7.0359 CETH Summer Seminar (1/334)

Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Tue, 21 Dec 1993 16:11:09 EST

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 7, No. 0359. Tuesday, 21 Dec 1993.

Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1993 11:28:45 -0500 (EST)
From: CHRISTINE BOHLEN <CETH@zodiac.rutgers.edu>
Subject: CETH 1994 Summer Seminar

CENTER FOR ELECTRONIC TEXTS IN THE HUMANITIES

Electronic Texts in the Humanities: Methods and Tools

The Third Annual Summer Seminar

at Princeton University, New Jersey
June 19 - July 1, 1994

organized by
The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities, Princeton and
Rutgers
with the co-sponsorship of
the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto


The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH) is again
offering an intensive two-week seminar in June 1994. The seminar will
address a wide range of challenges and opportunities that electronic
texts and software offer to teachers, scholars and librarians in the
humanities. Discussions on the capture, markup, retrieval,
presentation, transformation, and analysis of electronic text will
prepare students for extensive hands-on experience with illustrative
software, e.g., TACT, Micro-OCP, Dynatext, SGML tools, and hypertext.
Several large textual collections will be demonstrated so that
participants may make informed evaluations of their significance in
the light of current and future technologies. Approaches to markup,
from ad hoc schemes to the systematic design of the Text Encoding
Initiative, will be surveyed and considered.

The focus of the Seminar will be practical and methodological, with
the immediate aim of assisting participants in their own teaching,
research, and advising. It will be concerned with the demonstrable
benefits of using electronic texts, with typical problems and how to
solve them, and with the ways in which software fits or can be adapted
to common methods of textual study. Participants will be expected to
work on coherent projects, preferably of their own devising, and will
be given the opportunity to present them at the end of the seminar.

Throughout the Seminar, the instructors will provide assistance with
designing projects, locating sources for texts and software, and
solving practical problems. Ample computing facilities will be
available 24 hours per day. A small library of essential articles and
books in humanities computing will be on hand to supplement printed
seminar materials, which include an extensive bibliography.

Special lectures will describe current research in the field and
address research topics, as well as the role of the library in the use
of electronic texts.

The Seminar is intended for faculty, students, librarians, technical
advisers, and academic administrators with direct responsibilities for
humanities computing support. It assumes basic computing experience
but not necessarily with its application to academic research and
teaching. The number of participants will be limited to 30.


Provisional Schedule

Week 1, June 19-24

Sunday, June 19. Registration, reception and introductions

Monday, June 20. The electronic text

a.m. What electronic texts are and where to find them; survey of
existing inventories, archives, and other current resources.
History of computer-assisted text analysis in the
humanities. Introduction to simple concordancing with MTAS,
including practical session.

p.m. Creating and capturing texts in electronic form; keyboard
entry vs. optical scanning. Demonstration of optical
character-recognition technology. Introduction to text
encoding, surveying ad hoc methods, e.g. COCOA,
WordCruncher, TLG beta code; problems of these methods.
Practical exercise in deciding what to encode in typical
texts.

Tuesday, June 21. Concordancing

a.m. A focussed look at computer-assisted concordance generation;
types of concordances, their specific advantages and
disadvantages. Alphabetization, character sequences,
sorting, and forms of presentation. Introduction to
Micro-OCP; practical session in its use.

p.m. Review of other concordancing programs. Further work on
concordancing with Micro-OCP.

Wednesday, June 22. The interactive concordance

a.m. Indexed, interactive retrieval vs. batch concordance
generation. Textual problems and interpretative approaches
particularly suitable to an interactive system; the
continuing use of concordances in hardcopy. Preparation of
text for indexed retrieval; differing roles of markup and
external "queries"; kinds of displays and their augmentation
through post-processing. Introduction to TACT.

p.m. Practical work using TACT: simple markup, compilation of a
textual database, and methods of inquiry.

Thursday, June 23. Stylistics; SGML

a.m Stylistic comparisons and authorship studies using
concordance tools. Case studies, e.g. Federalist Papers,
Kenny on Aristotle, Burrows on Jane Austen. Introduction to
and overview of corpus linguistics.

p.m. Introduction to the Standard Generalized Markup Language
(SGML) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Document
structure and SGML elements. Document type declarations.
SGML entities and their uses: character representation,
boilerplate text, file management. Introduction to TEI Core
tags and base tags for prose. Group tagging of examples
using TEI tags.

