COMPUTERS, LITERATURE AND PHILOLOGY
An international seminar

Themes

Encoding of linear and non-linear document sources: Theory and practice. Text encoding has been the central problem of humanities computing for years. However, today the question is not only how to achieve a standard for representing texts, but also how to structure (concept mapping) and encode different sources of information (images, sounds, etc.). What happens to structured information once it has left its paper medium and become electronic? What does this process imply for transmission of information? In this session, apart from theoretical papers, there will be discussions on present conventions (such as SGML, HTML, XML, etc.) and future developments.

Computers and Philology: digital realisation of critical editions and the possibilities of the WWWeb. New definitions of the concept of the editio critica or abandonment of the concept of authorship? The epistemology of text and the problems of text transmission will be at the heart of this session, which will evaluate current projects and examine the prospects opened up by the Internet.

Text analysis and virtual data-banks: new definitions of textual criticism in the light of literary computing. How information technology modifies the concept of source and interpretation, challenging traditional historical disciplines. Presentation of projects and applications in progress.

Hype or Hypertext? Critical evaluation of the theoretical underpinning of the North American school (George Landow, Michael Joyce, Ted Nelson,etc.), and assessment of the place of hypertext theory in the history of books and writing. Review of the more promising products available on line, and investigation of the educational possibilities of hypertext in the study of languages and literature.

Call for papers (final form)

The seminar, conducted in English, aims to bring together a heterogeneous but significant group of scholars in order to promote lively and informal discussion on the future of philology, writing, and literary analysis in the digital support era. The conference will be interdisciplinary and contributions are welcome from the fields of literature, philology, writing and composition, linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, etc.

Keynote speakers include: Lou Burnard (Oxford University); Giuseppe Gigliozzi (University of Rome); Willard McCarty (King's College, London); Francisco Marcos Marin (Universidad Autónoma, Madrid); David Robey (Manchester University); Mirko Tavoni (Universitàdi Pisa); Antonio Zampolli (CNR, Pisa). Prof. Sir Stewart Sutherland, Principal of the University of Edinburgh will give the opening address.

Contributions should be 20 minutes in length and proposals in the form of a 500 word abstract (preferably written in HTML) should be submitted via e-mail by June 10th to:
info@digitalvariants.org.

All proposals will be reviewed, and authors of accepted papers will be notified by July 15th. Abstracts of papers will be published on the seminar web site.

For further details contact:
Computers, Literature and Philology

Check this site regularly for updated information on the seminar programme, venue and timetable, or send enquiries by email to: itaacma@srv0.arts.ed.ac.uk or the e-mail address mentioned above.

Conference fees: £35 per person (academic) / £25 (associated institutions) / £15 (post-graduate). This includes a buffet lunch on 8 September.

Note: Members of the University of Edinburgh are welcome to attend individual sessions without charge.

Venue: Edinburgh University, Adam Ferguson Building, Room G10, George Square.

Accommodation: A limited number of single rooms are available at Pollock Halls of Residence, University of Edinburgh, for 7, 8 September at £24 (20.35 + VAT) per night. Early booking advisable: contact Dr Anna Middleton at itaacma@srv0.arts.ed.ac.uk.

Contributors

Lou Burnard is a leading figure in the Computers and Humanities field, and among the founders of the Text Encoding Initiative, the most important project for the development of guidelines for the preparation and interchange of electronic texts. He is currently Manager of the Humanities Computing Unit at Oxford University Computing Services.

Elisabeth Burr, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the Gerhard-Mercator-Universität GH Duisburg (Germany), has been working in the field of Computers and the Linguistics of Romance languages since 1989 and has just been co-opted on to the ALLC Committee at the ALLC/ACH Conference in Debrecen (Hungary). Details of her research and teaching interests can be found at: http://www.uni-duisburg.de/FB3/ROMANISTIK/PERSONAL/Burr/burr.htm

Fabio Ciotti, University of Turin and CRILet, University of Rome "La Sapienza". Expert on text encoding and literary theorist, Fabio Ciotti currently teaches courses on Multimedia Publishing at IULM University in Milan and co-authored with Marco Calvo, Gino Roncaglia and Marco Zela Internet '96, '97 and '98 the most popular Italian guide to the Internet published by Laterza.

