7.0322 Networked Fellowships (1/274)
Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Tue, 30 Nov 1993 17:51:38 EST
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 7, No. 0322. Tuesday, 30 Nov 1993.
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 1993 13:25:30 -0500 (EST)
From: Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
Subject: Networked Fellowships
Opportunities for Fellowships at the Institute
for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities was
established in 1992 to provide researchers in the arts and
humanities with an opportunity to employ sophisticated
technical support and advanced computer technology in the
service of their scholarship. The Institute encourages
collaborative research proposals from humanists on the
internet, and it can offer creative technologists a broad
range of research needs and opportunities. The Institute's
Fellowships are open-ended, continuing until the termination
of the research for which they are awarded, but in all cases
the Institute's technical consulting is intended to be
concentrated in the first year, with the projects becoming
more or less self-sufficient after that time.
Call for Proposals:
Each year the Institute awards several fellowships for
computer-assisted research in the humanities. Members of
the arts and humanities faculties of the University of
Virginia are eligible to apply for On-Campus Fellowships;
successful applicants will be designated by the selection
committee as Fellows in Residence or Associate Fellows.
Faculty at other institutions, technologists with an
interest in the work of the Institute, and independent
scholars on the internet are eligible to apply (individually
or in groups) for Networked Associate Fellowships. All
those selected as Fellows of the Institute are expected to
publish a research report, via the Institute's networked
publishing facilities, at the end of the first fellowship
year. All proposals should address the questions on the
form at the end of this announcement.
Facilities:
The Institute maintains a suite of offices on the third
floor, west wing of Alderman Library. Each Fellow in
Residence is provided with an RS6000 workstation, and all
on-campus Fellows are given access to X-stations, laptops,
scanners, PCs, fax machine, printers, and telephone service.
All Fellows, on-campus or networked, have the use of the
suite of networked services maintained by the Institute:
these include an anonymous ftp site, a gopher server, a
World-Wide Web server, Listserv, and real-time virtual
conferencing facilties (in the form of a MOO). In addition,
the Institute maintains nearly 300 gigabytes of data storage
space for use by its Fellows. Most importantly, the
Institute gives its Fellows access to one another and to the
accumulated expertise of its technical staff.
History and Goals of the Institute:
The Institute was founded in 1992 with a major grant from
I.B.M. and a commitment of support from the University of
Virginia. The Institute is unique among humanities
computing facilities for its combination of a broadly
interdisciplinary charge with a project-centered and
research-oriented plan of work. In addition, it is unusual
for its success at bridging the gap between the two cultures
of academe: from its inception, the Institute has depended
on the synergy of computer science and humanities; its
fellows meet regularly with computer science faculty and
graduate students, and they confer and collaborate on a
daily basis with the Institute's staff of computer
professionals.
The principal goal of the Institute is to see that humanists
have the tools, the training, and the support to make the
most of computer technology. In part, this entails a
consolidation of existing facilities in order to produce an
integrated environment for the use of networked information
resources. In addition, the Institute's support is often
concentrated on converting information into electronic form
and addressing issues of standards and formats that arise in
the process of that conversion. Finally, where existing
software does not meet the needs of scholars in the
humanities, the Institute's technical staff will work with
the Institute's Fellows to produce broadly useful software
tools.
The Institute also addresses itself, wherever possible, to
topics and challenges of general importance for electronic
scholarship across the disciplines. These include (but are
by no means limited to) testing methods for collaborative
networked research, peer-review, and editing, investigating
the possibilities for networked hypermedia archives,
developing practical models for cost recovery in networked
scholarly publishing, exploring the creative potential of
the networks, negotiating cooperation with the private
sector and with government, studying the implications of the
digital library, and addressing the impact of electronic
media on intellectual property, with regard to both the
author's right to credit and the user's right to access.
On-Campus Fellows:
Fellows in Residence:
Fellows in Residence receive office space, teaching release
time, partial support for a graduate research assistant,
computer equipment, software, and maximum technical support.
Past Fellows in this category are Jerome McGann and Hoyt
Duggan (Dept. of English), Ed Ayers (Dept. of History), and
John Dobbins (Dept. of Art). These Fellows have embarked on
ambitious, multi-year projects that will, in many cases,
redefine scholarship in their respective disciplines. Much
of the work of the Fellowship year is devoted to project
design, collection of primary data, digitizing of analog
information, and testing of technical and methodological
approaches. Fellows in Residence become associate fellows
after the first year.
