Date: Sat, 29 May 1999 09:19:20 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: hiatus
Dear Colleagues:
Humanist will be sporadically inactive over the next few weeks, from 31 May
until approximately 14 June, while I am in transit, at ACH/ALLC and
otherwise preoccupied. Normally under such circumstances our able Assistant
Editor, David Gants, would be standing in for me, but he is simultaneously
in transit and at ACH/ALLC and so cannot. I will dart in from wherever I am
when I can and do my job, but as I do not yet have a cellular phone and
satellite uplink to the Internet -- AND DO NOT PLAN ON GETTING THUS HOOKED
ANYTIME SOON -- there will be silences. Perhaps welcome silences! If wishes
paid for tickets I'd have everyone at Charlottesville, since all signs are
that this year's ACH/ALLC will be an event to remember with a glow, but
wishes are a different sort of coin than the kind required.
The word "community" is mightily abused these days, often used to mean an
aggregate of people many of whom neither know nor care about each other.
(Have I said this before? Alas, it continues to be true.) Evidence from the
gatherings of ACH/ALLC and others of computing humanists attests to a
genuine intellectual and social community, however. As we all know, the
giving of papers is only a part of what happens at conferences; it's a sine
qua non, but I remember good ones for the boost they give to my sense of
working together with others toward a common goal, however broadly that may
be defined. Much more often than not, ACH/ALLC is exactly such an event,
and even when I come away thinking it might have been better for this or
that reason, I would not have missed the gathering of colleagues and
friends for anything. Besides, the banquets and other peripheral activities
are fabulous.
So, silences for a good reason. Still, apologies for them.
Yours,
WM
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