Friday, June 24. SGML and TEI

a.m. The TEI Header: documentation for electronic texts. The file
description; the encoding description; the text profile; the
revision history. Overview of the TEI DTDs: base tag sets,
additional tag sets, and auxiliary document types.

p.m. Using TEI in practice. Overview of available commercial and
public-domain software. Creating TEI texts; validation;
processing. Tools for processing SGML texts: commercial and
public-domain. Practical session creating and validating
TEI-conformant texts.


Week 2, June 27 - July 1

Monday, June 27. Scholarly editions

a.m. Overview of tools for preparing critical editions.
Introduction to Collate. Cladistics and database analysis of
corpora of variants. Preparing electronic editions.
Introduction to digitization of images.

p.m. Electronic publication. Discussion of methods and
implications. Role of Dynatext in publishing editions.

Tuesday, June 28. Electronic Dictionaries

a.m. The electronic dictionary; from machine-readable dictionary
to computational lexicon. What the New OED and other online
dictionaries can do for the scholar. Uses of lexical
knowledge bases in text retrieval. Building a simple online
lexicon with Tact.

p.m. Individual project work.

Wednesday, June 29. Hypertext

a.m. Development of hypertext and hypermedia for the humanities.
Techniques of presentation and organization of hypertextual
material. Comparative survey of major hypertextual systems
(e.g., Hypercard, Toolbook, Storyspace), and their
advantages and limitations for humanities material.

p.m. Demonstration of Perseus and discussion of how it is built.
Demonstration and discussion of hypertexts such as In
Memoriam.

Thursday, June 30. Evaluation; Projects

a.m. Discussion on the limitations of existing software. Advanced
analytical tools not commonly available, e.g. pattern
recognizers, lemmatization systems, morphological analyzers,
parsers; overview of these. The contributions of
computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, and
where research in these areas is headed. Examination of some
existing resources.

p.m. Presentation of participants' projects. Banquet.

Friday, July 1.

a.m. Presentation of participants' projects.

p.m. Concluding discussion of basic questions. What from a
scholarly and methodological perspective is to be gained?
What are the probable effects on research and teaching? What
can one learn from the collision of automatic methods with
intuitive perceptions? What it is the role of humanities
computing: merely an efficient facilitator of traditional
work or a fundamental component for pursuing new questions?
Where do we go from here with software, and with its
application? How can the machine better assist us in
educating the imagination?


The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities

The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities was established by
Rutgers and Princeton Universities in October 1991 to provide a
national focus for those who are involved in the creation,
dissemination and use of electronic texts in the humanities. CETH's
mission is to advance scholarship in the humanities by the use of high
quality electronic texts. CETH's major activities are: (1) cataloguing
existing electronic texts within the Rutgers Inventory of
Machine-Readable Texts in the Humanities which is held on RLIN (2)
providing access via the Internet to well-defined collections of good
quality SGML-encoded humanities electronic texts and using these texts
to act as a testbed for research on their "uses and users" (3) the
CETH Summer Seminar. CETH publishes a newsletter twice per year and
provides other support facilities. CETH is supported by the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the
Booth Ferris Foundation and the New Jersey Committee for the
Humanities.

Instructors

The seminar will be taught by Susan Hockey and Willard McCarty, with
assistance from C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (SGML and TEI), Peter Robinson
(electronic editions), Elli Mylonas and David Durand (hypertext), and
staff of Computing and Information Technology, Princeton.

David Durand has worked with hypermedia systems for several years,
specializing in literary applications, version management, and
persistent linkage. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Computer
Science at Boston University. He is an active member of the Text
Encoding Initiative and the HyTime committee, and has served as an
advisor to several hypertext projects. He helped organize the Brown
Computing in the Humanities User Group and has given several talks
there and elsewhere on hypertext systems, linguistic software, and
revision maintenance systems.

Susan Hockey is Director of the Center for Electronic Texts in the
Humanities. Before moving to the USA in October 1991, she spent 16
years at Oxford University Computing Service where her most recent
position was Director of the Computers in Teaching Initiative Centre
for Textual Studies. She has taught courses on humanities computing
for eighteen years and has given numerous guest lectures on various
aspects of computing in the humanities. She is the author of A Guide
to Computer Applications in the Humanities, SNOBOL Programming for the
Humanities, and the Micro-OCP manual as well as numerous articles on
humanities computing and has been Chair of the Association for
Literary and Linguistic Computing since 1984. She is a member of the
Steering Committee of the Text Encoding Initiative.