Associate Fellows:
Associate fellows receive equipment, software, and technical
support appropriate to the project. Past fellows in this
category are Ellen Contini-Morava (Anthropology), Bernie
Carlson and Mike Gorman (Engineering Humanities), and Duane
Osheim (History). Associate fellows often come to the
Institute earlier or later in the development of their
projects than do full fellows: what this means is that their
projects often no longer need, or are not yet ready for, the
intensive technical support and equipment provided for
Fellows in Residence. Associate fellows are provided with
consulting on project design and on technical issues, are
invited to attend Institute staff meetings with the Fellows
in Residence and the technical staff, and are given access
to a wide variety of Institute-maintained facilities.
Associate Fellows retain their status until the completion
of their projects or until they are selected as Fellows in
Residence.
Networked Associate Fellows:
Networked Associate Fellows receive access to Institute
facilities via the internet, project design consultation,
and support for a wide range of software facilities
(described below) for collaborative networked scholarship
and networked publishing. Scholars may apply for these
fellowships individually or as workgroups. The Institute
particularly encourages applications involving open-systems
or unix-based projects, projects that require large storage
facilities for text and image data, projects that would
benefit from collaborative editing facilities, and projects
that aim to publish their results with the assistance of a
university press.
The Institute also invites applications from technologists
interested in the work of the Institute. At the moment, our
research technical development priorities include (but are
not limited to) the implementation of SGML in networked
applications, World-Wide Web (especially the development of
the Web's annotation facilities), MUDs and their scholarly
uses, distributed databases, query-by-example, and optical
character recognition.
Networked Associate Fellows retain their status until the
completion of their projects, or until they or the Institute
find outside funding to bring them on campus as Fellows in
Residence.
Publishing:
Through World-Wide Web, the Institute can provide the means
for publishing networked hypermedia. The Web is platform-
independent, which means that it can be accessed from Macs,
DOS machines, or Unix workstations. Using the Web, the
Institute publishes its own technical/research reports, and
it can permit scholars to share their research among limited
working groups, or to publish it for the general public. In
the latter instance, we encourage scholars to work with
university presses, and we hope to provide a workable,
realistic model for scholarly production and non-profit cost
recovery in this medium. As a first step in this direction,
a World-Wide Web version of Postmodern Culture is now
available on the Institute's server,
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/home.html.
Seminars:
From time to time, the Institue hosts visiting lecturers,
roundtable discussions, and networked conferences.
Information on these events is available through the
Institue's WWW server. If you have a suggestion for a topic
or speaker, please let us know.
Deadlines:
Applications for fellowships in the 1994-95 academic year
are due by January 31st, 1994. Decisions of the selection
committee will be made by the end of February. Applications
should answer the questions listed on the form supplied
below.
Information:
For further information concerning the Institute and its
research, please contact us in one of the following ways:
electronic mail: iath@virginia.edu
World-Wide Web http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/ho
me.html
U.S. Post: Institute for Advanced Technology in the
Humanities
Alderman Library
Charlottesville, VA 22903
MOO: hero.village.virginia.edu 8888
Voice: (804) 924-4527
Fax: (804) 982-2363
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Fellowship Application: Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities
Deadline: January 31st, 1993
Applications may be submitted by e-mail (iath@virginia.edu), U.S.
Mail (Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville,
VA 22903), or U.Va messenger mail.
(Note: Scholars applying for Networked Associate Fellows,
as part of a workgroup, should fill out the "workgroup" line
consistently. Others may leave this line blank.)
Name:
Dept.:
University:
Workgroup:
E-mail:
Phone:
Postal:
Applicants should respond to each of the following items in their
Fellowship proposals, and may include whatever other supporting
information they wish to provide.
1) Please describe the research that you would pursue if you
were granted a fellowship at the Institute.
2) Please describe the role of information technology in your
project.
3) Please suggest ways in which the Institute's tool-building
or data-gathering efforts, on behalf of your project, might
also benefit the research or teaching of other scholars.
4) Please list any specialized equipment, software, analog-to-
digital conversion, or electronic information that you think
will be necessary to the successful completion of your
project, and estimate the cost of these items.
5) What other grant or teaching-release support have you
secured, or do you plan to seek, for this project?
6) What other electronic research are you aware of that is
relevant to your own project, either in content or in
method?
Please include the following with your application:
a current curriculum vitae.
(on-campus applicants only:) A statement of support from
your department's Chair, agreeing to provide you with at
least half-time teaching release and ten hours a week from a
graduate assistant, should you receive a Resident