Part C - Update form

A. Activities already implemented in 1996-1997

A.1 Main activities, outcomes and products.

The main outcomes after the first half year (September 1996 until March 1997) consist of a project office, management structure and information structure in place, a website established, initial meetings held, a questionnaire sent, and further plans made.

In the fall of 1996, an administration and management structure was set up. In September 1996, the University of Bergen established a project office and hired a half-time administrator. The pilot areas were managed as subprojects (see A.3).

A Steering Committee was composed of the following experts: Daniel Apollon, Dino Buzzetti, Harold Short, William Vaughan and the project coordinator. The committee had its first meeting on December 19 in London. At this meeting, it was agreed that the TNP should secure the cooperation of existing international associations for computing in various areas of the humanities (ALLC, EACL, CHART, AHC). All of these have in the meantime committed themselves. National and regional bodies relevant to the theme will be invited to participate. A conference will be planned for the spring of 1998, and a policy symposium in the fall of 1997. ACO*HUM should, from next year, devote more explicit attention to formal and computational aspects of methodology in broad areas of the humanities by adding a methodological track. After an initialization phase, the network should be open to other areas within the humanities, including languages, archaeology, philosophy and logic.

On December 7, 1996, ACO*HUM was presented at the EAIE conference in Budapest.

By January 1997, an infrastructure for communication had been set up. The partner address list was verified. A website was created at < A HREF="http://gandalf.aksis.uib.no/AcoHum/aco-hum.html">http://gandalf.aksis.uib.no/AcoHum/aco-hum.html.

At the end of February 1997, a WWW-based survey was conducted among all partners in order to gather factual information and get feedback on problems, experiences and ideas. The responses are currently collected.

A.2 Changes made during the year

Due to budget and practical limitations, the meeting plan was rearranged (see http://gandalf.aksis.uib.no/AcoHum/Calendar.html) while more attention was paid to Internet-based communication.

A.3 Management of the subprojects

The four pilot areas were managed by four Area Coordinators. They each put together an international Area Committee, had initial brainstorming meetings between October 1996 and February 1997, and set up WWW pages.

Computational linguistics and language technology

The Area Committee consists of Bill Black (Manchester), Walter Daelemans (Tilburg and Antwerpen), Laurence Danlos (Paris), Joakim Nivre (Göteborg), Koenraad de Smedt (Bergen, chair), Hans Uszkoreit (Saarbrücken), and Felisa Verdejo (Madrid) and draws significantly on expertise in European cooperation and curricula. A committee meeting was held in Brussels on Dec. 4. It was established that the area should seek active contact with international organizations (EACL, ALLC, FOLLI, ELRA and ELSNET) and national and regional organizations. Initial plans were made to gather experience by launching in basic international courses in computational linguistics and experimenting with WWW-based delivery. Plans for other future activities could comprise awareness spreading, building inventories and repositories of computational resources, requirements gathering and building an infrastructure for international placement (internship).

Textual scholarship and edition philology

The Area Committee consists of Lou Burnard (Oxford), Lisa Lena Opas (Joensuu), Espen S. Ore (Bergen, chair), Wilhelm Ott (Tübingen), Harold Short (King's College, London), Chris Stevens (Oxford), and Andrea Tabarroni (Udine). A meeting was held in London on Dec. 2-3. The meeting expressed its concern that the different educational systems and degree structures currently make it difficult to work on elements of pan-European curricula. However, there was a consensus that the fields to be covered under the new name textual scholarship and edition philology should include at least the following: text encoding, text repositories, hypermedia, stilometrics and other text statistics, and image processing (a.o. facsimile manuscripts). Work on country profiles and on cataloguing textual resources will support scholarship at a European level. Plans for ODL-pilots will be worked out in the fall.

History and historical informatics

The area commitee consists of Dino Buzetti (Bologna), Peter Denley (Queen Mary and Westfield, London), Ingo Kropac (Graz), Andrew Prescott (London, Guildhall), Jan Oldervoll (Bergen, chair), Manfred Thaller (Bergen & Max-Planck, Göttingen), and George Welling (Groningen). The group met in Bergen on October 25-27, 1997, discussing the strategy of how to further teaching of historical informatics and computer based teaching of history. A major task will be to make sources and other teaching material available on the Internet or in other digital form, to develop Internet-based teaching strategies, to set up support network and to develop actual teaching. A bibliography will be compiled and put on the net and a sample CD-Rom with teaching resources will be offered. Experiments in WWW-based teaching will be carried out and a support network will be offered to people wanting to make teaching material and sources available on the net. A model will be created for a European degree in historical informatics.

History of art and aesthetic disciplines

The area committee consists of Britt Kroepelien (area coordinator), Will Vaughan (chair), Anthea Peppin, Hubertus Kohl, Gerhard Nauta, and Trish Cashen. The committee met in Bergen on February 15, 1997, raising the following issues: development of IT skills for teachers as well as students, compatibility of course structures, establishing databanks, access to sources, copyright problems, and problems of compatibility of image formats. As far as teaching was concerned, the committee members were emphatic that it is important to introduce students to IT integrated into the working methods of their subject, not just generic introductions to IT. The committee put together an agenda comprising resources, tools, standards, training, delimitation of the area, identification of participant groups, and communication. The committee recommended seeking active contact with museums and art collections. Contact has been established with CHArt (Association for Computers and History of Art).