============================================================ _REACH_, May & June 1991 ------------------------------- Research & Educational Applications of Computers in the Humanities ----------------------------------- Newsletter of the Humanities Computing Facility of the University of California at Santa Barbara ------------------------------------------------ NEW VIDEO LASER DISK PLAYER FOR HCF PROJECTS A video laser disk player and a 27" color monitor are now available in the Phelps Hall location of the UCSB Humanities Computing Facility for the use of faculty members and graduate students in the humanities interested in developing instructional materials. The player is currently attached to a Macintosh SE, although it is expected that a Macintosh II will be available to fulfill this function in the very near future. A key element in the use of this equipment is a HyperCard program developed by Bruce Anderson of the UCSB Instructional Development Office. It provides a ready means of controlling the display of the images on the disk. The program is extremely easy to use, and even the novice will feel right at home after only a very short period of familiarization. When you're developing a presentation, you use this program to create a computer script, in effect, specifying by frame numbers various segments of the video laser disk imagery which you want to show during the presentation, and identifying each segment with a key phrase which you enter in your computer script. When you're ready to give the presentation, a similar computer and player will be set up in your classroom, ready to project your images either on a monitor or on a large screen. You simply install your own computer script and video laser disk, and you're ready. At each appropriate point in your presentation, you select the corresponding key phrase in your computer script, and the associated segment of disk imagery will then appear instantaneously on the screen. Various instructional projects using these techniques, both current and under development, will be described in future issues of _REACH_. ------------------------------------------------------------ DIRECTORY UNDERWAY Michael Strangelove of the Department of Religious Studies of the University of Ottawa is compiling a directory of electronic journals and newsletters of academic interest. Once he's completed it, Strangelove will post the directory on the networks. Strangelove is asking for the following information from journal and newsletter editors: title, description, how to subscribe and submit material, how to access back issues, and whom to contact for more information. Please send this information to: Michael Strangelove 441495@acadvm1.uottawa.ca ------------------------------------------------------------ COMPUTERS AND TEACHING IN THE HUMANITIES This year's conference on Computers and Teaching in the Humanities (CATH) will be held at the University of Durham on December 16-18, 1991. The conference will combine plenary sessions, parallel sessions, and workshops and tutorials. The workshops and tutorials will be practical, and designed to introduce participants to the skills needed for the preparation of the courseware materials. Topics for the conference will include: "computer applications in the humanities; course design issues; courseware authoring tools: types, sources, and uses; evaluation of courses, courseware, and students; pedagogic considerations in the use of computers in humanities teaching; and relevance of research issues." Prospective participants are invited to submit proposals for papers for 30-minute parallel sessions (including time for questions), software demonstrations, or for three-hour workshops in relevant methodologies. The abstracts should be approximately 500 words long and have a title and the full postal address of the proposer at the top. They should include brief details of equipment requirements. E-mail abstracts are welcomed, provided they are in ASCII format. The final date for submission is June 15th. All abstracts and other queries should be sent to: Michele Palmer CTI Centre for Textual Studies Oxford Univ. Computing Service 13 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 6NN, U.K. E-mail: ctitext@uk.ac.ox.vax Phone: 0865-273221 ------------------------------------------------------------ ELECTRONIC TEXTS OF KIERKEGAARD AND WITTGENSTEIN Alastair McKinnon of McGill University has announced that he now has available for distribution in electronic form "the complete texts of both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, in both cases with `simple display and search' and, as an option, a good deal of `high end' analytic software." McKinnon says that although at the moment these texts are available only for IBM and compatible computers, he is currently making arrangements to create Macintosh versions. He mentions that "the Kierkegaard text consists of 35 separate files (or books) each with its own accompanying `page correlation file' allowing the `search and display' program to indicate in the bottom right corner of the screen the page and line corresponding to the current line in any of the other two Danish editions or the current English, French, German or Japanese translations." As for the Wittgenstein material, "there are 22 Wittgenstein texts, 15 which he wrote in German and 7 which he wrote in English, these again in separate files but because of the circumstances of publication, without page correlation files." The texts are available in both "clean" and "edited" versions, "the former being a mirror image of the printed page and the latter having one or other accent on the first vowel in order to mark and disambiguate every ambiguous word in the text." McKinnon has two versions of the "display and search" program, one of which allows the user to make changes and another which does not. Also available are various analytic