Licia Calvi is currently Research Associate at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, group of Italian, at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). She is involved in ICT research, namely on its impact upon users cognitive demands and skills while interacting with the technology (Human-Computer Interaction). More recently she used ICT to design a Web-based course on business Italian and is now developing a course on Italian contemporary literature and hypertext ("L’ipertesto nella letteratura contemporanea: Calvino e gli altri").

Giuseppe Gigliozzi, University of Rome "La Sapienza", Department of Linguistic & Literary Sciences. Director of the CRILet, a research centre for literary computing at University of Rome. Dr Giuseppe Gigliozzi's scholarship centres on narrativity, text analysis and encoding, and literary theory. He has published a number of book-length contributions in the field of computers and the humanities.

Massimo Guerrieri (University of Rome "La Sapienza" , Department of Linguistic & Literary Sciences) holds a "Laurea" degree in Contemporary Italian Literature and works as project assistant at the CRILet and at the University of Rome III (Humanities Computing unit). His main research interest is the application of new technologies to the analysis, studying, and teaching of contemporary Italian literature. His thesis on the computer-assisted analysis of Eugenio Montale's poetry received the imprimatur mention from his "Laurea" Committee.

Staffan Björk works at the Viktoria Research Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he joined PLAY, the Applied Art and Technology research group. His interests range from information visualisation and human-computer interaction to literature, hypertext and interactive narrative.

Francisco Marcos Marin, full professor of Linguistics, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Departamento de Lingüística General, has been working in the field of Computers and the Humanities since 1971. He is the editor of Admyte®, a series of advanced Cd-Roms of digitalised manuscripts and incunabula of medieval Spanish literature (1992, 1993, 1998).

Willard McCarty, Senior lecturer at the King's College Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), editor of Humanist, and Vice-President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities is among the pioneers of literary computing. Among his various digital projects there is the Analytical Onomasticon, "a printed and electronic reference work to all devices of language by which persons are named in the Metamorphoses of Ovid."

Federico Pellizzi, University of Bologna, Dept. of Italian. General editor of Bollettino '900, one of the main electronic journals dealing with Italian contemporary culture and literature, which has editorial input from across Europe. Federico Pellizzi has recently organised an international computers and literature conference at the Universita di Bologna (October 1996) which attracted participation from the likes of George Landow and Ezio Raimondi.

Allen Renear is Director of the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University and President of the Association for Computing in the Humanities. Details on his research interests and biographical information can be found at: http://www.stg.brown.edu/stg/staff_pages/allen.html.

David Robey is Professor of Italian at the University of Reading. He has worked on literary theory and Renaissance Humanism, and is now engaged in a computer-based analysis of the structure of sounds in the Divine Comedy. He was Chair of the Verse Work Group of the Text Encoding Initiative.

Mirko Tavoni, University of Pisa, is professor of History of Italian Language and national coordinator of the CIBIT Italian universities consortium, the first on-line searchable archive of modern and classical Italian literary texts that would be available on the Internet by December 1998.

Antonio Zampolli, University of Pisa, full professor of Computational Linguistics, director of the Instituto di Linguistica Computazionale, CNR, Pisa. Antonio Zampolli has been working in the field of Computational Linguistics since 1967 and is responsible for a number of European projects related to digital language resources.

Claire Warwick is currently lecturer in Multimedia Publishing at the University of Shieffield and has worked for theHumanities Computing Unit at Oxford, on the British National Corpus, and for the Faculty of English on high level IT support for teaching and research in English literature and language. Although her doctoral work was on Seventeenth Century poetry, she is now increasingly interested in theories of electronic textuality and the way in which it may effect scholarly editions, and future research and teaching in English studies.

Participating Institutions and sponsors

The seminar has been made possible thanks to a grant from the Faculty of Arts for the year 1997-98 and it is organised in association with: The Writing and Computers Association Limited; CTI Textual Studies, University of Oxford; CRILet, Center for Literary Computing, University of Rome; Bollettino '900, Dept. of Italian, University of Bologna.

Other participating institutions

1. University of Edinburgh: The Graduate School of European Languages and Cultures; Department of Philosophy: the Archelogos Project; Department of Italian and contributors: the Digital Variants Project; Department of Applied Linguistics; Department of Linguistics; Department of Scandinavian Studies;
2. University of Rome "La Sapienza": Department of Linguistic & Literary Sciences; CRILet;
3. Viktoria Institute, Gotheborg;
4. University of Pisa, the CIBIT project;
5. University of Turin: Department of Communication Studies;
6. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid: Department of Linguistics.