we can create densely layered relationships between visual and aural elements that is more difficult, if not impossible, with other media types. Place video within the context of a multimedia application, where we can include other media types and user interaction, and the possibilities for dynamic layering increase substantially.

3) Analysis of Visual Technologies in the Humanities: In this age of the sound byte and MTV, however, we need to ask whether and
how video techniques like short clips and fast-cutting can be used to teach in the humanities, where prolonged contemplation of artefacts is favoured over the short and fast. Indeed, does the inclusion of these visual techniques spell the continued demise of the humanities at the hand of a consumerist culture where surface and speed are promoted over depth and contemplation? Or, can we take advantage of the qualities of DV to create stimulating and effective learning environments that free graphic expression from the manacles of "consumerism, corruption, deception, and ethical failure" so frequently associated with the visual?[1]

One step to answering these questions necessarily involves interrogating the common assumption that the visual is somehow less worthy than the textual, an assumption often expressed in terms of a binary opposition between the "laterally associative" movement of visual technologies and the "vertically cumulative" movement of text.[2] A second step involves exploring and sharing techniques for the development and application of DV in the humanities. What kinds of information does DV lend itself to? Would it work as well for a course on the Victorian novel as it would for a course on multimedia? If DV is best-suited to short clips and fast cuts, how do we filter our information but simultaneously ensure depth? Probing these questions may encourage humanities scholars to build effective paradigms for
DV delivery that do not merely contribute to the ills of speed culture, but that ensure new visual technologies are employed to build intellectually stimulating educational applications.

Notes:
1. Stafford, Barbara Maria. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997, p. 5.
2. Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994, p. 122.

Accents yet unknown: Discussion and demonstration of a software package that allows students to 'block' a scene from a play, and submit it as an assignment.
Michael Best (U of Victoria)

"Scenario" is a cross-platform program that allows students of literature or theatre to "block" a scene from a play. Students create a series of "frames": for each they choose a section of the text, then select characters and props from menus, and drag them to appropriate positions on the stage. In the process, they are introduced to the important way that physical space in performance can illustrate or modify the basic written text. Each frame has a text window that allows for a detailed explanation of the choices that are being made, and there is a separate space for an overall summary of the project.

The resulting data is stored in a single text-only file that can be read by either the Macintosh or Windows versions of the software; the files can be sent by email as an attachment if the course is being offered online (as is the case with the courses on Shakespeare it was designed for). When the teacher reviews the sequence of frames, he or she chooses a different mode that provides another text window for individual comments on each frame; again there is space in the project summary for a summary evaluation.

At present, Scenario is geared specifically for "productions" of plays by Shakespeare on a stage based on the original Globe Theatre. The design of the program, however, is sufficiently generalized that in future other stages and other playwrights -- or completely different scenarios -- can be illustrated. Scenario is based on a freeware HyperCard program developed by Michael Best. It is being developed as a collaborative venture between the Internet Shakespeare Editions and the Humanities Computing and Media Centre at the University of Victoria, by programmers Martin Holmes and Stewart Arneil.

Orlando Project Open
house
4:00-6:00 pm
Location:
5th Floor, Humanities Centre
Presentation of the the Orlando Project
Patricia Clements, Project Director, and
Susan Fisher, Project Librarian

THURSDAY
MAY 25
JEUDI
25 MAI

Session 4.
9:15-10:30 am
Location:
Humanites Centre 2-29
Electronic Readings
Chair: Teresa Dobson (U of Alberta)
Hypertextual interference
Alice Van der Klei (U of Montreal)

The state of new technologies like hypertext modes must be questioned by disciplines such as literary studies. With hypertext, our references to the textual are in transition. In a "Deleuzian" way we are deterritorialising ourselves and trying to move towards the dream of a Text without limits. I wish to question if we are in a utopian project of the text?

First, my hypothesis asks whether hypertext is just the utopia of the text? The network of knowledge put forward in the hypertext mode; this storage of a memory in a fragmented and video-clip manner puts us in presence of a new way of thinking of the text as working in interference, but also as a way of preserving our reference marks and memories. With hypertexts and the WWW, it is interesting to observe how we may preserve a cultural heritage
through Net-browsing or like I would like to say: form a "cultural memory map on the Net".

Also, I would like to approach the translation and transition of textuality into the electronic medium through a view a community based on memory and souvenirs. Furthermore, I will try to look at what it means to be a "hypertextual reader" who must learn to observe and point out "mediological" mechanisms. This reader searches for traces, and thus installs an inheritance. If webbrowsers are creating their own "collective memory" as they interfere nowadays in their search for cultural souvenirs, I wish to show how "cultural recycling" on the Net is more an art of interferences than simply repeating a collective memory.

Anamnesis and Amnesia: The Cyberfeminist Archive in M.D.     Coverley's Hypertext Fiction
Carolyn Guertin (U of Alberta)

In our information age much discussion has been devoted to how the new literatures in electronic environments threaten the printed book. Hypertext fiction, I will argue, contrary to pervasive fears, is evolving on a model based not on the codex but on a form that embodies the spirit of the future: the archive. The archive, as defined by Jacques Derrida in _Archive Fever_, is born equally of the compulsion to remember and of fears of forgetting. As such the archive keeps one foot firmly in the past and another in the future, remembering in order to allow us to forget and forgetting in order to remember. It is the encyclopedic keeper of everything from public knowledge to the intensely personal. By its very nature, says Derrida, the archive inhabits the space between the public and the personal, and is born of the tension between the revolutionary and the conservative, between genealogy and history and between anamnesis (the inability to forget) and amnesia (the inability to remember). According to Derrida, these tensions are the function of the archive.

