COMPUTER SCIENCE & THE HUMANITIES: CONFERENCE SERIES

DRAFT PROPOSAL FOR AN ANNUAL CONFERENCE SERIES

February 1999

Background

This proposal originates from the Steering Committee for Computer Science and the Humanities. The committee, with representatives from the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council; the Coalition for Networked Information; the American Council of Learned Societies; and the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage, has been convened to bring together stakeholders in the computer sciences and humanities communities to foster collaboration that promotes the application of information technology to the understanding of the human record.

Goals for a Conference Series

A conference would be held annually for three years. This approach is modeled on the valuable experience conducted for five years (1991-96) jointly by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the American Association of University Presses (AAUP). In a series of annual conferences, participants shared their experience and lessons learned (positive and negative) from projects underway. The program extrapolated from the participants' knowledge broader questions of usage, institutional needs and constraints, and the tensions between the communities of librarians and publishers. After five years, these shared conversations had established a high, common level of understanding and trust for future collaborations.

Conference goals will include:

• laying the groundwork for thoughtful integration, on both policy and programmatic levels, for educational use of technology
• facilitating a "take-off" from the current, rather limited, campus-based experiments to larger collaborations and projects (e.g., integration and standardization of formats and search engines, etc.)
• enabling funders to work with creators and users to determine criteria and priorities for gauging the most effective experiments being proposed, and for planning how best to make investments
• demonstrating exemplary applications in the humanities and computer and engineering sciences for research and teaching purposes, enabling attendees to "leapfrog" on existing knowledge and experience when designing their own projects
• linking discussions in a variety of fields/disciplines, and among a variety of institutional actors (campuses, societies, etc.)
• training the next generation of scholars in both the broader visions/framework of cross-disciplinary collaborations as well as methods relevant for narrower applications of academic technology
• creating opportunities for peer learning in several formats (e.g., formal presentations, informal "fair" demonstrations with hands-on interactivity, etc.)
• providing a common and ongoing forum for computing specialists and humanists
• providing a dissemination vehicle for the findings of the NINCH Building Blocks projects, which are identifying discipline-specific intellectual issues, problems, and technology requirements
• facilitating communication and dissemination about all of the above

Criteria for Invitation/Selection of Projects

A program committee composed of researchers and faculty in the field as well as representatives of the Steering Committee would select keynote speakers and panelists and develop criteria for selection of projects for breakout sessions and the project "fair." To avoid the "my database and I" approach of many conferences, which often entail descriptions of narrowly constrained niche applications, the program committee will look for new, proven, and emerging resources that have methodological significance.

This significance can be evident in two ways: the technologies in question can reveal or reinforce important aspects of traditional interpretative methods, or they may have potential to influence or alter received methods of teaching and research and challenge the prevailing disciplinary canon. The distinction between reinforced tradition and new or recombinant methodologies may, in some cases, be blurred in quite interesting fashion.

In either case, the program committee will ask conference participants to focus on the implications of the showcased projects, not just their technological components, as a means to enrich the understanding of these new tools and resources in the hope of advancing interdisciplinary collaboration.

Other selection criteria will include:

• representation from a variety of humanities and computer science disciplines
• representation of a variety of materials and uses
• representation of a broad range of project focus, e.g. teaching and learning, archiving, economic models
• representation of different institutional bases and sectors of collaboration

Rationale for a Three-Year Project of Annual Conferences

A annual conference of sustained activities which are routinely published, analyzed, and built upon, would enable those planning new projects in higher education to adjust their plans based on the experiences of others from year-to-year; establish trust and shared values as a base for future collaborations and policy-making among the constituencies served by the conference; inculcate technical standards; enable project planners to escape from single moment in technological developments; foster collaboration across humanities and computer science as a legitimate and necessary aspect of higher education.

Sample Agenda

DAY ONE		DAY TWO
AM	PM	AM	PM
Welcome	Panel focusing on successful collaborations of various types (e.g., Living Cell, Carnegie-Mellon; Semantic Landscapes, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)	Panel or keynote: : Salient changes in methodologies in the humanities	Report on the NINCH/ACLS Building Blocks conferences and what their findings imply for future humanities/computer sciences projects
Keynote on the integration of humanities computing projects into the higher education infrastructure; connections between policy and program	Project presentations (breakout sessions)	Panel on projects that did not work as planned (e.g., AALN; CETH)	Small groups discuss and develop criteria and priorities for funding for use by funders, scholarly societies, and campuses
Project presentations [breakout sessions] e.g. AMICO; Internet Scout project; Optimization research	Project fair	Project presentations [breakout sessions]; (e.g., Valley of the Shadow, UVa; Imaging projects, Santa Cruz) )	Small groups report back to full group
		Panel or presentation on funding issues and charge to small groups	Wrap-up: Potential Areas of Most Productive Convergence of Humanities andComputer Science

Potential Constituencies to be Served

• ACLS societies, journal publishers and editors/ ACLS organization itself
• humanists and computing researchers/faculty
• K-12, and higher education organizations
• project creators
• funding agencies, with an objective to induce new collaborations among traditionally separate agencies (Carnegie, Mellon, NEH, with NSF, Rockefeller, NRC, and others)
• Digital Library Initiative managers and developers
• graduate students
• campus administrators (level above centers and library units that create projects)
• national organizations -- AAU, NASULGC, etc.
• museums, historical societies, others experimenting with technology for public education

Rationale for a Three-Year Project of Annual Conferences

• based on AAUP/ARL model of 5 years of joint conferences presenting analyses and best practices to librarians and academic presses
• benefits on on-going basis from regular updates for projects underway;
• ability of those planning new projects to adjust their plans based on the experiences of others from year-to-year
• establishment of trust and shared values as a base for future collaborations and policy-making among the constituencies served by the conferences
• leverages conversations in this venue with those held by each constituency in other venues; results of those follow-up conversations can also be brought back to this context
• by moving beyond a single conference, enables project planners to escape from single moment in technological developments
• series of meetings becomes, in itself, a form of dissemination (through presentations at each annual conference, and reporting on those presentations in constituent publications and web sites)

Administration of the Conferences

The Steering Committee will establish a representative program committee which will assume responsibility for conference administration

• hotel or conference center contract
• meeting logistics
• publicity
• registration
• management of student scholarships
• speaker care
• on-site management
• dissemination products

The conference site should include a state-of-the-art facility where technology demonstrations (fair) could take place. Some suggested sites are Rice, Berkeley, U.Va., George Mason, Stanford, and Georgetown.

Dissemination Plan

A dissemination committee would advise on the development of significant products and work with their constituencies to develop products that would be particularly effective with different audiences. Products might include:

• conference proceedings/conference report
• a website of links to all projects presented in breakout sessions and in the project fair
• a publication on "best practices"
• a publication on funding priorities and criteria for computing and humanities projects
• network transmission of some parts of the conference (e.g. webcast)

Evaluation Plan

The Steering Committee or Program Committee will develop an evaluation form to be completed by conference attendees. It will measure the perceived value of the conference and provide feedback on content or structural changes that might improve the program in the following year.