Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 518.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2024-03-28 12:27:38+00:00
From: Scott B. Weingart <weingart.scott@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.369: name of the first ALLC/ACH conference
Dear Manfred (with thanks to Maurizio Lana for resurfacing the
conversation),
I'm glad our little https://dh-abstracts.library.virginia.edu/ has
continued to prove of interest and use. You're right that it's too limited
and parochial for the broader purpose, and I'm glad to see Julianne Nyhan
and Gerben Zaagsma are working on a larger solution, which as everyone
rightly points out is sorely needed.
As the wider conversation is already in capable hands, I wanted to address
a bit about the history of the dh-abstracts project in answer to Manfred's
questions.
I started a collection of digital abstracts from the ADHO conference in
around 2012, in the process of blogging about trends I'd noticed, and
Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara joined me shortly thereafter. We were at Indiana
University, and soon John Walsh offered me a fuller collection of ADHO
abstracts that he'd worked to assemble with John Unsworth several years
before. Later, around 2016 or so, Joe Rudman (ACH treasurer 1985-1989) gave
me much of his physical conference records.
The database stayed on my computer until March 2020, when my institution
Carnegie Mellon University (along with everyone else) suddenly needed tasks
our paid library students could perform from a remote location, so we could
justify continued salary payments. Nickoal and I, with new collaborator
Matt Lincoln, quickly built up a site to which we could get students to
contribute, and I very swiftly and haphazardly looked for as many DH and
proto-DH conferences as I could find to fill out such a resource. We
started and finished the work, as I recall, in under a semester. The
project was never funded. Nickoal and I continued to add conferences here
or there, when we had time, but usually that was once a year to keep ADHO
conference materials up to date.
I've since left academia, and my ability to keep the site going by force of
will alone has disappeared. John Unsworth recently generously offered to
bring the project to UVA (with Eichmann-Kalwara remaining on board), but
its exact future still requires much negotiation and planning.
You can imagine my shock and dismay when I started to see folks using the
site as a URL of record for DH presentations (somewhat like a DOI) in
citations, their CVs, and so on. This was never meant to be critical DH
historical infrastructure, it was never meant to be exhaustive, and it was
not designed to be permanent or archival. Our anglophone perspective
limited our scope tremendously, and the hasty circumstance of the project's
development never leant itself to sustain a broader history of the field.
But the fact that our Index is being used for that purpose *anyway* is
suggestive of the point you all have already been making: that the need for
such a resource is critical and immediate. In doing this work I've now
amassed a fairly large physical and pdf collection of conference records
myself, and I'd be happy for a place to donate them.
Hoping such a consortial response arises, and keenly following Julianne and
Gerben's efforts in this space,
Scott
On Fri, Jan 5, 2024 at 3:31 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 369.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
> [1] From: Alan Liu <ayliu@english.ucsb.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.367: name of the first ALLC/ACH
> conference (153)
>
> [2] From: Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
> Subject: The Heritage of Humanities Computing / [ DH ] (39)
>
>
>
> --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: 2024-01-04 18:12:47+00:00
> From: Alan Liu <ayliu@english.ucsb.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.367: name of the first ALLC/ACH
> conference
>
> Thanks to everyone for the information about the 1989 ALLC-ACH conference.
> Willard also sent me some announcement posts from Humanist about that
> conference as well as other materials; and Geoffrey Rockwell sent material
> as well. Interestingly, it looks like there is no bibliographically clean
> answer to the question of when the first "ALLC-ACH" conference occurred. If
> I understand correctly from early materials, the 1989 conference was the
> first de facto ALLC-ACH conference, but literally that conference was named
> in ways that combined the different genealogical trees of the ALLC and ILLC
> before "ACH" began to enter the conference's actual name.
>
> For example, here are two announcement headings I've now seen for the
> conference:
>
> The Dynamic Text (16th International ALLC Conference and 9th ICCH
> > Conference)
>
> And:
>
> Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing
> Association for Computers and the Humanities
> 16th International ALLC Conference -- 9th ICCH Conference
>
> Also, just to echo the thought of others: the early narrative of the
> conference (and of the organizations involved) really should be written,
> documented, and deposited in a consolidated way before it all gets lost. (I
> myself didn't enter the DH field until about 1993 or so after that 1989
> conference.) At a minimum, someone with the knowledge should draw the
> family tree of the ALLC, ICCH, and ACH (and subsequent associations) in
> those early years.
>
> --Best, Alan
>
> On Thu, Jan 4, 2024 at 1:01 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
> >
> > Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 367.
> > Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> > Hosted by DH-Cologne
> > www.dhhumanist.org
> > Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
> >
> >
> > [1] From: maurizio lana <maurizio.lana@uniupo.it>
> > Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.363: name of the first ALLC/ACH
> > conference (40)
> >
> > [2] From: Max Kemman <maxkemman@gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.363: name of the first ALLC/ACH
> > conference (19)
> >
> > [3] From: John Bradley <john.bradley@kcl.ac.uk>
> > Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.363: name of the first ALLC/ACH
> > conference (12)
> >
> >
> >
> >
> --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Date: 2024-01-03 17:48:26+00:00
> > From: maurizio lana <maurizio.lana@uniupo.it>
> > Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.363: name of the first ALLC/ACH
> > conference
> >
> > Il 03/01/24 09:32, Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de> ha
> > scritto:
> > >
> >
> --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > Date: 2024-01-02 09:50:33+00:00
> > > From: Manfred Thaller<manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
> > > Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.361: name of the first ALLC/ACH
> > conference?