programs for use in the construction of multi-dimensional models of text. For further information, please communicate with: Alastair McKinnon E-mail: ina7@musicb.mcgill.ca ------------------------------------------------------------ OLD ENGLISH NEWS OE-CALL is an electronic newsletter, edited by Patrick Conner and Clare Lees, designed to provide an electronic forum for discussion of the use of computers in teaching Old English and related subjects. The newsletter also serves as a clearing-house for information about relevant software, research projects, conferences, and publications. Subscribers are encouraged to submit their own views on software or recent conference sessions and computing demonstrations. The editors of OE-CALL prefer to send out issues of the newsletter in electronic form only, but they will mail copies to subscribers who have no access to computing facilities. To subscribe to OE-CALL, send an e-mail note to one of the editors: Patrick Conner E-mail: u47c2@wvnvm.bitnet Clare Lees E-mail: lees@fordmurh.bitnet ------------------------------------------------------------ NEW CHINESE STUDIES DISCUSSION GROUP Tom Nimick and David Wright are the editors of CHINA, a new electronic discussion group on Chinese Studies based at Princeton University. The addresses of the list server and the discussion group are: listserv@pucc.bitnet china@pucc.bitnet The editors welcome discussion of any issue in Chinese Studies "in the fields of anthropology, art history, economics, history, literature, linguistics, politics, religion, and sociology." To subscribe to the new CHINA discussion group, send an e-mail message to the address of the list server containing the single line: subscribe china "your name" with your own name, not your e-mail address, in place of "your name," without the quote marks. If you have any questions about the group, send a note to the editors: Tom Nimick or David Wright E-mail: q4356@pucc.bitnet ------------------------------------------------------------ GROUP FORMED FOR ANALYSIS OF ANCIENT TEXTS CONTEX-L is a new electronic discussion group for all who are interested in the cross-disciplinary analysis of ancient texts. The addresses of the list server and the discussion group are: listserv@uottawa contex-l@uottawa The group provides "a forum for the scholarly, informal and polite discussion of the social worlds behind and within the texts of antiquity, including those of the Hebrew bible, early Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism and all the literature associated with the Graeco-Roman world." To subscribe, send an e-mail message to the address of the list server containing the single line: subscribe contex-l "your name" with your own name, not your e-mail address, in place of "your name," without the quote marks. For further information on the group, please communicate with: Michael Strangelove E-mail: u5@acadvm1.uottawa.ca ------------------------------------------------------------ KURZWEIL 5200 SCANNER NOW IN OPERATION AT HCF The Kurzweil scanner at the South Hall location of the Humanities Computing Facility has now been upgraded to the K-5200 level. The reader is the same unit as before, but the co-processor has been moved outside the host computer into a separate unit, and a new version of the software has been issued. An SCSI controller board inside the host computer is the link between the computer and the new external Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) processing unit. The new processing unit contains a 32-bit Advanced Micro Devices Am29000 processor. Running at a fast 25 MHz, with 6 MB of RAM, it's capable of carrying out 15 million instructions per second (MIPS). The result is a very obvious increase in scanning speed. The software user interface is much the same as it was before, so no significant adjustment is needed. Among the new features are the capability to convert scanned files to Nota Bene format, the ability to scan legal size documents in landscape mode, and a zoom feature in verification mode which lets you see more of the surrounding page. The most spectacular improvement is a fast scan option for high quality originals which results in very rapid scanning rates. The speed is achieved by capturing the image page at a slightly lower resolution of 400 horizontal dots by 200 vertical dots, rather than the usual 400 by 400 dots. A typical page of double-spaced manuscript can now be both scanned and interpreted in 10-12 seconds. Accuracy also seems improved, even at the fast scan speed. ------------------------------------------------------------ PROJECT GUTENBERG Michael Hart, the organizer of the wonderfully named Project Gutenberg, is a crusader for the creation and low cost distribution of English language electronic texts. Hart's goal is "to provide a collection of 10,000 of the most used books by the year 2000, and to reduce, and we do mean reduce, the effective costs to the user to a price of approximately one cent per book, plus the cost of media and of shipping and handling." Project Gutenberg operates an electronic discussion group devoted to issues of electronic text creation and distribution at the addresses: listserv@uiucvmd.bitnet gutnberg@uiucvmd.bitnet Those interested in the aims of the Project can subscribe to the group in the usual manner. For further information about Project Gutenberg, send an e- mail note to: Michael Hart E-mail: hart@uiucvmd.bitnet ------------------------------------------------------------ DIGITAL IMAGE CONFERENCE IN NORWAY The Department of Art History of the University of Bergen, the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities, and IBM Bergen Scientific Centre are the sponsors of a conference on computer imagery, "THE DIGITAL IMAGE: Pictorial Arts and Information Technology," to be held in Bergen, Norway, on October 17-19. The conference will focus on the "possibilities for