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COMPUTER SCIENCE & THE HUMANITIES:ACLS/NINCH
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November 12, 1998
Digital technologies have the potential for changing, even transforming, the ways that both scientists and humanists do their work.
How can those of us practicing in the arts and humanities more effectively use computer science and technology to solve key problems in our fields? How can we feel more in command, even help in the design, of the software, tools and digital environments that we might want to use? What is it about humanities tasks and problems that are of value to computer scientists? Working more closely with computer scientists, will we be able to more powerfully conceptualize and answer the problems and tasks of our professions?
These are some of the many questions behind the Computer Science and the Humanities initiative organized by NINCH, CNI, the National Academy of Sciences and ACLS that opened with a roundtable meeting held at the National Academy of Sciences March 28, 1997.
One component of this initiative is the "Building Blocks" project, presented to the CAO at its meeting in Philadelphia in May 1998. This is conceived as preparation, both discipline by discipline as well as collectively, for deeper discussions with computer scientists and the development of workplans for joint activity. Its ambitions are both to create a deeper understanding of what our essential issues and problems are in the disciplines, as well as to create a useful platform for learned societies to discuss issues around mounting material resources in the digital environment.
As a result of our call for participants at the Spring meeting in Philadelphia and an announcement on CAO, we were able to organize a meeting of 17 representatives of 12 learned societies this July to discuss the parameters of this project.
Our outline plan is to create seven parallel workshop series, each organized by a cluster of learned societies around fields (see list below). Having agreed on the basics, the group agreed that a smaller steering committee, with one representative for each field cluster, would be responsible for the overall coordination of the series, including funding.
The steering committee met November 10 together with a computer scientist and representatives from two humanities computing centers. The outline for proceeding was generally agreed upon. A set of questions, professionally designed to elicit deeper understanding of the way that scholars, teachers and others work with their resources, will be sent to carefully selected participants. The answers will be analyzed and form the basis for the opening workshop in each field-based series. It is expected that these discussions will stimulate further discussion groups. Following a presentation of new models for thinking about humanities computing, we will propose an outline research agenda that will be fed by the opening series of discussions. The field-based workshops will then meet to consider how these will apply to particular fields and describe exemplary problems that new advances in computing could help with. A summary document will describe the process, key issues and, above all, a number of "grand challenge" problems that need to be worked on with computer scientists.
We encourage participation by other learned societies; please contact David Green or the steering committee members. Please also consult the project's webpage at http://www-ninch.cni.org/PROJECTS/ Building/1.html
with steering committee members and participating societies (as of 1/7/99)
American Historical Association
American Musicological Society
Economic History Association
Organization of American Historians
Society for the History of Technology
Middle Eastern Studies Association
American Studies Association
Renaissance Society of America
American Comparative Literature Association
Modern Language Association
Society of Dance History Scholars
American Society for Theater Research
American Academy of Religion
American Philosophical Association
American Anthropological Association
Association of American Geographers
Society for Ethnomusicology
College Art Association
Society for Cinema Studies