In feminist hands, particularly in M.D. Coverley's hypertext novel _Califia_, this notion of the archive is subsumed within the form of hypertext fiction to become a parody of its traditional self. In _Califia_ we are deluged with a wealth of information, narratives and characters in 800 multimedia screens, and notions of memory and forgetting are central to the text. The narratives are quests to recover lost secrets, buried connections and hidden treasures that have been concealed beneath the silt of time and lost to the ravages of Alzheimer's Disease. In _Califia_, the parodic impulse is contained in the effort to remember the details of the past in order to 'unforget' or practice anamnesis--that is, the past is not discarded and facts are not avoided, but instead these facts become departure points for a strategy of fiction that leaps forward out of the predetermination of written history into a new kind of vision and visual narrative.

_Califia_ is a literal archive, a container for all the facts known about three California families over five generations. The text fulfills the archival compulsion to remember. No fact is too small, insignificant or cryptic in the quest to recover the history of the family's search for gold. The information that is gathered, however, is three-pronged as presented by the text's three narrators: Augusta keeps facts, linear narrative and chronology; Calvin, the archivist, keeps and/or writes fictional speculation; Kaye compiles myths, legends and ephemeral arcana. The text comfortably encompasses all three types of archives without resolving or rationalizing the contradictions between the different forms of knowledge. But while _Califia_ fosters and documents the compulsion to remember, the engine that drives it is one of forgetfulness. As the sole survivor of an earlier generation, Violet is the chief archivist of memory; afflicted as she is with Alzheimer's Disease though, she can only physically (rather than verbally) remember clues that we, as seekers of the fabled gold of the Amazon Queen, need to reveal the nature of the treasure we uncover in the process of navigating the text. Violet, like the archive, is liminal, composed of equal parts remembering to remember and remembering to forget. Violet is the keeper of familial amnesia--not a rejection of cultural memory, but a transposition into a present-day relevance, a movement into a sensory state of remembering--virtual, visual, and visionary. Violet is a seer who exists in doubled time, both like and antithetical to Maxwell's Demon (cf N. Katherine Hayles's _Chaos Bound_) with his inability to forget. Violet is cut free--not from history--but from the present moment, capable of inhabiting only a memory state. Where Maxwell's Demon's compulsive anamnesis is the ROM of the archival system, Violet's amnesia is the second memory--that which cannot be saved or recorded, a space comparable to the fluid, vulnerable space of RAM.

There is a "topography" (Bolter) to the fiction of _Califia_ that enlists words as suitcases for memory along with the graphic counterparts of language (as identified by Tim McLaughlin): architecture, cartography and photography. _Califia_ in particular and many cyberfeminist hypertexts in general use historical context to leap free of old boundaries, to make old categorizations permeable, to escape narrative predestination and a restrictive historical framework to (re)write possible futures. A feminist archiviology is a countercultural form of speaking that is composed of conflicting voices, images, and oral forms of knowledge. The reader, as she sifts through the mass of contradictory information, must choose possibilities, must find a balance between the collective memory not of the book but of the archive and the spatial potentialities of the personal reading experience of the electronic narrative.

Béroul’s Tristran et Yseut: revisiting the bipartite theory. A TACT-generated Analysis.
Ineke Hardy-Stovel (U of Ottawa)

From the 19th century onwards, the authorship of the Tristran romance as preserved in manuscript B.N. fr. 2171 has been subject to intense debate, witness Muret’s 1904 edition entitled Le roman de Tristan par Béroul et un anonyme. The questions were inspired in the first instance by the nature of the relationship between Béroul’s version and that of Eilhart von Oberge: the latter closely follows the first 2752 lines of Béroul’s text, then abruptly diverges. Proponents of the dual or even multiple authorship theory justified their position by pointing to textual inconsistencies and differences in vocabulary, syntax, versification, style and pronunciation, but no consensus was ever reached. The publication in 1972 of (a translation of) an edition by Alberto Vàrvaro, with its balanced evaluation of the various arguments and its measured conclusion, seems to have put an end to the debate, swinging the tide towards the unitarian theory. The research carried out in the fifties and sixties by scholars such as Guy Raynaud de Lage and T.B.W. Reid was obviously conducted without the benefit from electronic database and text retrieval programs, however, and I therefore propose to re-examine some of the points they raised, aided by the program TACT (developed by the University of Toronto). The results will be useful in evaluating the arguments advanced, if not their ultimate significance in interpreting the text.

Session 5: plenary
10:45- 12:15 pm
Location:
Humanites Centre 2-29
Plenary
Chair: W. Winder (U of British Columbia)
Tagging for Content
Paul Fortier (U of Manitoba)

Session 6.
2:00-3:15 pm
Location:
Humanites Centre 2-29
Electronic Publishing
Chair: Marshal Soules (Malaspina U-C)
The Difference between 'Straightforward' and 'Easy': A Case Study in the HTML to SGML Conversion of Early Modern Literary Studies
Kathryn Harvey, SGML Consultant/Developer EMLS,
Mount Saint Vincent U
Ray Siemens, Senior Editor (Advisory) EMLS, Malaspina U-C

This paper will discuss data management and markup concerns that Early Modern Literary Studies (EMLS) has faced over the years since its inception and those that we face especially now, as we are turning our attention and energies to the process of converting files originally tagged in HTML to a more stable archival and distribution format, TEI-conformant SGML.

        EMLS, a scholarly journal in electronic form, has as its focus sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature in English. Entering its sixth year of publication in 2000, it has served well in excess of half a million ‘documents' -- papers, reviews, notes, announcements, and so forth -- to a group consisting of some 3,500 regular readers and ten times that number in occasional browsers; readers access the journal via the internet from its distribution sites at the U of Toronto and Sheffield Hallam U (http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html), as well as its mirror site at Oxford U and its archive at the National Library of Canada. EMLS is indexed by the MLA International Bibliography, the Modern Humanities Research Association's Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, and a number of other services and databases.

