From: HUMANIST Discussion 12-OCT-1988 12:44:30.03 To: ARCHIVE CC: Subj: Biographical supplement (542) Received: from UKACRL by UK.AC.RL.IB (Mailer X1.25) with BSMTP id 0308; Wed, 12 Oct 88 12:38:58 BS Received: by UKACRL (Mailer X1.25) id 0210; Wed, 12 Oct 88 12:38:27 BST Date: Tue, 11 Oct 88 23:23:42 EDT Reply-To: Willard McCarty Sender: HUMANIST Discussion From: Willard McCarty Subject: Biographical supplement (542) To: Oxford Text Archive Humanist Mailing List, Vol. 2, No. 224. Tuesday, 11 Oct 1988. Autobiographies of HUMANISTs Thirteenth Supplement Following are 23 additional entries to the collection of autobiographical statements by members of the HUMANIST discussion group. HUMANISTs on IBM VM/CMS systems will want a copy of Jim Coombs' exec for searching and retrieving biographical entries. It is kept on HUMANIST's file-server; for more information, see the Guide to HUMANIST. Further additions, corrections, and updates are welcome. Willard McCarty Centre for Computing in the Humanities, Univ. of Toronto mccarty@vm.epas.utoronto.ca OR mccarty@utorepas 11 October 1988 ================================================================= *Ahrens, John Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT 06117; (H) 203-247-9560 (O) 203- 243-4745 I have just returned to teaching after spending the past four years as the Assistant Director of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University. During this time I was the Managing Editor of the Center's publications, including a journal entitled Social Philosophy & Policy. My stint as an editor instilled in me a fervent loathing of bad writing and a desire to eradicate it wherever it may be. My research interests are primarily in the areas of ethics and political philosophy. I have a special interest in environmental issues and in the foundations of classical liberalism. When the attraction of traditional philosophical issues pales but I still have the desire to work, I turn my attention to popular culture, especially the literature and films of science fiction. I teach classes in these areas (including even science fiction), and in elementary logic. Beyond such academic pursuits, I am an avid student of computers and of the martial arts. ===================================================================== *Brink, Daniel T. Assoc. Prof., English, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287- 0302 (602) 965-6795. My academic training was in Germanic philology, with an emphasis on the West Germanic tongues, Old English, Old Saxon, and the like. I minored in linguistics, and wrote a generative phonology of Dutch for my dissertation (U of Wisconsin). My computer interests awoke with the advent of the microcomputer, largely as a result--probably common to many humanities computing types--of my frustration in the the early eighties with trying to get foreign characters into WordStar. I finally succeeded, but a sabbatical was lost in the process and my interests took a decidedly new direction. I am now Manager of a new facility on my campus, Technology Assessment and Development, which has the charter of identifying and evaluating new products which have the potential impacting the university in major way. Talk about fun... I can still recite the entire corpus of Old Low Franconian literature by heart, however, so I haven't gone completely bad: Hebban olla vogala nestas bigunnan hinasi thu ende ik. Wat onbidan we nu? ================================================================= *Hanly, Ken Brandon University, Brandon Mb. Canada, R7A 6A9 I am an associate professor of philosophy at Brandon University. I have been involved for some time in socialist politics as well as community involvement, e.g. was president of a co-operative housing project, of a direct charge buyer's co-op etc. I am interested in humanist religion -was a member of the local unitarian fellowship for some time- as well as discussion of contemporary social issues. I am also interested in Marxist analyses of social problems. As a hobby I read and write poetry and have served as editorof a poetry magazine and have edited a series of chapbooks. ================================================================= *Horton, Thomas B. Dept. of Computer Science, Florida Atlantic Univ., Boca Raton, FL 33431; (407) 393-2674 I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the Univ. of Edinburgh (Scotland) in June 1987, and started as an assistant professor here at FAU the following autumn. My PhD research examined statistical authorship studies and focused on the question of collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher in "Henry VIII" and "The Two Noble Kinsmen." In this study I used distribution-free discriminant analysis techniques to analyze the rate of occurrence of function words, with successful results: 94.8% of 459 scenes of known authorship (containing at least 500 words) were assigned to the correct author. The procedure indicates that the two disputed plays are collaboration and generally supports the usual division (but not always). Current research interests include the analysis of function word rates and characterization in the plays of Shakespeare and Fletcher. I am also very interested in computer processing of old-spelling texts, especially Jacobean drama and Middle English manuscripts. Here at FAU I teach core Computer Science courses such as Data Structures and Analysis of Algorithms. I generally program in Pascal and C on UNIX systems and am busy converting my colleagues to the TeX document processing system. At Edinburgh I helped set up a local "Computers in the Humanities" special interest group. FAU does not have a strong community of computer users in the humanities, but I have recently made contact with the College of Humanities, who are interested in joint supervision of graduate students, seminars and possibly a course in literary computing. I'd be very interested hearing from anyone interested in research in authorship studies, literary statistics, characterization studies or Middle English texts. ================================================================= *Janus, Louis E. Norwegian Department, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN 55057; (507) 663-3486 (work); (612) 822-1015 (home). I teach Norwegian and Linguistics at St. Olaf College. In the