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > One small note: I'm probably not the only one, who has a collection of
> > > older abstract collections and similar unpublished materials. (The
> > > conference proceedings most of the time give a very different picture
> > > than the abstracts of the conferences.) Has anybody ever thought to set
> > > up an archive of such material relevant for the history of this sort of
> > > interdisciplinary study? Personally I think setting it up under the
> > > various political structures of the disciplines, as DH, would not
> really
> > > be safe for the longterm, but one of the larger libraries, might
> > > contemplate setting up such a repository?
> >
> > wonderful suggestion, these days that the whole collection of the Whole
> > Earth Catalog editions is surfacing online: the collection is hosted by
> > the Internet Archive, while the website wholeearth.info serves as a
> > guide to the various sections of the catalog
> > :-)
> > what about the Internet Archive as the site for this repository of grey
> > literature?
> >
> > Maurizio
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > che faresti se vivessi così?
> > mau mau, con chi fugge
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Maurizio Lana
> > Università del Piemonte Orientale
> > Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici
> > Piazza Roma 36 - 13100 Vercelli
> >
> >
> >
> --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Date: 2024-01-03 10:01:19+00:00
> > From: Max Kemman <maxkemman@gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.363: name of the first ALLC/ACH
> > conference
> >
> > Dear Manfred,
> >
> > I'm probably not the only one who has a collection of
> > older abstract collections and similar unpublished materials. (The
> > conference proceedings most of the time give a very different picture
> > than the abstracts of the conferences.) Has anybody ever thought to set
> > up an archive of such material relevant for the history of this sort of
> > interdisciplinary study? Personally I think setting it up under the
> > various political structures of the disciplines, as DH, would not really
> > be safe for the longterm, but one of the larger libraries, might
> > contemplate setting up such a repository?
> >
> > Carnegie Mellon Unversity Library has a project titled The Index of
> Digital
> > Humanities Conferences, which strives to achieve this. It is far from
> > complete,
> > but appears to be still active, see
> > https://dh-abstracts.library.virginia.edu/
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Max Kemman
> >
> >
> >
> >
> --[3]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Date: 2024-01-03 09:22:42+00:00
> > From: John Bradley <john.bradley@kcl.ac.uk>
> > Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.363: name of the first ALLC/ACH
> > conference
> >
> > Dear friends: My typing is terrible, and has got worse as I get older...
> >
> > Regarding the name of the Toronto conference: the word was
> > "International", not
> > "Internation" (of course).
> >
> > My apologies... John B
> >
> > John Bradley
> > Honorary Senior Research Fellow
> > King's Digital Lab and Department of Digital Humanities
> > King's College London
>
>
>
> --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: 2024-01-04 16:57:26+00:00
> From: Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
> Subject: The Heritage of Humanities Computing / [ DH ]
>
> Dear Max, Dear Maurizio,
>
> thanks very much for my rather spontaneous remark, that some kind of
> repository for the written traces of the past of HC / DH would be useful.
>
> https://dh-abstracts.library.virginia.edu/ , Max, is indeed quite
> encouraging.
> It misses a few things: [1] CHART (https://chart.cch.kcl.ac.uk/I which
> petered
> out some ten years ago; [2] Computers in the History Classroom; [3]
> Vereniging
> for Geschiedenis and Informatica (Netherlands); [4] Geschichte und
> Informatik
> (Switzerland) ...
>
> How the missed [1] I do not know; [2] is the case of an association cum
> conference, which has been active in the early internet days, never really
> got
> to a web site before it ceased to be active, however; [3] and [4] would be
> remedied, if a stronger European presence in the project could be
> envisaged.
>
> Even strengthening the project considerably, I see two problems however:
> (a) For the period 1980 - 2000 the various newsletters are at least as
> important
> as the conferences.
> (b) Much of the material pre-2000 never made it into the digital form.
>
> The later problem, Maurizio, is the reason why I am somewhat doubtful
> whether
> the Internet Archive would really help.
>
> So I am still afraid, that the dream of an institution which provides a
> unified
> repository for "the whole" of interdisciplinary work between the Humanities
> {Literary / Linguistic, History, Archaeology ...} in ALL media {Books,
> journals,
> newsletters, books of abstracts, programs of summer schools,
> e-publications, ...
> }, possibly digitizing what's pre-digital, where one could deposit relevant
> material without having to worry, that a new director simply gets rid of
> it ten
> years later, remains exactly that, a dream.
>
> If somebody looks for an additional work package for the next
> infrastructure
> application ... and your application is the very first one, where the long
> term
> infrastructure can truly [ i.e., outside of application lyrics ] be
> expected to
> continue, once that startup funding runs out ...
>
> Best regards,
> Manfred
--
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