B. Activities Planned
B.1 Activities to be
undertaken during the funding period covered by this application
This report lists activities planned from September 1997 until September
1998. Common activities for the whole project include the following:
- The results of the survey will be gathered in a report and distributed
to all partners and will form the basis for an agenda for further activities.
- A policy symposium will be held in the fall of 1997 (This includes
Area Committee and Steering Committee meetings).
- A large international conference is being organized in the spring of
1998.
- A methodological track will be installed.
- An extension to Non-European languages
(see separate application) will be effectuated.
- Joint activities with other TNPs will be worked out.
Activities planned in the subprojects are the following:
At the Area Committee meeting at EACL in July 1997, a definitive choice
will be made from the following innovative activities which are now being
preliminarily planned:
- Initiating the development of basic courses with self-assessment to
prepare for summer courses, student exchanges and work opportunities. (These
are likely to be delivered as ODL courses).
- Building a repository of materials to be used in courses and means
of delivering these courses Europe-wide, including ODL.
- Gathering requirements for teacher education, and spreading awareness
in secondary schools, in preparation of higher education.
- Spreading awareness among a wider public, including industry, through
an European introductory course on language technology and promotional
materials including projects, programmes, conferences, journals and CL
factsheets.
- Making an infrastructure for international opportunities for placement
(internship, stage) in cooperation with research centres and industry.
- Use the field of grammars and parsers in an in-depth case study of
computational linguistics curricula in Europe.
- Launching an ODL test as a flexible WWW-based frame around existing
computational systems (e.g. computational morphology). Evaluate and construct
guidelines.
The name of the area (previously textual scholarship and repositories)
is changed to Textual scholarship and edition philology. The activities
planned are:
- Setting up a network-based interchange of information about curricula
.
- Setting up an inventory of textual databases and other resources on
the Internet.
- Analysing the prerequisites for university level courses covering textual
computing.
- Following up the work on country profiles by catalogueing national
centres and repositories.
- Working out plans for ODL-projects (to be decided at the Area Committee
meeting in October 1997).
- Presentation of the ACO*HUM at the ALLC-ACH'97 and DRH'79 conferences.
- Catalogueing digitized historical sources of broad European importance
for teaching.
- Making guidelines for Internet-based teaching strategies and setting
up a support network for people wanting to make teaching materials available
on the Internet.
- Compiling a bibliography and a sample CD-Rom with teaching resources.
- Initiating tests in WWW-based teaching.
- Creating a model for a European degree in historical informatics.
- Presentations of ACO*HUM will be given at CHArt (Computers and History
of Art) 13th Annual Conference, University of Northumbria at Newcastle
(September 5-6, 1997), in journals (Kunstchronic and CHArt Journal) and
at the next major art history conference in Germany.
- A report will be made on the state of the art and future prospects
in the application of IT to History of Art. This report will be recorded
on electronic media.
- An evaluation will be made of current applications of modern IT in
the teaching of History of Art as well in other fields within the humanities
which might serve as useful models. This evaluation will provide a basis
for the group's subsequent work in promoting the development of IT-based
courseware for teaching History of Art.
- An overview will be made of the skills required for taking advantage
of IT applications in History of Art. The group will then make recommendations
regarding minimum standards of IT competency for students and offer suggestions
for means of enhancing IT skills in students as well as in teachers.
- A preliminary report will be drafted on copyright problems and standardization
problems.
- For inclusion in the ACO*HUM website, the Area Group will compile a
basic bibliography on Computers and Art History, an annotated list of relevant
web sites, and a brief description of relevant projects and university
courses.
- As a step towards providing a canonical set of resources, made available
on-line, the group plans to establish a digital archive of important art
historical texts, preferably linked to the WWW and on CD-Rom. Participants
will be encouraged to digitize 'local' art historical texts according to
procedures and standards recommended by the ACO*HUM Area Group.
Purpose and objectives
B.2 Current objectives
The main objective of ACO*HUM is to analyze the use of new technologies
in Humanities scholarship in Europe, identifying opportunities, problems,
and good practice with respect to the integration of advanced computing.
More specific objectives are:
Humanities education: needs for change
to analyze the extent to which humanities scholars need advanced computing
methods for working with language, literature, history, logic, art, music,
etc.;
to research how humanities students can better be prepared for the
professional world where our languages and cultures will increasingly be
manipulated by information technology;
to research how institutions are addressing the teaching of new skills
in advanced computing in their traditional humanities disciplines;
Humanities education: innovation in curricula
to facilitate the strengthening of advanced computing content in Humanities
programmes through European collaboration;
to identify learning modules for cross-disciplinary humanities programmes
with a broad agreement on advanced computing content, means of delivery
and learning, and potential uses;
to identify learning modules strengthening specialized computing in
individual humanities disciplines;
Humanities education: new processes for learning
to facilitate student mobility and the availability of teaching competence
in advanced computing;
to increase the accessibility of computational resources for humanities
scholarship (e.g. language data, text repositories, historical databases,
digitized art collections);
to collaborate with ODL projects in order to promote the integration
of accessible humanities resources in distance learning modules.
B.3 Current planned outcomes
The expected outcomes consist of dissemination of good practice; exchange
of information through meetings and conferences; reports, inventories and
other written material; improved accessibility of computational resources;
collaborative structures; new strategies for humanities learning; ODL test
courses; curriculum recommendations; increased awareness among humanities
teaching staff, students, employers, and public bodies; and a platform
for addressing current and future issues.
B.4 Project approach
The common pedagogical approach insists on setting a focus on the development
of `hybrid skills' among students graduating in the humanities. Participants
in the ACO*HUM network will discuss new didactic models incorporating advanced
computing in theoretical and applied study modules. Priority will be given
to the incorporation of an innovative approach to teaching and learning,
e.g.the use of network-based computational resources for language and culture.
To ensure the feasibility of the project and modularize its activities,
the project has in its initial year focused on four pilot areas within
the Humanities which have already been strong in their incorporation of
advanced computing, although not yet Europe-wide:
With respect to these areas, the approach strongly consists of the identification
of best practice and making the results, consisting a.o. of analyses, recommendations,
and shared resources, available Europe-wide.
During the next years, the TNP will make a strong effort to transfer
the methodology to the whole humanities by spreading best practice to other
humanities disciplines including Non-European
languages (see separate application), cultural studies, archaeology,
music, art, logic and philosophy, and religion and biblical studies. We
have established initial contacts with the TNPs in archaeology,
arts and music, and
established a common interest in joint activities. These plans will be
actively worked out during 1997-1998.
The proposed increasing coverage of the humanities is clearly dependent
on a proportionally increasing financial support.