[1] From: David Green <david@cni.org> (111)
Subject: SENATE HEARING ON REAUTHORIZATION OF NEA & NEH
[2] From: David Green <david@cni.org> (118)
Subject: NEXT GENERATION INTERNET: COMMENTS INVITED
[3] From: "Nancy M. Ide" <ide@cs.vassar.edu> (45)
Subject: Journal: Computers and the Humanities Vol 30 No 4 :
[4] From: Philip Bernick <pbernick@crl.nmsu.edu> (10)
Subject: Re: New Corpus from the Linguistic Data Consortium
[5] From: LDC Office <ldc@unagi.cis.upenn.edu> (59)
Subject: New corpus
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 19:25:42 -0400
From: David Green <david@cni.org>
Subject: SENATE HEARING ON REAUTHORIZATION OF NEA & NEH
***************************************************************
NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
April 27, 1997
SENATE HEARING ON REAUTHORIZATION OF NEA & NEH
Please forgive any duplication and the length of this posting, but I felt
many members would find interesting and useful this account in the NCC
Washington Update of today's Senate Hearings on the reauthorization of the
Endowments.
David Green
==============================================================
NCC Washington Update, vol. 3, # 17, April 29, 1997
by Page Putnam Miller, Director of the National Coordinating
Committee for the Promotion of History <pagem@capaccess.org>
SENATE HEARING ON REAUTHORIZATION OF NEA & NEH
On April 29 the
Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources held a hearing to consider
reauthorization of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.
Senator James Jeffords (R-VT), chair of the committee, opened the hearing
by stating that the intent of this hearing is to cover the issue of
reauthorization with a broad brush and to focus particularly on education.
"Both agencies," he stated, "have great potential to enhance and improve
the educational opportunities for the people of our nation." Jeffords
lamented that Congress spends too much time discussing controversial
grants and not enough on the agencies' meaningful accomplishments, such
the educational programs. In the last Congress, Jeffords noted the
Senate passed by a bi-partisan vote of 12 to 4 a reauthorization bill that
aimed at tightening up the administration of both agencies, closing
loopholes, and streamlining functions. "It is legislation," he said,
"that I hope that we can use as a basis for discussion this year." He
ended his opening statement by saying that he was confident that this
Congress would move forward on reauthorization legislation for the
endowments.
This lengthy hearing consisted not only of remarks by the eight Senators
who attended but also of testimony from two panels -- one made up of the
heads of the endowments and the other of witnesses testifying about
successful endowment funded educational projects. Sheldon Hackney, Chair
of NEH, and Jane Alexander, Chair of NEA, summarized their testimony and
spent more of their time responding to Senators comments and questions on
a wide range of issues.
Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), the ranking minority member of the committee,
stressed that these small agencies had a crucial impact on the arts and
humanities of the country and that a few controversial grants shouldn't
warrant the elimination of the endowments. Senator John Warner (R-VA)
complimented the two chairs of the endowments and said they had brought
their agencies enhanced credibility. Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)
emphasized the positive role of the endowments in his state and called for
new exploration of ways that the endowments' educational work could
relate to Headstart programs. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) commented on the
indispensable role of the endowments in economic development as cultural
and heritage tourism gain increased momentum. Mike DeWine (R-OH) restated
a point that he has been making over the last several years which is that
in a time of reduced resources the endowments priorities need to be on the
underserved in our population, particularly children and rural areas.
After recognizing the key role of the endowments, Senator Christopher Dodd
(D-CT) presented again his idea for building a true endowment for these
agencies, an idea that he has been promoting for the last several years.
His plan calls for expired copyrights to be auctioned for a period of
perhaps 10 years and for the funds from the auction to build an endowment
for the NEH and NEA. He noted that the Copyright Office had been somewhat
hostile to this idea but that he was going to continue to pursue it and
would be seeking cosponsors.
Senator Tim Hutchinson (R-ARK) voiced the only criticism of the hearing,
and his remarks were directed only at NEA. In sharply worded comments and
questions he attacked the high administrative costs of NEA, the fiscal
problems of the NEA, and the failure of NEA to respond within a year to an
Inspector General's report. Hutchinson stated that no federal dollars
should be spent on NEA and that the argument that NEA funds are a catalyst
for securing private funds is a bogus one for private funding for the arts
has increased even when NEA's funds have been cut. No responses to these
criticisms by either Senators or witnesses were able to change
Hutchinson's firmly held views on these matters.
