Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 106.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 09:10:48 +0100
From: Stefan Sinclair <ss@huco.arts.ualberta.ca>
Subject: Re: 17.066 history in terms
Dear All,
For reasons that it would be wasteful to speculate about here, I haven't
been receiving my regular doses of Humanist in my inbox. There was a
thread started just about 10 days ago on the naming of our field
("computers and the humanities" => "computing in the humanities" =>
"humanities computing").
I think the question of how we identify ourselves is crucial, particularly
as we continue our efforts to attract the attention of people who may be
encountering the terms for the first time (institutional adminstration,
funding agencies, prospective students to our programmes, prospective
employers for our students, etc.).
Rather than engage at this point in the ongoing (and important) discussion
of what might be the most appropriate label for our activities, I'd simply
like to point out what seems to me an interesting phenomenon related to
the *teaching* of "humanities computing" at the University of Alberta. I
usually see the discipline's name abbreviated as "HC". However, at Alberta
we've gotten use to branding both the researching and teaching activities
as HuCo, which I believe has emerged directly from the need to reference
short course titles in the M.A. programme: HUCO-500, HUCO-612, etc. (ie.
the convention of 4 letter acronyms for course names). I find it
intriguing that a relatively trivial practicality of administration has
driven a reformulation of our identity. Is HuCo used anywhere else?
Stfan (Stéfan)
--Stfan Sinclair, University of Alberta Phone: (780) 492-6768, FAX: (780) 492-9106, Office: Arts 218-B Address: Arts 200, MLCS, UofA, Edmonton, AB (Canada) T6G 2E6 M.A. in Humanities Computing: http://huco.ualberta.ca/
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