I

The first section of the paper, presented by Ray Siemens, will offer both general and specific contexts for concerns surrounding the process of data conversion. We have found that our concerns about data management and markup have evolved and changed considerably over the last several years. Six years ago, we began using ASCII text editors, manual FTP file uploading and management, and were concerned only with HTML tagging -- and, even then, we kept it simple, knowing that a good number of our readers were using text-only browsers. As a great number of tools for HTML document creation and site management came into the market, those in our editorial group chose individual document creation solutions -- ultimately resulting in some kinds of small chaos; this was brought to order by instigating a ‘document control' process.

        Document management became an especially pertinent concern once our text-oriented site reached a total size of 5 megabytes. Behind such a concern was, the issue of markup. HTML was fine for what we wanted to do initially, but as we thought further about the future of the journal, we realised that we would benefit from document markup more clearly suited to our readers' needs and our own specific needs as an internet-based professional publication; concerns about the most useful archival format and future portability were at the forefront, as well as our desire to add levels of encoding in our documents to facilitate more precise searching of the documents we publish. At this point, we began exploring SGML and XML. Last summer, we began a rudimentary conversion of all materials in back-issues of the journal-proper to SGML, optimistic that such tagging will ultimately add to EMLS' utility and longevity.

II

The second section of the paper, presented by Kathryn Harvey, will discuss two significant challenges posed by the HTML to SGML conversion process, using the electronic journal EMLS as a practical example. First of all, collaboratively produced textbases will contain tagging inconsistencies. In the case of EMLS, these result from the use of several different HTML editing programs as well as the employment of many different taggers. Because the HTML-structure of the EMLS issues – articles even – is not uniform, the process of conversion is exceedingly difficult to automate. Secondly, further complications of full automation arise from the nature of the conversion itself: HTML basically utilizes format or structural-tagging to dictate a web-browser's display of the page, whereas SGML provides more sophisticated opportunities for content-based tagging which permit complex searches of the textbase. At this stage of the paper, examples drawn from the EMLS conversion will be used to illustrate some of these problems.

Teaching Writing on Screen: The Creation of a CD-ROM
Joanne Buckley (McMaster U)

This session will recrd the progress of a CD-ROM development in-house at McMaster University for use in a new Multimedia course, Writing in the Electronic Age. The difficulties of adapting materials from printed form to screen use will be explored, and the need for collaboration with software developers and student users will also be a subject of discussion.

Our student involvement took three forms: questionnaires meant to improve the quality of the software for the next class, focus groups with students, and observations of students who use the software in the lab. We also involved students in the development of course materials, including diagnostics, lessons, and some of the encoding.

METHOD OF PRESENTATION:

This session will involve a brief detailing of the stages of development of the CD-ROM for a university freshman composition course. The finished CD-ROM will be shown and the results of student questionnaires will be examined to show how the first users of this product reacted to it and how they felt it compared to their classroom textbook.

New Models for Electronic Publishing
Ron Tetrault (Dalhousie U)

        Roger Chartier rightly warns that reading on a computer screen is not the same as reading a book. He reminds us of the ephemerality of e-text when he says that "electronic representation of texts completely changes the text's status: for the materiality of the book, it substitutes the immateriality of texts without a unique location" (18). A publisher vouches for a work in print, but any project in the electronic medium must allay doubts about its durability, dissemination, and certification before it can lay claim to scholarly authority. We have all encountered dead links on the Web, but an even greater problem is how to evaluate so much material of wildly varying quality, most of it self-published. My work on developing an electronic edition of Lyrical Ballads (by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798-1805) has reached a point where these problems have become paramount. The process of securing the imprimatur of a major academic press for online delivery of this edition has made it clear to me that the evolution of electronic publishing will call forth innovations that are not just technological but institutional.

        On the technical side, we as editors have formed a decided preference for online delivery over CD-ROM distribution. Not only is Internet dissemination more cost effective, but it also permits easy correction of errors that are likely to plague any scholarly edition. More important, the fluid nature of the World Wide Web will allow us to take ready advantage of new standards and new forms of interface as they develop. We can constantly add new materials and we can explore new paradigms for their presentation. Lately our new method of marshalling scholarly apparatus which I have called "dynamic collation" has been enhanced by the addition of popup windows generated by javascript which preview variant readings whenever the reader passes the cursor over a revised passage in the electronic text. This reconceptualization of how variant readings can be presented in the digital medium grounds in actual practice David Greetham's proposition that "dismembering scholarly apparatus" will be a consequence of the transition to the new medium (329).

        The real challenge for online publication, however, is what might be called the lack of mature institutional structures on the Web. So long as anyone can publish anything on WWW, the quality of its materials remains questionable. Certainly, Matthew Kirschenbaum is right to caution us that "publication entails a great deal more than simply the act of making public." Hitherto, some degree of authority has been conferred on a website by its association with an institutional host such as a university, as well as by the reputation of its author. But the framework of authenticity provided by an established publisher would be an even greater guarantee of the reliability of these immaterial texts. We have now concluded negotiations that would see the electronic Lyrical Ballads published under the auspices of Cambridge University Press, through the good offices of the website of "Romantic Circles", a reputable online journal hosted by the University of Maryland. By reporting on the progress of these negotiations and their outcome, I hope to indicate ways in which both the Net and established publishers will need to evolve in an electronic world in order to guarantee standards of scholarly authority.

        The future of electronic publishing depends upon us asking questions about much more than technical standards. Online scholarly archives must also meet the same standards of peer review, editorial practice, and institutional sponsorship that have traditionally ensured the quality of print publications.