Willard McCarty has been active in humanities computing since 1977.
With its founding Director, Ian Lancashire, he helped to set up the
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto, of
which he is now the Assistant Director. He was the founding editor of
Humanist, the principal electronic seminar for computing humanists,
and has edited several other publications in the field. He regularly
gives talks, papers, and lectures throughout North America and Europe.
Since 1990 he has taught a series of graduate courses in humanities
computing at Toronto. Willard McCarty took his Ph.D. in English
literature in 1984; his current literary research is in classical
studies, especially the Metamorphoses of Ovid. He is working on a
heavily-encoded electronic edition of that poem, from which will be
generated a forthcoming reference book, An Analytical Onomasticon to
the Metamorphoses of Ovid.

Elli Mylonas is a Research Associate in Classics at Harvard
University, and was the Managing Editor of the Perseus Project where
her responsibilities included the creation and structuring of the
textual component of the project, and working together with the user
interface designers and documentation specialists. She is also the
project leader for Pandora, a Macintosh search program for the TLG and
PHI disks. Mylonas is a founding member and one of the two organizers
of CHUG (Computing in the Humanities User's Group), a humanities
computing seminar that has been meeting biweekly at Brown University
for the last 4 years. She is also on the Text Representation Committee
of the Text Encoding Initiative, where she has worked on identifying
SGML structures for tagging reference systems, drama and verse in
literary texts. She has published and spoken on hypertext, descriptive
markup and literary texts, and the use of computers in education and
has co-taught tutorials on "Teaching with Hypertext" at the Hypertext
meetings in San Antonio and Milan (1991, 1992).

Peter Robinson is Executive Officer for the Canterbury Tales Project,
which aims over a ten-year period to issue machine-readable
transcripts of the 88 manuscripts and pre-1500 printed editions of
the Canterbury Tales, together with analyses and computer images of
each manuscript page. He is the developer of Collate, a widely-used
computer collation program, and head of the Text Encoding Initiative
Working Group on Textual Criticism. He has edited Old Norse poetic
texts, has published on matters relating to computer-assisted textual
editing and on digitization of manuscript images, and acts as a
consultant to several large editorial projects. He is based at the
Oxford University Centre for Humanities Computing.

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen studied Germanic medieval literature in the
comparative literature program at Stanford University; since 1980 he
has been working to bring computing technology to bear on problems of
textual research. In 1985 and 1986, he served as a consultant for
humanities computing in the Princeton University Computer Center;
since 1987 he has worked at the academic computer center at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is now a senior research
programmer. He is a member of the Steering Committee, and the editor
in chief, of the Text Encoding Initiative.

Fees

The cost of participating in this Summer Seminar will be $995,
including tuition, use of computer facilities, and lunch at Princeton
for the two weeks, and banquet and reception. Students pay a reduced
rate of $845. Student accommodation is available at a cost of
approximately $25 per night. CETH will also assist successful
applicants in finding hotel accommodations. There will be 24-hour
access to networked microcomputers in the student accommodation
throughout the seminar.

Application Procedure

To apply for participation in this Summer Seminar, submit a one-page
statement of interest. The statement should indicate (1) how
participation in the Seminar would be relevant for your teaching,
research, advising or administrative work, and possibly that of your
colleagues; (2) what project you would like to undertake during the
Seminar, or what area of the humanities you would most like to
explore; and (3) the extent of your computing experience. Applications
must be attached to a cover sheet specifying your name, current
institutional affiliation and position, postal and e-mail addresses,
and phone and fax numbers, as available, as well as natural language
interest and computing experience. Currently enrolled students must
also include a photocopy of a valid student ID. E-mail submissions
should have a subject line `Summer Seminar Application'. The statement
must be received by the reviewing committee, consisting of members of
the Center's Governing Board, by FEBRUARY 9, 1994, at the address
below. Those who have been selected to attend will be notified by
March 9, 1994. Payment will be requested at this time.

Summer Seminar 1994
Center for Electronic phone: (908) 932-1384
Texts in the Humanities fax: (908) 932-1386
169 College Avenue bitnet: ceth@zodiac
New Brunswick, NJ 08903 internet: ceth@zodiac.rutgers.edu
U.S.A.