What’s all the Hype in Hypertext About?
A Humanities Computing Colloquium

10~11 March 2000
University College Dublin

Scholarly Adventures in Comuterland.
Field Notes from N-Dimensional Space
by Professor Jerome McGann, University of Virginia

Short Biographical Note
Jerome McGann is the John Stewart Bryan University Professor, University of Virginia, and has recently been appointed the Thomas Holloway Professor, Royal Holloway College, University of London. His online The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A Hypermedia Research Archive is scheduled for publication shortly by University of Michigan Press, and a new book, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that must be lost will appear in the spring 2000 from Yale University Press. Much of his current work involves experiments in textuality and interpretive method using electronic tools.

Abstract
This paper reports on some of the results that have begun to emerge from our past seven years' research work on The Rossetti Archive. The Archive was from the outset conceived as a theoretical site for investigating, under laboratory conditions, the "nature" of text and textuality and methodologies of critical editing. Using digital technology to design a general model for computerized critical editing – our primary goal – has forced us in recent years to re-engage a whole series of fundamental aesthetic and interpretive questions. Some of these involve a critical turn upon certain recent developments in our approaches to electronic textuality, while others relate to more general issues of literary meaning and critical method.

Time and Space in Hyperspace: A New Frontier
Dr Susan Schreibman,
New Jersey Institute of Technology

Short Biographical Note
Susan Schreibman is Professor of Technical and Professional Communication at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously she was the Semester in Irish Studies Newman Scholar (1997-99), and a Faculty of Arts Fellow in Modern English (1994-97) at University College Dublin. She completed her PhD in 1997 at UCD, The Thomas MacGreevy Chronology: A Documentary Life (1855-1934) and is editor of The Thomas MacGreevy Archive, a digital archive about the life, works and relationship of Thomas MacGreevy (http://www.ucd.ie/~cosei), and Irish Resources in the Humanities (http://www.ucd.ie/irh)

Abstract
This paper will address how computer-mediated discourse provides new opportunities and challenges in two areas of textual criticism, Reception Theory and Versioning. Versioning is a relatively new development in the area of textual criticism which seeks to represent several 'definitive' versions of a work which represent the wishes of the author at a particular point in time, as well as to represent various witnesses of creative work. It was not, however, until the development of hypertext that textual critics found a suitable medium to display this fluid concept of authorship. Hypertext has the spatial richness to overcome the limitations of the book's two-dimensionality to present, not only works in progress, but the richness and ambiguity of authorial intention.

Reception Theory, on the other hand, seeks to provide present-day readers with a snapshot of a text's history across time, as well as how previous generations of reader-response have gone into shaping our conception of the text. It also seeks to make available to present-day audiences the historical, psychological, social and/or semantic codes of the text as it was received at some point in the past. If, meaning of a work is created in the interaction between text and reader, hypermedia has the potential to create a three-legged stool in which present-day readers overhear the dialogue created between past readers and the text.

This paper will explore how computer-mediated discourse can embody new paradigms of literary criticism which are shaped by the new medium.

Teaching Humanities in the Information Age
Professor Koenraad de Smedt, University of Bergen

Short Biographical Note
Koenraad de Smedt is professor of computational linguistics at the University of Bergen. He is coordinator of a SOCRATES thematic network project on Advanced Computing in the Humanities. His research interests include computational modelling of human language processing. His educational interests include curricula development and new teaching methodoligies in computational linguistics and other humanities computing.

Abstract
The transformation of humanities research due to new computing methods is putting demands on competencies and skills which in turn are challenges for curriculum development. At the same time, computing methods create opportunities for improving the quality of education. Institutions of higher education should not be passive, nor should they be content with superficial improvements, but they should invest in sound educational innovations.

Digital Resources and Digital Libraries: New Opportunities for the Humanities
Dr Marilyn Deegan, University of Oxford

Short Biographical Note
Marilyn Deegan is Digital Resources Manager of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University and is also Chair of the Oxford Digital Library Services Development Team. Formerly she was Manager for Computing in the Arts at Oxford University and Professor of Electronic Library Research at De Montfort University. She is a specialist in Anglo-Saxon and medieval medical texts and herbals, as well as humanities computing and digital library research. She is editor-in-chief of Literary and Linguistic Computing, and Director of Publications for the Office for Humanities Communication at Kings' College, London.

Abstract
Humanities computing and humanities informatics have proved difficult concepts to define since the very beginning of these activities, and there have been as many definitions as there are scholars doing the defining. This is greatly complicated by the rapid changes in the humanities, in computing, and in the library world in the last five years. Access to primary sources is the sine qua non of humanities scholarship, and digital library developments have brought a plethora of materials in a wide range of formats to the scholar's desktop for analysis, manipulation, and access. Is this changing scholarship or only allowing the scholar to do more easily what he or she would have done in the past? This paper will explore some of the new opportunities offered to scholarship by the wider use of digital resources, and suggest some avenues it would be fruitful to explore further. In particular, I will be looking at Oxford University's plans for new digital library services to be established during 2000.

Essential Problems of Humanities Computing
Dr Willard McCarty, Kings College, London

Short Biographical Note
Dr Willard McCarty is Senior Lecturer in Humanities Computing at King's College, London. He is Vice-President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and founding Editor of the electronic seminar Humanist (1987--). His primary research interests are humanities computing as a whole, metatextual representation of literary phenomena, forms of electronic publication and the cohesibility of Ovid's Metamorphoses. These interests come together in his forthcoming Analytical Onomasticon to the Metamorphoses of Ovid

Abstract
A recent survey Humanities computing units and institutional resources suggests that assimilation of computing into the disciplines is sharpening rather than satisfying the question of its institutional home. Experience suggests that from an interdisciplinary perspective computing reveals a substantial common ground of mechanical techniques by which the major types of data may be processed. Furthermore particular examples show that by applying these techniques we are able to raise better questions about the artefacts of study than formerly. Thus three fundamental problems: (1) a model for humanities computing adequate to what we know is actually happening, and one that is flexible enough to accomodate differences in the various institutional and academic cultures; (2) a research agenda of questions belonging to humanities computing; and (3) a curriculum; particularly at the postgraduate level, that adequately covers what we think a computing humanist should know.
http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/

Write Once, Publish Many
The Potential of Humanities Computing
Peter Flynn, University College Cork

Short Biographical Note
Peter Flynn trained in the printing and publishing industry and took his MA at Central London Poly, in the days when only scientists got access to computers. He now works in academic computing and electronic publishing support in the Computer Centre at University College Cork, when he tries to persuade Humanities users that wordprocessors do not solve all problems. He teaches and speaks in Ireland and abroad, and is consultant to several research projects in the EU and the USA.
Peter also works with R&D activites outside UCC, including the groups which designed HTML and XML (he is maintainer of the XML FAQ) and he works with the text management consultancy Silmaril. Peter is author of The World-Wide Web Handbook (ITCP, 1995) and Understanding SGML and XML Tools (Kluwer, 1998).