3:30 - 4:30 pm
Location:
Humanites Centre 2-29
COCH/COSH General Meeting
Chair: Ian Lancashire (U of Toronto)
General meeting and meeting with HSSFC Representative (4:15)

WEDNESDAY, MAY 24 MERCREDI 24 MAI
Session 1. 9:15-10:30 am Location: Humanites Centre 2-29	The Future of the Arts and Humanities Computing Centre Part I Chair: R.G. Siemens (Malaspina U-C) Computing centres serving the Arts and Humanities have seen notable change in recent years, and face a promise of continued evolution -- an evolution concurrent with several influential forces, chief among them the changing perceptions of what constitutes computing in Arts and Humanities disciplines. The several papers making up this panel address both the past and the future of the Arts and Humanities Computing Centre; each speaker will discuss their centre, its history and institutional role, and issues central to its projected future. Introduction Ian Lancashire (U Toronto) Embracing Confusion: The Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick Alan Burk, Electronic Text Centre (U New Brunswick) The Text Centre, officially launched in 1996, was born out of part-time labour and a series of prototype projects, including the Web-publishing of an SGML (Text Encoding Initiative) version of an 18th century loyalist diary, searchable full-text back files of a major Provincial newspaper, an electronic scholarly journal, and a Maliseet-Passamaquoddy / English Dictionary. Presently, the Centre is working on a wide range of initiatives in line with its mission to support the University community in the creation, maintenance, and use of electronic texts and images in accordance with publishing standards and best practices. In the course of this presentation, I will briefly describe three current Text Centre initiatives. First, the Centre is in the process of imaging and Web-publishing one of Canada's major loyalist manuscript collections, the Winslow Papers, resulting in upwards of 16,000 images. For the project, the Centre has developed an extended multi-layered Dublin Core metadata schema to track the archived TIFF images saved to CD and for the purposes of making their JPEG counterparts Web searchable.. Second, the Centre, working with researchers in the United States and Australia, has recently completed a contract with Industry Canada to research and develop metadata schemas to describe and manage a variety of multimedia objects -- video, still image, and audio. The Centre is now looking at building a prototype delivery system along with the necessary metadata to describe some 250 sample multimedia objects. Third, in association with Chadwyck-Healey and a distinguished scholarly board, the Centre is preparing a database of Canadian poetry texts encoded to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines and also to Chadwyck-Healey specifications for inclusion within their LION database. This project, in its first phase, will include the works of approximately 200 poets from the 18th, 19th and early 20h centuries. In conclusion, I will offer some thoughts on possible future roles for the Centre. From Language Centre to Humanities Computing: A Natural Evolution Peter Liddell, Language Centre (U Victoria) Having its roots in the cognitive/natural approach dichotomies of language learning in the 80s, the UVic Language Centre was well-placed to take advantage of a number of innovations in the 90s. Supporting and developing a wide spectrum of projects -- stand-alone, CD- and web-based -- has led to a number of options. In early 2000 a process was initiated to acknowledge this potential, by broadening the mandate of the Centre. The new role will enable the Faculty to meet its computing needs better, in the spirit of the recently revised Faculty Plan, and in accord with the University's 5-year plan for IT, which is to be released for discussion in February/March 2000.
Session 2. 10:45 am -12:15 pm Location: Humanites Centre 2-29	The Future of the Arts and Humanities Computing Centre Part II Chair: R.G. Siemens (Malaspina U-C) Supporting Multimedia in the Humanities Geoffrey Rockwell, Humanities Computing Centre (McMaster U) In this paper I will discuss the history of the Humanities Computing Centre at McMaster University and discuss the changes brought about by having to support a multimedia program. The Centre grew out of traditional audio labs and its activities in the late 1980s and early 1990s were focused on developing computer based language instruction and providing facilities for students to access language resources. In the mid 1990s we had to adapt to the growing student use of e-mail and the WWW for entertainment and research. As we started introducing courses in humanities computing and multimedia we also had to expand the labs to include facilities that would support student multimedia development. This has changed the character of the facilities from a delivery environment to a more complex creation environment with MIDI keyboards, CD-burners, scanners, video capture facilities and more. This evolution has been accelerated by the introduction this year of a Combined Honours in Multimedia program that will eventually have 200 concurrent students. In this paper I will try to make the case that humanities computing centres should provide an environment where students can build multimedia not just use it, and discuss the resources and staff needed to support such an environment. Putting Teaching before Technology: A Successful Arts Technology Centre at Alberta Terry Butler, Technologies for Learning Centre (U Alberta) The Arts TLC (Technologies for Learning Centre) has been in operation since November 1997. Its mandate is to provide pedagogical and technological support to a potential clientele of 600 teaching staff members in the Faculty of Arts (the University of Alberta's largest academic unit). Our mandate is to: assist departments and the Faculty of Arts with general technology issues guide, advise, and assist teachers in accessing appropriate technology for their teaching cultivate and develop the knowledge and skills of faculty, staff, and students with respect to technology and teaching provide input to policy decisions Our staff consists of a Director, and Instructional Technology Specialist, a part-time Office Administrator, and a cadre of student mentors who provide direct support to teaching staff. The presentation will share strategies which have been found to be successful for situating a technology centre in the academic organization. It will also explain how we are