Date: Sat, 01 May 1999 07:36:47 +0100
From: Elisabeth Burr <he229bu@unidui.uni-duisburg.de>
Subject: VERY URGENT: help needed!
Dear colleagues of Humanities Computing,
Our university is facing a very heavy cut in posts (167). It has been proposed
that Romance studies should go. At the moment a rescue plan is being put for-
ward which, however, excludes Italian studies completely. Italian is
considered, by my collegues in the Romance department to be a minor (in
some respects inferior) language. But, as you all know, above all inside
the Italian department humanities computing has been pushed forward. This
is because, despite being a specialist in Romance linguistics, my base is
the Department of Italian. If the Italian department is closed all the
work in:
- corpus building: Italian, French and Spanish newspaper corpus 1994; the
Italian newspaper corpus 1989 part of which you can get from the Oxford
Text Archive or on the CD of ECI,
- computer aided teaching of the linguistics of the Romance languages (some of
you have seen my presentation in Edinburgh or at King's; you might also have
a look at:
http://www.uni-duisburg.de/FB3/ROMANISTIK/PERSONAL/Burr/burr.htm
or at our semester program under
http://www.uni-duisburg.de/VV/ss99/iv-0303.htm
in order to see who is trying to use, if at all, the media at our disposal ),
- on-line computer aided textual analysis:
http://www.uni-duisburg.de/FB3/ROMANISTIK/PERSONAL/Burr/humcomp/tacthome.htm
(by the way the web pages of our department themselves are my own doing:
http://www.uni-duisburg.de/FB3/ROMANISTIK/)
- collaboration with ACO*HUM ecc. will be closed down, too.
If there is anything in the above you consider worthwhile, I would like to
urge you to send an e-mail of protest to our Rector:
Prof. Dr. Wolff
rector@verwaltung.uni-duisburg.de
or if you prefer to send a fax:
An den
Rektor
der Gerhard-Mercator-Universitaet Duisburg
Prof. Dr. Wolff
+49 203 379 3500
urging him to seriously consider the consequences of closing down the only
department at Duisburg University which has made a contribution to the
development of good practice in Humanities Computing.
As the decision of closure will be taken the 7th of May, I urge you to send
such an e-mail as soon as possible and by all means by the 6th of May.
For those of you who are involved in literary studies I would like to add
that a landmark History of Italian literature has just been published by
the head of the Italian department, Prof. Dr. Manfred Hardt.
I thank you all in advance for your support
Elisabeth Burr
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
PD Drin. Elisabeth Burr
FB 3/Romanistik Gerhard-Mercator-Universitaet GH
Geibelstrasse 41 47048 Duisburg
+49 203 3791957 Elisabeth.Burr@uni-duisburg.de
http://www.uni-duisburg.de/FB3/ROMANISTIK/PERSONAL/Burr/burr.htm
Editor of:
http://www.uni-duisburg.de/FB3/ROMANISTIK/home.html
http://www.uni-duisburg.de/FB3/SILFI/home.html
http://www.uni-duisburg.de/FB3/DRV/home.html
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Humanist Discussion Group
Information at <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
=========================================================================