The panel on exemplary education projects consisted of Dr. Edward Ayers,
Professor of History at the University of Virginia; Dr. Victor Swenson,
Executive Director of the Vermont Council on the Humanities; Mr. Jeff
Hooper, Founder and Director of the Mad River Theater Works in Ohio; and
Ms. Alicia Dandridge, a 6th grade teacher in a Washington, DC school.
Ayers and Swenson addressed NEH funded projects. Ayers, project director
of the "Valley of the Shadow Project: Two American Communities in the Era
of the Civil War", gave a demonstration and talked about how this project
reaches thousands of people every week who visit the WEB site of the
Valley Project to look at evidence and to draw their own conclusions about
the Civil War. By perusing diaries, letters, slave census, newspapers,
church records, photographs, and many other surviving documents, visitors
to the WEB site are able to gain knowledge first hand about the Civil War
and to sift through quantities of evidence with a powerful yet simple
computer tool. Ayers noted that the project has received many positive
responses, some from teachers who comment that students who have visited
the Valley Project write better papers and ask more insightful questions.
Senator Jeffords applauded this use of technology to make history come
alive and said he was "excited by what you have shown us." Ayers
concluded by noting that there is no way to recover costs of making this
vast range of documents available to people around the world and that it
was too big a project, with too many people involved, to have undertaken
with NEH support.
Swenson talked about a variety of programs that the Vermont Council on the
Humanities have sponsored to tackle the thorny problem of illiteracy. One
program, "Never Too Early: Teaching the Earliest Teachers," provides
training on reading to children for people engaged in child care programs
for the very young. "Our approach to literacy through the humanities in
Vermont," Swenson said, "depends on a central love of books and reading
and on intense cooperation among many agencies, organizations and devoted
individuals." The Vermont Council also sponsors programs on adult
literacy and has a program for teen mothers to show them the ways of
reading to babies and toddlers. Swenson concluded by stating that they
have discovered that "if reading is central to the humanities, it is
equally true that the humanities are central to reading." Jeffords had
high praise for the state councils' literacy programs.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
NCC invites you to redistribute the NCC Washington Updates.
A complete backfile of these reports is maintained by H-Net.
See World Wide Web: http://h-net.msu.edu/~ncc/
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 18:33:44 -0400
From: David Green <david@cni.org>
Subject: NEXT GENERATION INTERNET: COMMENTS INVITED
***************************************************************
NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
April 29, 1997
Below is a useful summary by the American Library Association of the
government's announcement of the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative.
The draft concept paper is available at
<http://www.hpcc.gov/ngi-concept-08Apr97/> and open for comment until May
15.
David Green
------------------- ALWN629.TXT follows --------------------
=================================================================
ALAWON Volume 6, Number 29
ISSN 1069-7799 April 29, 1997
American Library Association Washington Office Newsline
NEXT GENERATION INTERNET DRAFT CONCEPT PAPER ISSUED BY THE
CLINTON ADMINISTRATION; COMMENTS INVITED
The Clinton Administration has proposed a Next Generation
Initiative (NGI) involving research and development programs
across federal agencies, with $100 million requested for FY98. A
draft paper outlining the concepts and goals of the NGI
initiative has been posted for public comment by May 15. The
draft was prepared by the Large Scale Networking Working Group of
the Computing, Information, and Communications R&D Subcommittee.
The draft concept paper notes that the Internet technology --
designed for a network of thousands -- is laboring to serve a
network of millions, but new technology, protocols, and standards
can be developed to lead to an NGI at rates thousands of times
faster than today. Several years of generic, pre-competitive
research and testing will be required. The federal government
proposes to participate because critical federal missions require
a NGI, and because much of the needed research is too long-term
or high-risk for the private sector to fund.
The draft states the NGI vision as follows:
"In the 21st Century, the Internet will provide a
powerful and versatile environment for business,
education, culture, and entertainment. Sight, sound,
and even touch will be integrated through powerful
computers, displays, and networks. People will use
this environment to shop, bank, study, entertain, work,
and visit with each other. Whether at home, at the
office, or on travel, the environment will be the same.
Privacy, security, and reliability will be built in.
The customer will be able to choose among different
levels of service with varying prices. Benefits of
this environment will include a more agile economy, a
greater choice of places to live or work, easy access
to life-long learning, and better opportunity to
participate in the community, the nation, and the
world."