past, I taught a beginning level course in computer use for Humanists (an interim which focused on several UNIX tools). Now I am involved in several Mac projects, most specifically with sound digitizing in foreign language instruction. I have a number of Old Norse sagas in machine readable format, which I soon will be announcing to the general public. I was at the meeting in Columbia, SC where we discussed establishing the HUMANIST, but somehow did not end up on the e-mail list. ================================================================= *Keith, Philip M. English Department, St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN 56301; 612-255-3189 I have been working on and off with computers in literature and the teaching of writing for the better part of a decade. I have been working with word-processing and interactive programs for teaching and improving writing. I have also been working at some text-analyzer projects on metrics and prose structure. ================================================================= *Lipson, Elizabeth Academic Computing Publications Editor, Emory University Computing Center, Uppergate House, Atlanta, Georgia 30322 404/727-7651 I write computing publications and a newsletter for our user community at Emory. My past activities have been in the area of computer training-- instructor led, classroom/individual, computer-based training, self-paced materials. I have worked in computing for about five years. Before that, I worked in research/writing in the field of historic preservation. I have a B.A. in history from Georgia State University. ================================================================= *MacWhinney, Brian Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA 15213; 412 268-3793 I am a psychologist and not a bona fide humanist. Much of my work is clearly psychological in nature. This is the work I do in simulating the acquisition of language with computers and in conducting experiments to provide data for these simulations. However, a second line of my research comes closer to touching on issues in the Humanities. This is my work as director of the Child Language Data Exchange System. With the support of various public and private national foundations, Catherine Snow of Harvard University and I have worked with many researchers in the field of child language acquisition to establish a large (over 100 megabytes) database of adult-child conversational interaction data. Most of the these data are from English. However, a growing proportion of the database is from other languages as well. The CHILDES system has not only developed a large database but has also specified a standard transcription system for conversational analysis. In addition, we have developed a set of C programs for the analysis of conversational data. These programs are unlike concordance programs in many ways and focus on Boolean searches, cross-tier searches, and numerical outputs. Membership in the CHILDES system and access to the data and programs is open to the research community. ================================================================= *Makivirta, Joni Mikael Minna Canthin katu 22 A 5, 40100 Jyvaskyla, Finland 1. Studies I am a student of history. During this year I should graduate. My main subject is general history. I have also studied history of Finland, Economic history, Social sciences (=mostly politics), and Educational sciences. I probably will still study Speech communication as an extra subject. This year I should do my pro gradu -work. I will most probably do study on T.H.Green - an english politician during 19th centory (=Victorianic time). Green was interesting man because he respected Christian values in life. He thought that liberalism should lead also qualitial improvement in human beeing. A improvement meant that people lerned to act and work moralisticly - in Christian sense of the word. By learning these values people could learn to think also common good - not only themselves. This kind of thinking gave some ideas also to socialistic thinkers. Although they, of course, left out the word Christian. Was Mr. Green a true Christian, I do not know. But at least he sympathised Christian values. 2. Life Well that about my studies. Now. My story: I have lived all of my life in Finland. (is in Europe, Scandinavia and beside the USSR.) And I am still living in my home city: Jyvaskyla. Jyvaskyla is in central Finland. Here is lot of lakes, woods ... and nature is very colse. There are some 70 000 citizens in Jyvaskyla. I graduated from High School 1986. After that I decided to study history in local University. So here I am. I am Christian, but I can sympathise with many kind of a people and understand many kind of a thoughts - although I would not apply them in my own life. Maybe this is the reason for my interest to T.H.Green? 3. Expectations I hope I could find, via this list, someone who is interested in Victorianic time. I also hope I could learn to use some databases, and tell about them in the Departement of History. I have founded the list HISTORY at FINHUTC, so if anyone is interested in that. You are welcome to join in. I wonder if HUMANIST and HISTORY could do some co-operation? ================================================================= *McDaid, John G. Computer Coordinator, NYU Expository Writing Program, 269 Mercer St. Rm. 219 New York, NY 10003 (212) 998-8862 For the last five years, I've been teaching expository writing at NYU while working on my doctorate in media ecology. My dissertation is on the process of hypermedia composition, and I've been working at integrating hypertext (StorySpace, HyperCard) into our freshman comp sequence. We have two dedicated classrooms with Macintoshes running 16 sections each semester. I see computers from a McLuhanist perspective, and as a tool for decentering authority in the classroom. I'm interested in networks, computer conferencing, collaborative work-group support, and Xanadu. ================================================================= *Meadows, Dennis Lynn Director, Institute for Policy and Social Science Research; Professor of Business Systems and Policy, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824, USA; 603/862-2186 Telex: 493-0372 RPC UI I have been on the faculties of MIT and Dartmouth; I just joined the UNH