Digital Humanities 2007
The 19th Joint International Conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, June 4 - June 8, 2007
The 19th Joint International Conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, June 4 - June 8, 2007
This area of the site provides access to the abstracts of the conference presentations, and the abstracts of papers, posters and panels. Individual abstracts are available as PDF, XHTML, XML (TEI P4) and plain text.
You may also download the Electronic Edition, as a single (26.5MB) PDF file.
This electronic edition was created from abstracts submitted to the Program Committee, and marked up in XML by
Welcome to The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—the birthplace of ILLIAC (the first computer built and owned entirely by an educational institution), PLATO (the first online instructional program and home of the first online community), The Illiac Suite (the first piece of music produced with a computer), Project Gutenberg (the first online collection of literary texts), Mosaic (the first graphical web browser), and Richard Powers (author of Galatea 2.2 and The Gold Bug Variations). UIUC is also home to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications where computer engineers and domain experts pursue grid computing, security, visualization, datamining, scientific computing, and petascale computing. NCSA is a sponsor of this conference, along with CHASS, the new and NCSA-based Center for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. The other sponsor, and home to the local organizer, is the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, or GSLIS. GSLIS (pronounced "gislis") has the oldest doctoral program of its kind in the U.S., and it offers a professional masters program that is ranked in first place nationally, as well as an advanced graduate degree for practitioners in digital libraries and an undergraduate minor in information technology studies. GSLIS has been delivering online degree programs since 1996, and it currently enrolls half of its students in the online program. The GSLIS faculty includes some well-known names in humanities computing, including Allen Renear, past president of The Association for Computers and the Humanities.
Many people contributed to the materials that are represented in this book of abstracts. As local organizer, I would like to begin by thanking two people whose diligence and effort made this conference possible: Ray Siemens, who chaired the international program committee with great aplomb and efficiency, all the while making it look easy, and Sara Schmidt, who assisted in every aspect of the local process, from registration to submissions for review, to exhorting authors to turn in final copy of accepted abstracts, to marking up the abstracts into their final form for this book and their presentation on the Web. Sara has thrown herself into organizing this conference with a will, and she has found a way to make everything work.
So many others need to be thanked, beginning with the authors who submitted proposals to the conference in the first place, and to all of those who contributed their time and expertise to reviewing submissions to the conference: the quality of what we present at this year's conference is due to both kinds of effort. Thanks also go to the International Program Committee, who—under Ray's able leadership—vetted the outcome of the reviewing process and made the difficult final decisions on the program. I'd also like to thank Harald Weinrich, of Hamburg, Germany, developer of the ConfTool system that we used this year to manage the reviewing and registration processes: he was very helpful when we needed changes to that system, and I recommend him and ConfTool highly.
Thanks also must go to Martin Holmes, for helping us to re-use the XML/XSL-based abstract publishing system developed for the 2005 iteration of this conference, in Victoria, British Columbia, and Amit Kumar for getting that system set up under digitalhumanities.org, where it can be re-used in future years, and for tweaking the stylesheets and other aspects of that system for this year's conference. David Dubin and Kevin S. Hawkins helped with translation issues, from German and Russian, respectively, and Christian Wittern, Elisabeth Burr, Peter Liddel, Alex Bia, and others helped in extending and adapting translations in the ConfTool interface; Syd Bauman and Julia Flanders helped to answer questions about TEI encoding of the abstracts; and Hana S. Field assisted Sara in marking up those abstracts. Melissa Terras helped in rounding up information about current membership/subscribership, from Oxford University Press, and Miranda Remnek helped with bursaries for our Eastern European colleagues. Several of those were very generously paid for by Vernon Burton, out of the resources of the Center for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences here at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Some were also covered by the Associations (ACH and ALLC): this is one of the many worthwhile things that the Associations do with the income that individual subscribers provide.
I hope you enjoy your visit to Champaign-Urbana, and I hope you have a chance to take the excursions to Springfield (the Lincoln Museum and the Dana Thomas House, a Frank Lloyd Wright commission) and Allerton Park (recently declared one of the 'seven wonders of Illinois'). In between, I hope you have a stimulating and successful conference, hear many fine papers, and engage in those hallway conversations that are sometimes the most rewarding part of a small conference.