The three goals for this 5-year initiative are: (1)
high-performance network fabric, (2) advanced network service
technologies, and (3) revolutionary applications.
Goal 1 involves connecting at least 100 universities at speeds
100 times faster than today's Internet, and 10 federal research
institutions at speeds 1000 times faster.
Goal 2 involves experimentation with the next generation of
networking technologies that "push the envelope."
Goal 3 involves the demonstration of new applications that meet
important national goals and missions. Examples used include
national security, disaster response, scientific research,
distance education, environmental monitoring, prediction and
warnings, and health care. The draft notes that "this program
will not provide substantial direct funding for applications."
The Advisory Committee on High-Performance Computing and
Communications, Information Technology and the Next Generation
Internet had input into the draft and will be commenting further
on it. Two members of the Advisory Committee, Ching Chih Chen,
professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science,
Simmons College; and Sherrilynne Fuller, director of the Health
Sciences Libraries and Information Center, University of
Washington, bring library experience to this committee.
ALA will send comments on the draft, and expects to focus on the
following:
1. A recommendation that a strong and specific plan be developed
for diffusion of the NGI research and development results not
just to industry but to government, education, and libraries; and
that progress toward the NGI be balanced with interoperability
with the first generation Internet.
2. A recommendation to adjust the NGI budget to reflect a
civilian as well as a military focus, and specifically to
increase the National Science Foundation share(proposed at only
$10 million of the $100 million) as the agency with the broadest
charter in support of a wide range of education and research
efforts, and to specifically add the National Library of Medicine
as a partner in the NGI Initiative.
3. A recommendation that the NGI program needs an explicit
applications component and budget because high-end applications
and fundamental network architecture are closely interdependent.
Since technology developed and tested in the NGI program is
intended to be eventually adopted by a larger user community,
more thought is needed towards areas such as libraries, education
and health. There should be an explicit role for the National
Library of Medicine. Digital library programs such as those at
the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration should be linked to the NGI effort.
The draft concept paper on the Next Generation Internet
Initiative is available at:
http://www.hpcc.gov/ngi-concept-08Apr97/
Comments may be sent to ngi@hpcc.gov or faxed to 703/306-4727.
Comments received by May 15 will be used in preparing a final
version. ALA members who wish to contribute to the ALA comments
should send feedback by May 13 to alawash@alawash.org.
_________________________________________________________________
ALAWON is a free, irregular publication of the American Library
Association Washington Office. To subscribe, send the message:
subscribe ala-wo [your_firstname] [your_lastname] to listproc
@ala.org. ALAWON archives at http://www.ala.org/washoff/alawon.
Visit our Web site at http://www.alawash.org.
ALA Washington Office 202.628.8410 (V)
1301 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, #403 202.628.8419 (F)
Washington, DC 20004-1701 800.941.8478 (V)
Lynne E. Bradley, Editor <leb@alawash.org>
Deirdre Herman, Managing Editor <alawash@alawash.org>
Contributors: Carol C. Henderson
Rick Weingarten
All materials subject to copyright by the American Library
Association may be reprinted or redistributed for noncommercial
purposes with appropriate credits.
=================================================================
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 97 22:34:27 EDT
From: "Nancy M. Ide" <ide@cs.vassar.edu>
Subject: Journal: Computers and the Humanities Vol 30 No 4 : REPLACE PREVIOUS MESSAGE WITH THIS
*************************************************************************
JUST PUBLISHED JUST PUBLISHED JUST PUBLISHED JUST PUBLISHED
*************************************************************************
COMPUTERS AND THE HUMANITIES
Volume 30 No. 4 1996
Table of Contents
Word Frequency Distributions and Lexical Semantics
R. Harald Baayen, Rochelle Lieber
A Rationale for Teacher Education and CALL: The Holistic View and Its
Implications
Mike Levy
Conceptual Modeling versus Visual Modeling: a Technological Key to
Building Consensus
Gary F. Simons
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMPUTERS AND THE HUMANITIES
The Official Journal of The Association for Computers and the
Humanities
Editors-in-Chief:
Nancy Ide, Dept. of Computer Science, Vassar College, USA
Daniel Greenstein, Executive, Arts and Humanities Data Services,
King's College, UK
For subscriptions or information, consult the journal's WWW home page:
http://kapis.www.wkap.nl/kapis/CGI-BIN/WORLD/journalhome.htm?0010-4817
Or contact:
Dieke van Wijnen
Kluwer Academic Publishers
Spuiboulevard 50
P.O. Box 17
3300 AA Dordrecht
The Netherlands
Phone: (+31) 78 639 22 64
Fax: (+31) 78 639 22 54
E-mail: Dieke.vanWijnen@wkap.nl
Members of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH)
receive a subscription to CHum at less than half the price of an
individual subscription. For information about ACH and a membership
application, consult http://www.ach.org/, or send email to
chuck_bush@byu.edu.