faculty this fall to define, create, and run a new institute that will support research interests of faculty across the campus. My research interests lie in the creation of sophisticated simulation models and educational games that show the interaction of psychological, economic, social, political, and technical factors. My games and books on this subject have been translated into over 30 languages. I also have an extremely strong and active interest in Eastern Europe. I have lived in Budapest and visited the USSR over 45 times. I will take a Fulbright in Moscow next spring. I serve as US Director of the Soviet- American Environmental Education Project. ================================================================= *Meath, Terrence W. User Services Specialist, Health Sciences Computing Services, University of Minnesota, BOX 720 UMHC, 5-235 Malcom Moos Tower, 515 Delaware St. S.E., Minneapolis, MN 55455; (612) 625-7175 In requesting to join your list, I am representing several hundred faculty, staff and students in the Health Sciences at the UofM, and not just myself. We have taken a different approach to network based information sharing. Rather than require each of our users to subscribe to the lists that they think might be useful to them (and then unsubscribe if necessary), we have created a small group of public mailboxes (mailboxes on our system that all of our users can access), which we subscribe to the various list servers. Our public mailboxes are organized around general topics such as statistics, computing, health, etc. and each contain the traffic of a dozen or so lists. The mailboxes have the ability to show all of the traffic together, or to sort on any one list. The biggest advantage is that we involve many more people in network communications than would be the case if they had to learn about, evaluate and manage the subscriptions by themselves. Further, this type of involvement eliminates a great deal of redundant network traffic. Our users are still free to subscribe to a list on their own, but our public mailbox technique has worked out so well that few people have chosen to do that. ================================================================= *Moulthrop, Stuart Assistant Professor of English; P.O. Box 7355 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520; 203-436-3023 My primary interest is in theory and history of narrative, especially late-modern and "postmodern" developments. My dissertation (Yale, 1986) was an investigation of problematic closure in Sterne, Dickens, and Charlotte Bronte. I'm currently working on a book concerning the status of fictional language in recent American fiction (Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston). Parallel (somewhat) to all of that, I also take an active interest in hypertext, particularly its literary applications. I've written a hypertextual treatment of Borges's "Garden of Forking Paths" in Storyspace and am presently involved in a couple of other hypertext projects, including speculations about an electronic literary review. ================================================================= *Muller, R. Andrew Associate Professor, Department of Economics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario; (416) 525-9140 x3831 I am an academic economist with professional interests in public policy, especially environmental policy, housing and industrial organization. I have published econometric studies of the pulp and paper industry's adjustment to pollution control and energy price changes, analyses of the Toronto housing market and rent control, and analyses of Canadian water export policy (with particular reference to the Grand Canal Scheme to export water from James Bay to the United States). I have also worked on simulating the effects of the proposed Canada-US free trade agreement. I have a long standing interest in politics and political philosophy. I have often been disturbed by the extent to which my discipline, Economics, tends to coarsen the public sensibilities of those who study it. I have presently (Fall, 1988) a specific interest in the nature of liberal education in to-day's universities. I chair a committee in the Faculty of Social Sciences has been struck to investigate possible changes in our undergraduate degree programme. Discussion has focussed on the nature of liberal education in the 1990s. I am trying to reconcile two views on this - an "applied social science " view which would "fix-up" current degree programs by adding courses in computer techniques, report writing, etc. and a more traditional liberal education view which would impose distributional requirements and create special courses to ensure all students received some exposure to science, literature, philosophy, and the history of thought. ================================================================= *Neu, Joyce Dept. of Speech Communication, 207 Sparks, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802, (814) 865-7365 I am an Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at Penn State University with a degree in Linguistics. I have used micro computers in teaching writing to both natives and non- natives since 1983 and have been instrumental in developing computer labs at Santa Monica College and at the U. of California, Irvine for use by humanities faculty and students. ================================================================= *Oleske, William F. Technical Assistant, Central Language Laboratory, The University, Leeds LS2 9JT, West Yorkshire, England, U.K.; Tel:Leeds (0532)- 332647 I am charged with the introduction, maintenance and development of technical support for language acquisition, foreign language text process and support in the audio-, video-, and satellite broadcast reception area I am also concerned with the development of the use of Computer Assi anguage Learning software and with non-Roman alphabet wordprocessing as a communication and teaching tool. In my post, I am the technical support for the numerous autonomous foreign language teaching departments within the University. I also maintain contacts with my equivalent colleagues throughout the U.K. and Eire. ================================================================= *Owen, David W. D. Dept of Philosophy, 213 Social Sciences Bldg, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85718 Main computing interests: display and printing of alternate character sets, especially on laser printers; text searching; computer conferencing, ================================================================= *Rhine, Michael L. Computer Operations Supervisor, Georgia Tech Research Institute, (404) 421-7694; (404) 894-7171 Background in music and performing arts (22 yrs exp) in r+r, r+b, classical and jazz (classic guitar/recorder in chamber music ensembles, bebop and standards, etc...). Avid reader: ecletic interests. 