moving from a service model based upon "early adopters" to one in which From South of the Border to North: Transitions in Humanities Computing Scott Gerrity, Language Centre (U Victoria) In this paper I explore current transitions at the University of Victoria Language Centre as it continues to expand beyond its languages support mission to embrace projects in the large and ever evolving field of humanities computing. These transitions have as their impetus both the quite practical (and administrative) need to reach out to more disciplines in the humanities (a growing trend at many language computing centres), and the less practical but equally important need to anticipate and support--or simply make available--feasible options for future research in humanities computing. Partly at issue is the changing nature of computer driven learning centres and staying current with state-of-the-art possibilities, and opening these possibilities to faculty members. To represent these changes, The Language Centre plans to rename itself soon to include "Humanities" as part of its title. The question of the future of the humanities computing centre is dealt with primarily on a local level; but global implications arise as well, especially in the area of institutionalized support for faculty and staff projects. Discussions in the Language Centre have focused on the need to expand our research and development core, due to an overload of projects and support needs; to investigate options for student coursework in humanities computing; to develop closer ties with the university library and its database access and use; to update technology (analog to digital audio, for example) in our CALL facility; and to continue to expand in the direction of web-based materials vs. stand-alone, in order to offer programs with more global access and free up valuable space in a very busy CALL facility. Concurrent with the discussion of transitions in the Language Centre, I explore the challenges I face personally moving from instructing languages and literature, and directing a CALL facility at a smaller, predominantly "teaching" university in Washington State to coordinating a major language centre on the cusp of expanding its computing mandate. Face to face with the question of the future of humanities computing (literally, as the main topic for presentation at The Language Centre Coordinator position interview), I have had to change roles and significantly broaden my perspective, from what might be called qualified user to qualified producer. Many of my individual transitions coincide with what is currently happening at the University of Victoria Language Centre, and at other language centres as well.
Session 3: 2:00-3:45 pm Location: Humanites Centre 2-29	Software for the Classroom Chair: Joanne Buckley (McMaster U) Hybrid Online Courses & Strategies for Collaboration Marshal Soules (Malaspina U-C) See abstract at http://www.mala.bc.ca/~soules/hybrid.htm Half-Baked Software Inc.: Commercializing Humanities Software Ethically Martin Holmes (U of Victoria) Over the last two years, the University of Victoria Language Centre Research and Development team has developed a piece of software called Hot Potatoes, which is primarily intended for creating Web-based interactive exercises for language teaching. Released as freeware to the academic community, Hot Potatoes quickly became successful, and now has many thousands of users in over 100 countries world-wide. Along with this success came overtures from the business community regarding commercial use of the software, along with some pressure and encouragement from various quarters suggesting that it might be worthwhile to develop a business based on Hot Potatoes. The two principal developers, Stewart Arneil and Martin Holmes, approached the university's Innovation and Development Corporation for advice, and with their help set up a company, Half-Baked Software Inc. The company is part-owned by the university, and its main purpose is to develop the commercial potential and spin-offs from Hot Potatoes. Some of the profits are channelled back into the university and the Language Centre to support further development; at the same time, the principals are able to make some money themselves, doing extra programming work, and running the company. In its first six months, Half-Baked Software turned over nearly $30,000 from contract programming work, sale of commercial licences for Hot Potatoes, and the release of a CD-ROM. Meanwhile, both Half-Baked Software and the university remain committed to keeping the basic version of Hot Potatoes free for non-commercial academic use. This session will relate our experiences in setting up the company, explain our philosophy in keeping it small and firmly under our control (the "nanocorp" model), and discuss some of the successes and pitfalls we have encountered during the first year. The presentation may be useful to anyone who is considering small-scale commercial exploitation of software (or any other intellectual property) created at their institution. We will also discuss the differences between commercializing a Humanities project and the kind of science or engineering project that is more typically taken from the academic environment to the commercial market. And ACTION!: Digital Video in the Humanities Andrew McTavish (McMaster U) It used to be that, to include digital video (DV) in scholarly multimedia, the only recourse for academics was to hire professionals, not necessarily because we had neither the skill to create DV nor the desire to learn it, but mainly because of cost. Producing DV has, until recently, been very expensive, and the audience for it limited by costly and resource-intensive delivery modes. But now, faster, more versatile, and less expensive technologies for the creation and delivery of DV are coming down the pipeline from professional to prosumer and consumer, meaning that we find ourselves in a more likely position to create and use DV in our research and instruction. The result is that new media technologies like DV are slowly being included as tools and topics of research and instruction in humanities computing. For the most part, though, when scholars say "humanities omputing," they are generally referring to electronic texts and their technologies of production and delivery. It stands to reason that, since text is a core component of humanities scholarship--whether as the artefact under study or as published research--the prominent media type in humanities computing has been