storage, analysis and presentation of stills and moving pictures through computer technology." It will present a wide variety of "projects concerned with research in and dissemination of art and culture historical topics through the use of modern multimedia technology." Researchers from a number of the leading international institutions will discuss and demonstrate their projects. Participants will also learn about the development of projects in Norwegian institutions. Information about the conference can be obtained from: The Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities P.O. Box 53, Universitetet N-5027 Bergen, Norway imageconf-91@navf-edb-h.uib.no ------------------------------------------------------------ FIRST OPEN TEI NORTH AMERICAN WORKSHOP The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has announced its first open North American Workshop, to be held at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 22-23. The workshop will provide an opportunity to learn more about the TEI's draft _Guidelines for the Encoding and Interchange of Machine-Readable Texts_. It will combine detailed presentations with small group discussion sessions and hands-on activities. Topics to be covered during the workshop will include: "nature and purpose of descriptive markup, basic features of SGML, essential components of the TEI Guidelines, TEI conformance--what it is and why it matters, an overview of SGML-aware software, and using TEI texts with standard software packages." The workshop is being organized by the TEI Editors, Lou Burnard and Michael Sperberg-McQueen, with additional support provided by Elaine Brennan and Harry Gaylord, who also ran the TEI Workshop at the recent highly successful ACH/ALLC conference in Tempe, Arizona. For further information about the workshop, please communicate with: TEI North American Workshop wwp@brownvm.brown.edu ------------------------------------------------------------ DESKTOP PUBLISHING GROWING Judging by the increase in local activity recently, more and more computing humanists are likely to become interested in the process of desktop publishing during the coming period. What is desktop publishing? Briefly, it involves the use of a micro computer to produce what is called "camera-ready copy," printed copy ready to take directly to the printer for the production of the negatives used in the printing process. Desktop publishing eliminates the two traditional steps of typesetting and paste-up. It reduces costs, speeds up the publication process, and gives greater control over the material. As readers of the fine print on the masthead will have noticed, I use the program Ventura Publisher to produce _REACH_. A number of desktop publishing programs are available, but I started with Ventura and have found no reason to change. As you can see, it does newsletters quite nicely. It is also generally recognized as the best desktop publishing program for long and complicated documents, such as catalogues, directories, and books. Since I use it myself, Ventura Publisher is available in the Humanities Computing Facility for those who would like to undertake a project. However, it's a complex program, and anyone wanting to use it for even a seemingly simple project has to be willing to spend a fair amount of time and effort learning its intricacies. Still, it's already being employed to good effect on several projects. One of the graduate students on the HCF staff is using it to produce a newsletter on Asian Studies issues. Another graduate student working for the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center has been using Ventura to prepare the Center's calendar of events, and I understand that the Center newsletter is likely to be the next project on the list. Currently, a third graduate student is preparing copy for the UCSB Graduate Student Association journal. I've also been using Ventura myself recently in areas outside the newsletter front. Not long ago, I put an article in camera-ready form for a faculty member who needed to submit it in final format to the publisher of a hard bound book whose subject matter dictated a very tight schedule. Then, a few months ago, I did a brochure and a program for an academic conference being held on the UCSB campus. Its proceedings, in hard bound form, will be a coming project. Since these local signs probably do indeed reflect a general increasing interest in desktop publishing, I think I'll plan to include a few articles on various aspects of the topic in some of the future editions of _REACH_. --Eric Dahlin ------------------------------------------------------------ _REACH_ is published six times a year by the Humanities Computing Facility of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Advisory Committee: Edward Branigan Film Studies Carol Genetti Linguistics Gunther Gottschalk Germanic, Oriental & Slavic Allan Grapard Religious Studies Barbara Harthorn Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Gerald Horne Black Studies JoAnn Kuchera-Morin Music Albert Lindemann History Francisco Lomeli Chicano Studies Ursula Mahlendorf Women's Studies Jack Murray French & Italian Michael O'Connell, Vice Chair English Giorgio Perissinotto, Chair Spanish & Portuguese Nathan Salmon Philosophy Leland Strasburg Dramatic Art John Sullivan Classics Burr Wallen Art History ------------------------------------------------------------ HCF Coordinator & Editor of _REACH_: Eric Dahlin Phone: 805/893-2208 HCF1DAHL@ucsbuxa.bitnet HCF1DAHL@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu ------------------------------------------------------------ _REACH_ is produced on an Everex 386, using Microsoft Word, Version 5.0, and Xerox Ventura Publisher, Version 3.0, with camera ready copy printed on an HP LaserJet III. Printing is by UCSB Printing & Reprographic Services. ============================================================