--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 1997 09:25:18 -0400 (EDT)
From: Philip Bernick <pbernick@crl.nmsu.edu>
Subject: Re: New Corpus from the Linguistic Data Consortium
On Tue, 29 Apr 1997, LDC Office wrote:
> Announcing a NEW RELEASE from the
> LINGUISTIC DATA CONSORTIUM
>
> DSO CORPUS OF SENSE-TAGGED ENGLISH NOUNS AND VERBS
>
> Further information about the LDC and its available corpora can be
> accessed on the Linguistic Data Consortium WWW Home Page at URL
> http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ldc.
Actually, your new web address seems to be http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/
philip
--[5]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 1997 09:25:01 -0400 (EDT)
From: LDC Office <ldc@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Announcing a NEW RELEASE from the
LINGUISTIC DATA CONSORTIUM
DSO CORPUS OF SENSE-TAGGED ENGLISH NOUNS AND VERBS
This corpus contains sense-tagged word occurrences for 121 nouns and
70 verbs which are among the most frequently occurring and ambiguous
words in English. These occurrences are provided in about 192,800
sentences taken from the Brown corpus and the Wall Street Journal, and
have been hand tagged by students at the Linguistics Program of the
National University of Singapore. WordNet 1.5 sense definitions of
these nouns and verbs were used to identify a word sense for each
occurrence of each word.
In addition to providing the word occurrences in their full sentential
context, the corpus includes complete listings of the WordNet 1.5
sense definitions used in the tagging.
The following example illustrates the format of a sentence with a
sense tag for the word "action", followed by the corresponding
WordNet1.5 sense definition:
ca01.db #020 `` These >> actions 8 << should serve to protect in
fact and in effect the court 's wards from undue costs and its
appointed and elected servants from unmeritorious criticisms ''
, the jury said .
Sense 8
legal action, action, case, lawsuit, suit -- (a judicial proceeding
brought by one party against another; "no criminal cases were heard
while the judge was ill")
=> proceeding, legal proceeding, judicial proceeding,
proceedings -- (the institution of a legal action)
=> due process, due process of law -- (the administration
of justice according to established rules and principles)
=> group action -- (action taken by a group of people)
=> act, human action, human activity -- (something
that people do or cause to happen)
(In the actual corpus, all tagged occurrences of a given noun or verb
are stored together in one file, with each full sentence on one line;
all noun and verb word sense definitions are stored together in two
separate files.)
This sense tagged corpus was provided by Hwee Tou Ng of the Defence
Science Organisation (DSO) of Singapore. It was first reported in the
following paper at ACL-96:
"Integrating Multiple Knowledge Sources to Disambiguate Word Sense:
An Exemplar-Based Approach," by Hwee Tou Ng and Hian Beng Lee, in
Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics, pages 40-47, Santa Cruz, California, USA,
June 1996. ( http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cmp-lg/9606032 )
Institutions that have membership in the LDC during the 1997
Membership Year will be able to receive DSO Corpus of Sense-Tagged
English Nouns and Verbs at no additional charge, in the same manner as
all other text and speech corpora published by the LDC.
Nonmembers can receive a copy of this corpus for research purposes
only for a fee of US$100. If you would like to order a copy of this
corpus, please email your request to ldc@unagi.cis.upenn.edu. If you
need additional information before placing your order, or would like
to inquire about membership in the LDC, please send email or call
(215) 898-0464.
Further information about the LDC and its available corpora can be
accessed on the Linguistic Data Consortium WWW Home Page at URL
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ldc. Information is also available via ftp
at ftp.cis.upenn.edu under pub/ldc; for ftp access, please use
"anonymous" as your login name, and give your email address when asked
for password.