text. But as new technologies develop for the creation and delivery of multimedia documents, so too does scholarly interest in the digitization and application of multiple media types. A general consequence of this expansion of interest is the need for scholars wishing to practice multimedia to learn new technical skills and develop new grammars of expression. Most humanities scholars are quite adeptat creating textual documents, and many employ visual images in their print and digital publications. But how good are we humanists at creating and including other rich-media elements such as DV? To compound matters, most of us work within an environment where text is the privileged media. Although humanities computing has been challenging assumptions about textual technologies in the humanities, the advent of DV might make us wonder how bringing visual technologies to instruction and research intersects with the terms of this challenge. This paper explores the production of DV for humanities instruction. It uses the example of a digital lecture series being developed at McMaster University as a springboard to an examination of visual technologies within the primarily text-centred model of humanities instruction and research. The major parts of this paper are: 1) Description of Topics in Multimedia, Digital Lecture Series: Topics in Multimedia is a digital lecture series being developed at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario for the instruction of multimedia in the humanities. The project is organized around a set of topics, each with a subset of mini-lectures comprised of digital video, graphics, and animation. This section will include a very short demonstration of Topics in Multimedia and form the practical basis for the more theoretical section that follows. 2) Analysis of the Qualities of DV: Every media type has its own qualities that make it better suited to some uses over others. Film and video, for instance, are essentially linear media, meaning that they do not easily allow for user-explorative reception in the same way that hypertext does. Yet, video makes it possible to create dynamic interactions between audio-visual elements, meaning that we can create densely layered relationships between visual and aural elements that is more difficult, if not impossible, with other media types. Place video within the context of a multimedia application, where we can include other media types and user interaction, and the possibilities for dynamic layering increase substantially. 3) Analysis of Visual Technologies in the Humanities: In this age of the sound byte and MTV, however, we need to ask whether and how video techniques like short clips and fast-cutting can be used to teach in the humanities, where prolonged contemplation of artefacts is favoured over the short and fast. Indeed, does the inclusion of these visual techniques spell the continued demise of the humanities at the hand of a consumerist culture where surface and speed are promoted over depth and contemplation? Or, can we take advantage of the qualities of DV to create stimulating and effective learning environments that free graphic expression from the manacles of "consumerism, corruption, deception, and ethical failure" so frequently associated with the visual?[1] One step to answering these questions necessarily involves interrogating the common assumption that the visual is somehow less worthy than the textual, an assumption often expressed in terms of a binary opposition between the "laterally associative" movement of visual technologies and the "vertically cumulative" movement of text.[2] A second step involves exploring and sharing techniques for the development and application of DV in the humanities. What kinds of information does DV lend itself to? Would it work as well for a course on the Victorian novel as it would for a course on multimedia? If DV is best-suited to short clips and fast cuts, how do we filter our information but simultaneously ensure depth? Probing these questions may encourage humanities scholars to build effective paradigms for DV delivery that do not merely contribute to the ills of speed culture, but that ensure new visual technologies are employed to build intellectually stimulating educational applications. Notes: 1. Stafford, Barbara Maria. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997, p. 5. 2. Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994, p. 122. Accents yet unknown: Discussion and demonstration of a software package that allows students to 'block' a scene from a play, and submit it as an assignment. Michael Best (U of Victoria) "Scenario" is a cross-platform program that allows students of literature or theatre to "block" a scene from a play. Students create a series of "frames": for each they choose a section of the text, then select characters and props from menus, and drag them to appropriate positions on the stage. In the process, they are introduced to the important way that physical space in performance can illustrate or modify the basic written text. Each frame has a text window that allows for a detailed explanation of the choices that are being made, and there is a separate space for an overall summary of the project. The resulting data is stored in a single text-only file that can be read by either the Macintosh or Windows versions of the software; the files can be sent by email as an attachment if the course is being offered online (as is the case with the courses on Shakespeare it was designed for). When the teacher reviews the sequence of frames, he or she chooses a different mode that provides another text window for individual comments on each frame; again there is space in the project summary for a summary evaluation. At present, Scenario is geared specifically for "productions" of plays by Shakespeare on a stage based on the original Globe Theatre. The design of the program, however, is sufficiently generalized that in future other stages and other playwrights -- or completely different scenarios -- can be illustrated. Scenario is based on a freeware HyperCard program developed by Michael Best. It is being developed as a collaborative venture between the Internet Shakespeare Editions and the Humanities Computing and Media Centre at the University of Victoria, by programmers Martin Holmes and Stewart Arneil.
Orlando Project Open house 4:00-6:00 pm Location: 5th Floor, Humanities Centre	Presentation of the the Orlando Project Patricia Clements, Project Director, and Susan Fisher, Project Librarian

