University of Victoria Department of English Faculty of Humanities PO Box 3070 STN CSC, Victoria, BC V8W 3W1 siemens@uvic.ca http://web.uvic.ca/~siemens Abstract: A currently-accepted foundation for work in humanities computing is knowledge representation, which draws on the field of artificial intelligence and seeks to produce models of human understanding that are tractable to computation. More specifically, in activities of the computing humanist, knowledge representation manifests itself in issues related to archival representation and textual editing, high-level interpretive theory and criticism, and protocols of knowledge transfer -- all as modeled with computational techniques. My paper traces a model of humanistic activity provided by humanities computing, noting that the results of modeling the activities of the humanist, and the output of humanistic achievement, with the assistance of the computer are found in what are often considered to be the exemplary tasks associated with humanities computing: the representation of archival materials, the analysis or critical inquiry originating in those materials, and the communication of the results of these tasks (i.e. the dissemination of primary and secondary materials via electronic means). Bio: Ray Siemens is Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing and Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria. He is President [English] of the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI) and, in 2003, was Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London. He is director of UVIC's Digital Humanities / Humanities Computing Summer Institute , and founding editor of the electronic scholarly journal Early Modern Literary Studies, he is also author of many articles chiefly focusing on areas where literary studies and computational methods intersect, is editor of several Renaissance texts, and is co-editor of several book collections on humanities computing topics, among them the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities (with Susan Schreibman and John Unsworth). |