4.5 years USMC, 3rdBAT 5thMAR, 1st MARDIV as enlisted and officer (0301/2). Currently working in the computer field. No previous background. All learning OJT. Studying Mathematics w/concentration in CompSci. ================================================================= *Richman, David Theater and Dance, University of New Hampshire I am Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of New Hampshire. My principal interest is in theatrical production. For eleven years I was Director of Theater at the University of Rochester and Artistic Director of the University of Rochester Summer Theater. I have directed twenty-two productions, including "King Lear," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and "The Misanthrope." I have published several articles on connections between theatrical practice and critical inquiry. Though I do not use computers in my work, I am serious about the computer as a tool and a source of information. Being blind, I find that the computer has become one of my most important sources of information, and moreover a vital connection to the academic community. Arguably, the coming into being of computers with speech is the greatest single advance for the blind since the invention of Braille. ================================================================= *Rutherford, John RUTHERFORD@CTSTATEU Academic Computing Services Coordinator / Central Conn. State University Elihu Burritt Library / New Britain, CT 06050 / 203 827-7800 I am a librarian by profession and have become interested in academic computing subjects through work with online bibliographic services. Prior to my position at Central Connecticut I was an assistant manager of information services at the University of Petroleum & minerals in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and was involved in the implementation of the DOBIS/LIBIS automated library information system. I am interested in text recognition systems and have been a third party follower of several HUMANIST discussions in this area and look forward to becoming more involved in HUMANIST discussions. ================================================================= *Schriner, Ken Research Assistant, System Analyst, Arkansas Research and Training Center in Vocational Rehabilatation, University of Arkansas, 346 N. West Ave., Fayetteville, AR 72701; (501) 575- 3656 I am currently employed as a computer jock by ARTCVR in support of faculty research. This recent development ended a 5 year stint with the Computing Services department at this campus. While there, some of my support of faculty was in the area of humanities. Including several statistical studies of slave holdings in the state prior to the Civil War. I find the application of computers to fields like humanties quite interesting, since it is usely so different from the application in fields like engineering. I have also worked 2 years for Exxon. My role was computer support of engineers. We did large amounts of oil reservoir simulation computing. Computers used for simulation are another area of interest. I was bit by that bug during my three years of employment by the US Geological Survey as a Hydrologist. Simulation there consisted of stochastic simulation of rainfall, runoff, and sunspots. Also, some simulation of water reservoir operating schedules was performed. My goals are to obtain a wide range experience of the world, much as Thomas Jefferson did. To that end, I also brew beer. ================================================================= *Stuart, Christopher Technical Consultant, 220 CCC, Academic Computing, Cornell University 14850 (607) 255-8304 I work closely with the college of liberal arts at Cornell University and am most involved with the application of computing to course design and research. I have a B.A. in Medieval History from the University of the South (Sewanee, TN) and became interested in computing while working in the field of historic preservation in St. Augustine, Florida. My tastes, as probably is the case with most people in this group, are varied, though I would be hard pressed to decide between giving up my P.G. Wodehouse books or my bluegrass record collection. My duties as technical consultant at Cornell include managing the software lending library, consulting projects in the humanities, and teaching microcomputer applications. ================================================================= *Spaeth, Donald Arts Computing Development Officer, Computing Service, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT UK; Tel. 0532 333573 I am an historian by training, specialising in early modern British history. My research is on popular religion in 17th and 18th century England. I became involved in computing while a high school student at the University of Illinois, where I took a Latin course and subsequently became a programmer on the PLATO C.A.I. computer. While at college and graduate school, I used computers for word-processing, statistics, and dataset management, and served for a year as a Computer Proctor, assisting students and faculty in their computing. I finished at Brown University in 1985 and then worked for two years for Project Pallas at the University of Exeter, England. Pallas is a project funded by the U.K. Computer Board to teach basic computing skills to students in the Faculty of Arts (i.e., Humanities). In 1987 I moved to the University of Leeds, where I am Arts Computing Development Officer, working jointly in the Computing Service and the Faculty of Arts. My job is to be a computer expert for humanities lecturers, to serve as a contact point between the Computing Service and the Faculty of Arts, and to encourage the use of computers in research and teaching by giving courses and advice. *****END*****