John Unsworth
Local Organizer
Planning for Digital Humanities 2007 began in earnest in the Sorbonne’s Maison de la Recherche, in July 2006, at the first conjoint conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) under the umbrella of the Association for Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO) – a meeting most certainly inspired by the collegiality, congeniality, and grace of our hosts, Liliane Gallet-Blanchard and Marie-Madeleine Martinet of CATI, the research centre for Cultures Anglophones et Technologies de l'Information. With the success of our time together in Paris as exemplar—the Parisian gathering itself modeled on successes of the past at Victoria, Göteborg, Athens, Tübingen, New York, Glasgow, Charlottesville, Debrecen, Kingston, Bergen, Santa Barbara, Washington, Tempe, Toronto, among many other notable loci for our community—near the end of a conference that we roundly acknowledged as being a high water mark for our community, we had good reason to anticipate with considerable optimism our next community event: the 2007 meeting in the ‘Paris of the midwest’, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
As this brief rehearsing of important gathering places, people key to our recent events, and the research centres kindly sponsoring our conference activity rightly begins to suggest, no conference organizing group works in isolation, nor without a helpful context. Indeed, in a community like ours, conference organization can be as much a pleasure as conference participation, for each is an activity involving the interaction of members of the community—from the conception of the annual conference theme (which often arises out of key points of focus from earlier conferences), to the breaking-in of a new conference management tool for our community (which involved absolutely everyone), to receiving and reviewing presentation proposals (involving a group numbering circa one hundred), to the conference itself (which has an impact beyond the conference attendees, eventually on thousands of interested individuals).
While we all participate, some notes of special thanks are due to our local hosts and sponsors, represented most generously in the person of John Unsworth, and to those involved in the conference assistance from which we all benefit, personified with utmost efficiency by this volume’s co-editor, Sara Schmidt. A note of especial gratitude is due to all those who so diligently participated in the review of submissions for the conference: Adrian Miles, Allen H. Renear, Amy Bruckman, Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Bethany Nowviskie, Bruce Robertson, Christian Kay, Christian Wittern, Christie Carson, Christine Ruotolo, Chuck Bush, Claire Warwick, Claus Huitfeldt, Dan Tufis, David Bearman, David G. Durand, David Gants, David Green, David L. Hoover, David S. Dubin, Doug Reside, Elisabeth Burr, Elli Mylonas, Espen S. Ore, Federico Meschini, Francisco Javier Carreras Riudavets, Gabriel Egan, Gary F. Simons, Gary Shawver, Hanno Biber, Harald Baayen, Hazel Gardiner, Hugh Craig, J. Stephen Downie, Jay David Bolter, Jean Anderson, John Bradley, John Dawson, John Lavagnino, Joseph DiNunzio, Joseph Rudman, Julia Flanders, Karen Wikander, Kim Plofker, Lars Johnsen, László Hunyadi, Lisa Hopkins, Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen, Lou Burnard, Lyman Gurney, Manfred Thaller, Marie-Maddeleine Martinet, Mark Olsen, Marshall Soules, Martha Nell Smith, Martin Holmes, Martyn Jessop, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Matthew Zimmerman, Melissa Terras, Michael Neuman, Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Nancy Ide, Natalia (Natasha) Smith, Neil R. Fraistat, Øyvind Eide, Patrick Conner, Patrick Juola, Paul Caton, Paul Joseph Spence, Penelope Gurney, Perry Willett, Ray Siemens, Richard Gartner, Richard Giordano, Ron Van den Branden, Sebastian Rahtz, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Susan Hockey, Susan Schreibman, Syd Bauman, Tanya Clement, Wendell Piez, Willard McCarty, William Kretzschmar, William Winder, Worthy N. Martin, and Zenón Hernández Figueroa.
With very best wishes for a pleasant and fruitful time together!
Ray Siemens
Chair, International Program Committee