THURSDAY MAY 25 JEUDI 25 MAI
Session 4. 9:15-10:30 am Location: Humanites Centre 2-29	Electronic Readings Chair: Teresa Dobson (U of Alberta) Hypertextual interference Alice Van der Klei (U of Montreal) The state of new technologies like hypertext modes must be questioned by disciplines such as literary studies. With hypertext, our references to the textual are in transition. In a "Deleuzian" way we are deterritorialising ourselves and trying to move towards the dream of a Text without limits. I wish to question if we are in a utopian project of the text? First, my hypothesis asks whether hypertext is just the utopia of the text? The network of knowledge put forward in the hypertext mode; this storage of a memory in a fragmented and video-clip manner puts us in presence of a new way of thinking of the text as working in interference, but also as a way of preserving our reference marks and memories. With hypertexts and the WWW, it is interesting to observe how we may preserve a cultural heritage through Net-browsing or like I would like to say: form a "cultural memory map on the Net". Also, I would like to approach the translation and transition of textuality into the electronic medium through a view a community based on memory and souvenirs. Furthermore, I will try to look at what it means to be a "hypertextual reader" who must learn to observe and point out "mediological" mechanisms. This reader searches for traces, and thus installs an inheritance. If webbrowsers are creating their own "collective memory" as they interfere nowadays in their search for cultural souvenirs, I wish to show how "cultural recycling" on the Net is more an art of interferences than simply repeating a collective memory. Anamnesis and Amnesia: The Cyberfeminist Archive in M.D. Coverley's Hypertext Fiction Carolyn Guertin (U of Alberta) In our information age much discussion has been devoted to how the new literatures in electronic environments threaten the printed book. Hypertext fiction, I will argue, contrary to pervasive fears, is evolving on a model based not on the codex but on a form that embodies the spirit of the future: the archive. The archive, as defined by Jacques Derrida in _Archive Fever_, is born equally of the compulsion to remember and of fears of forgetting. As such the archive keeps one foot firmly in the past and another in the future, remembering in order to allow us to forget and forgetting in order to remember. It is the encyclopedic keeper of everything from public knowledge to the intensely personal. By its very nature, says Derrida, the archive inhabits the space between the public and the personal, and is born of the tension between the revolutionary and the conservative, between genealogy and history and between anamnesis (the inability to forget) and amnesia (the inability to remember). According to Derrida, these tensions are the function of the archive. In feminist hands, particularly in M.D. Coverley's hypertext novel _Califia_, this notion of the archive is subsumed within the form of hypertext fiction to become a parody of its traditional self. In _Califia_ we are deluged with a wealth of information, narratives and characters in 800 multimedia screens, and notions of memory and forgetting are central to the text. The narratives are quests to recover lost secrets, buried connections and hidden treasures that have been concealed beneath the silt of time and lost to the ravages of Alzheimer's Disease. In _Califia_, the parodic impulse is contained in the effort to remember the details of the past in order to 'unforget' or practice anamnesis--that is, the past is not discarded and facts are not avoided, but instead these facts become departure points for a strategy of fiction that leaps forward out of the predetermination of written history into a new kind of vision and visual narrative. _Califia_ is a literal archive, a container for all the facts known about three California families over five generations. The text fulfills the archival compulsion to remember. No fact is too small, insignificant or cryptic in the quest to recover the history of the family's search for gold. The information that is gathered, however, is three-pronged as presented by the text's three narrators: Augusta keeps facts, linear narrative and chronology; Calvin, the archivist, keeps and/or writes fictional speculation; Kaye compiles myths, legends and ephemeral arcana. The text comfortably encompasses all three types of archives without resolving or rationalizing the contradictions between the different forms of knowledge. But while _Califia_ fosters and documents the compulsion to remember, the engine that drives it is one of forgetfulness. As the sole survivor of an earlier generation, Violet is the chief archivist of memory; afflicted as she is with Alzheimer's Disease though, she can only physically (rather than verbally) remember clues that we, as seekers of the fabled gold of the Amazon Queen, need to reveal the nature of the treasure we uncover in the process of navigating the text. Violet, like the archive, is liminal, composed of equal parts remembering to remember and remembering to forget. Violet is the keeper of familial amnesia--not a rejection of cultural memory, but a transposition into a present-day relevance, a movement into a sensory state of remembering--virtual, visual, and visionary. Violet is a seer who exists in doubled time, both like and antithetical to Maxwell's Demon (cf N. Katherine Hayles's _Chaos Bound_) with his inability to forget. Violet is cut free--not from history--but from the present moment, capable of inhabiting only a memory state. Where Maxwell's Demon's compulsive anamnesis is the ROM of the archival system, Violet's amnesia is the second memory--that which cannot be saved or recorded, a space comparable to the fluid, vulnerable space of RAM. There is a "topography" (Bolter) to the fiction of _Califia_ that enlists words as suitcases for memory along with the graphic counterparts of language (as identified by Tim McLaughlin): architecture, cartography and photography. _Califia_ in particular and many cyberfeminist hypertexts in general use historical context to leap free of old boundaries, to make old categorizations permeable, to escape narrative predestination and a restrictive historical framework to (re)write possible futures. A feminist archiviology is a countercultural form of speaking that is composed of conflicting voices, images, and oral forms of knowledge. The reader, as she sifts through the mass of contradictory information, must choose possibilities, must find a balance between the collective memory not of the book but of the archive and the spatial potentialities of the personal reading experience of the electronic narrative. Béroul’s Tristran et Yseut: revisiting the bipartite theory. A TACT-generated Analysis. Ineke Hardy-Stovel (U of Ottawa) From the 19th century onwards, the authorship of the Tristran romance as preserved in manuscript B.N. fr. 2171 has been subject to intense debate, witness Muret’s 1904 edition entitled Le roman de Tristan par Béroul et un anonyme. The questions were inspired in the first instance by the nature of the relationship between Béroul’s version and that of Eilhart von Oberge: the latter closely follows the first 2752 lines of Béroul’s text, then abruptly diverges. Proponents of the dual or even multiple authorship theory justified their position by pointing to textual inconsistencies and differences in vocabulary, syntax, versification, style and pronunciation, but no consensus was ever reached. The publication in 1972 of (a translation of) an edition by Alberto Vàrvaro, with its balanced evaluation of the various arguments and its measured conclusion, seems to have put an end to the debate, swinging the tide towards the unitarian theory. The research carried out in the fifties and sixties by scholars such as Guy Raynaud de Lage and T.B.W. Reid was obviously conducted without the benefit from electronic database and text retrieval programs, however, and I therefore propose to re-examine some of the points they raised, aided by the program TACT (developed by the University of Toronto). The results will be useful in evaluating the arguments advanced, if not their ultimate significance in interpreting the text.
Session 5: plenary 10:45- 12:15 pm Location: Humanites Centre 2-29	Plenary Chair: W. Winder (U of British Columbia) Tagging for Content Paul Fortier (U of Manitoba)
Session 6. 2:00-3:15 pm Location: Humanites Centre 2-29	Electronic Publishing Chair: Marshal Soules (Malaspina U-C) The Difference between 'Straightforward' and 'Easy': A Case Study in the HTML to SGML Conversion of Early Modern Literary Studies Kathryn Harvey, SGML Consultant/Developer EMLS, Mount Saint Vincent U Ray Siemens, Senior Editor (Advisory) EMLS, Malaspina U-C This paper will discuss data management and markup concerns that Early Modern Literary Studies (EMLS) has faced over the years since its inception and those that we face especially now, as we are turning our attention and energies to the process of converting files originally tagged in HTML to a more stable archival and distribution format, TEI-conformant SGML. EMLS, a scholarly journal in electronic form, has as its focus sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature in English. Entering its sixth year of publication in 2000, it has served well in excess of half a million ‘documents' -- papers, reviews, notes, announcements, and so forth -- to a group consisting of some 3,500 regular readers and ten times that number in occasional browsers; readers access the journal via the internet from its distribution sites at the U of Toronto and Sheffield Hallam U (http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html), as well as its mirror site at Oxford U and its archive at the National Library of Canada. EMLS is indexed by the MLA International Bibliography, the Modern Humanities Research Association's Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, and a number of other services and databases. I The first section of the paper, presented by Ray Siemens, will offer both general and specific contexts for concerns surrounding the process of data conversion. We have found that our concerns about data management and markup have evolved and changed considerably over the last several years. Six years ago, we began using ASCII text editors, manual FTP file uploading and management, and were concerned only with HTML tagging -- and, even then, we kept it simple, knowing that a good number of our readers were using text-only browsers. As a great number of tools for HTML document creation and site management came into the market, those in our editorial group chose individual document creation solutions -- ultimately resulting in some kinds of small chaos; this was brought to order by instigating a ‘document control' process. Document management became an especially pertinent concern once our text-oriented site reached a total size of 5 megabytes. Behind such a concern was, the issue of markup. HTML was fine for what we wanted to do initially, but as we thought further about the future of the journal, we realised that we would benefit from document markup more clearly suited to our readers' needs and our own specific needs as an internet-based professional publication; concerns about the most useful archival format and future portability were at the forefront, as well as our desire to add levels of encoding in our documents to facilitate more precise searching of the documents we publish. At this point, we began exploring SGML and XML. Last summer, we began a rudimentary conversion of all materials in back-issues of the journal-proper to SGML, optimistic that such tagging will ultimately add to EMLS' utility and longevity. II The second section of the paper, presented by Kathryn Harvey, will discuss two significant challenges posed by the HTML to SGML conversion process, using the electronic journal EMLS as a practical example. First of all, collaboratively produced textbases will contain tagging inconsistencies. In the case of EMLS, these result from the use of several different HTML editing programs as well as the employment of many different taggers. Because the HTML-structure of the EMLS issues – articles even – is not uniform, the process of conversion is exceedingly difficult to automate. Secondly, further complications of full automation arise from the nature of the conversion itself: HTML basically utilizes format or structural-tagging to dictate a web-browser's display of the page, whereas SGML provides more sophisticated opportunities for content-based tagging which permit complex searches of the textbase. At this stage of the paper, examples drawn from the EMLS conversion will be used to illustrate some of these problems. Teaching Writing on Screen: The Creation of a CD-ROM Joanne Buckley (McMaster U) This session will recrd the progress of a CD-ROM development in-house at McMaster University for use in a new Multimedia course, Writing in the Electronic Age. The difficulties of adapting materials from printed form to screen use will be explored, and the need for collaboration with software developers and student users will also be a subject of discussion. Our student involvement took three forms: questionnaires meant to improve the quality of the software for the next class, focus groups with students, and observations of students who use the software in the lab. We also involved students in the development of course materials, including diagnostics, lessons, and some of the encoding. METHOD OF PRESENTATION: This session will involve a brief detailing of the stages of development of the CD-ROM for a university freshman composition course. The finished CD-ROM will be shown and the results of student questionnaires will be examined to show how the first users of this product reacted to it and how they felt it compared to their classroom textbook. New Models for Electronic Publishing Ron Tetrault (Dalhousie U) Roger Chartier rightly warns that reading on a computer screen is not the same as reading a book. He reminds us of the ephemerality of e-text when he says that "electronic representation of texts completely changes the text's status: for the materiality of the book, it substitutes the immateriality of texts without a unique location" (18). A publisher vouches for a work in print, but any project in the electronic medium must allay doubts about its durability, dissemination, and certification before it can lay claim to scholarly authority. We have all encountered dead links on the Web, but an even greater problem is how to evaluate so much material of wildly varying quality, most of it self-published. My work on developing an electronic edition of Lyrical Ballads (by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798-1805) has reached a point where these problems have become paramount. The process of securing the imprimatur of a major academic press for online delivery of this edition has made it clear to me that the evolution of electronic publishing will call forth innovations that are not just technological but institutional. On the technical side, we as editors have formed a decided preference for online delivery over CD-ROM distribution. Not only is Internet dissemination more cost effective, but it also permits easy correction of errors that are likely to plague any scholarly edition. More important, the fluid nature of the World Wide Web will allow us to take ready advantage of new standards and new forms of interface as they develop. We can constantly add new materials and we can explore new paradigms for their presentation. Lately our new method of marshalling scholarly apparatus which I have called "dynamic collation" has been enhanced by the addition of popup windows generated by javascript which preview variant readings whenever the reader passes the cursor over a revised passage in the electronic text. This reconceptualization of how variant readings can be presented in the digital medium grounds in actual practice David Greetham's proposition that "dismembering scholarly apparatus" will be a consequence of the transition to the new medium (329). The real challenge for online publication, however, is what might be called the lack of mature institutional structures on the Web. So long as anyone can publish anything on WWW, the quality of its materials remains questionable. Certainly, Matthew Kirschenbaum is right to caution us that "publication entails a great deal more than simply the act of making public." Hitherto, some degree of authority has been conferred on a website by its association with an institutional host such as a university, as well as by the reputation of its author. But the framework of authenticity provided by an established publisher would be an even greater guarantee of the reliability of these immaterial texts. We have now concluded negotiations that would see the electronic Lyrical Ballads published under the auspices of Cambridge University Press, through the good offices of the website of "Romantic Circles", a reputable online journal hosted by the University of Maryland. By reporting on the progress of these negotiations and their outcome, I hope to indicate ways in which both the Net and established publishers will need to evolve in an electronic world in order to guarantee standards of scholarly authority. The future of electronic publishing depends upon us asking questions about much more than technical standards. Online scholarly archives must also meet the same standards of peer review, editorial practice, and institutional sponsorship that have traditionally ensured the quality of print publications.
3:30 - 4:30 pm Location: Humanites Centre 2-29	*COCH/COSH General Meeting* Chair: Ian Lancashire (U of Toronto) General meeting and meeting with HSSFC Representative (4:15)

Society for Digital Humanities Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs

Society for Digital Humanities
Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs