Electronic Resources for Historical Linguists. Part 2: Dictionaries and Related Resources
Chair: Christian Kay
University of Glasgow, UK
The set of papers will be followed by a discussion, which may include points from Part 1: Medieval Studies (session 1.2 on Saturday 22 July).
(8.1.1) Developing a User Interface for the Historical Thesaurus of English Ingres Database
Irené Wotherspoon
University of Glasgow, UK
This is effectively a continuation of a paper published in Literary
and Linguistic Computing Vol 7, 1992, which described the issues and
processes involved in transferring the legacy database of the Historical
Thesaurus of English (HTE) in dBase 11.4 into Ingres 6.1, chosen as
being able to support the retrieval of complex information. During a long-term
project like HTE, spanning decades rather than years, there will obviously
be a huge change in the software available, and software in use will become
obsolete. It is therefore vital to transfer the database into new options
where feasible. The paper describes the problems encountered in developing
a front-end for the Ingres database, now in OpenIngres O.I.2.0, which would
cope with the multiple conditions of the queries required in what is essentially
a research tool, but which would also be acceptably user-friendly. The
user interface now in use is BI/query, the successor to GQL, and this will
be described and demonstrated. The complexities of retrieval from the HTE
arise from the data concerned with the currency of the words, taken from
the Oxford English Dictionary. This consists of a) actual starting
and finishing dates for periods of currency; b) the qualifiers ante and
circa, as in the OED. (These are not used in the OED CD queries, but are
necessary for retrieving e.g. words current before a specified date); c)
indicators for continuous or discontinuous currency; d) indicator of present
currency, e) Old English, covering all dates before 1150; f) style and
status labels from the OED attached to periods of currency - a word may
be labelled e.g. 'vulgar' for only part of its currency.
(8.1.2) The Electronic Scottish National Dictionary: Work in Progress
Susan Rennie
Scottish National Dictionary Association, UK
The Scottish National Dictionary (SND) is the standard historical dictionary of modern Scots, covering the period from 1700 to the present. This presentation will describe the current project to digitise the SND to produce the eSND, which will eventually be output on the Internet. It will include a brief description of the SND itself, outlining its history, content and structure, and describe how the eSND will differ from the printed text, in particular by integrating the original Supplement and adding new material from the SNDA's ongoing research. The various stages of the eSND project will then be discussed, using examples from the work in progress:
(8.1.3) Early Dictionaries of English and Historical Corpora
Anne McDermott
University of Birmingham, UK
This paper discusses the implications for historical corpora of an examination of some early dictionaries of English. Comparison is made between Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and works such as Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656), Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum (1730), and Robert Ainsworth's influential Linguae Latinae Compendiarius (1736). The claim that early English-English dictionaries contained many "hard words", i.e. words, often from classical sources, which had infrequent or nil occurrence in the language at the time, is examined by checking the occurrence of such words in historical corpora. This leads to an examination of the corpora themselves and comparison with corpora of modern English. Suggestions are made about how historical corpora might be developed in future, for example by offering domain-specific search facilities. Reference will be made to A dictionary of the English language on CD-ROM : the first and fourth editions, Samuel Johnson, edited by Anne McDermott (Cambridge : CUP in association with the University of Birmingham, 1996).
Supporting Digital Scholarship: a Project Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
John Unsworth
Worthy Martin
Thornton Staples
Ken Price
University of Virginia, USA
Summary:
To date, digital library efforts have focused on library-based production
of digital primary resources. This project will, for the first time, address
second-generation digital library problems, where the focus is on scholarly
analysis, reprocessing, and the creation of digital primary resources.
With $1m in support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation over three years
(2000-2002), the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology
in the Humanities (IATH) and the University of Virginia Libraries' Digital
Library Research and Development Group will address three closely related
problems:
Institutional Background:
Since its inception in 1992, the Institute has focused intensive support and advanced computer resources on long-term humanities research proposed by faculty at the University of Virginia and elsewhere. To date, the Institute has supported more than forty fellows in architecture, landscape architecture, architectural history, art history, religious studies, classics, anthropological linguistics, medieval and 19th-century British literature, 19th-century American literature, American history, classical history, history of science, archaeology, film, and music, among other disciplines.
The majority of this research - indeed, most of the Institute's work - involves intensive collaboration among groups of scholars, and between scholars and the Institute's technical experts. The Pompeii Forum project, for example, sends an interdisciplinary group of researchers to Pompeii each summer, where a systematic survey of the Forum at Pompeii is being conducted using an extremely accurate surveying device known as a laser Total station, and feeding data from that device into a laptop in the field. These measurements are then brought back to the Institute, where they are processed into two-dimensional plans and three-dimensional CAD models. Further field-research provides an extensive photographic survey of the buildings at Pompeii, and these photographs are used in conjunction with advanced photogrammetric software to create accurate, photo-realistic surfaces for the three-dimensional CAD models. Finally, using modeling tools custom-built at the Institute, the researchers are able to combine individual building models into a model of the entire site and even render the walls transparent, in order to see both sides at once, thus producing an analysis of the Forum more detailed, more accurate, and more flexible than any other to date.
The University of Virginia Libraries have established a number of electronic data centers that work closely with the Institute's staff and fellows: the Electronic Text Center, the Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, the Digital Media Center, and the Special Collections Digital Center. Library digital centers have provided support to many of the same faculty involved in research with the Institute, and staff from these centers meet regularly with IATH staff and others in a digital library interest group. Most recently, the Libraries have established a Digital Library Research and Development Group, charged with long-range planning of digital library architectures, systems, and procedures. Having begun to assemble a broad digital collection, they recognize that no library management system yet exists to handle it and they have dedicated themselves to developing an appropriate solution to the problem.
Further information about library digital centers is available on the Web at <http://www.lib.virginia.edu/ecenters.html>
Information about Digital Library Research and Development is available at <http://www.lib.virginia.edu/dl/intro/>.
Project Goals:
Much of what has taken place in digital library contexts to date has aimed at producing large collections of digital data, often - in fact usually - without the involvement of the intended audience for that data, scholars and researchers. In this project, we aim to foreground the scholarly user - something we believe we are uniquely positioned to do - and from this perspective we will look at the issues of collections development, data management, metadata, and digital library systems. We expect to complete a number of trials in these areas, and although we do not believe the scope of this project is sufficient to provide universal or definitive solutions, we do expect to arrive at a better understanding of the problems that will be involved in the next generation of digital library activities.
So much hyperbole attends the current phase of digital library development that it may seem surprising to suggest there are things scholars need to do that digital libraries cannot support. Three scenarios are presented here as examples of some of those unsolved, second-generation digital library problems:
Scenario 1: Scholarly use of digital primary resources
A literary scholar researching the history of a particular poem knows that its author also painted the subject of the poem. She can find information about the poem and the painting in the digital library, and can even retrieve a digital image of the painting. The scholar knows that other dual-media works were produced by this author, and she suspects that the author's arrangements of his paintings in exhibitions might well be significant in understanding the related literary works: therefore, the scholar would like to use the digital library to find out when the painting in question was exhibited and, for a given exhibition date, would like to know what painting was to its left and what painting was to its right - and then see those paintings together in a virtual reconstruction of the exhibit.
In this example, we consider the possibility that the scholar of the very near future will want to do something more than browse or perform keyword searches in the digital library. The promise of the digital library is that it will enable scholars to frame questions that would have been inconceivable without this technology. And yet, in practice, we find that digital libraries support only very narrowly defined investigative activities. Partly this is because we tend to treat objects in the digital library as though they had no other temporal or spatial contexts - as though they had always and only existed, discrete and timeless, in our information systems. Partly, too, these limitations are a sign that the digital library is mainly concerned, at this point, with providing simple access to the discrete digital object, rather than with supporting context, comparison, or analysis - the building blocks of scholarship.
We could begin to grapple with this problem by producing several proof-of-concept example projects, in which data and metadata expressly support more complex kinds of "behaviors" in the digital library, and are associated with other objects in the digital library (e.g., Java applets) that actualize those behaviors on the end-user's machine. This follows the Fedora model that the library is already developing, specifically that aspect of Fedora that permits "client access to multiple views, or disseminations, of the object's data through the transparent activation of external mechanisms that execute these content type behaviors"
<http://www2.cs.cornell.edu/NCSTRL/CDLRG/FEDORA.html>.
Scenario 2: Library adoption of "born-digital" scholarly research
An archaeologist spends decades producing detailed digital records of an important classical archaeological site. The records include CAD reconstructions of individual buildings, topographical maps, photographs, and maps locating particular artifacts in areas and layers of excavation, and large-scale computer models of the entire site. Upon retirement, the archaeologist offers his entire collection of digital records to the library (since no publisher has ever known what to do with them) - but he offers them on the condition that the library treat these records as a special collection, catalogue them, and make them available through the web to other researchers and students of archaeology.
This example makes plain the problems that libraries will inevitably face as they come to collect digital resources produced by scholars outside of library (and quite possibly, publishing) frameworks. The problem is likely to be especially acute in the areas of architecture and archaeology, where data is likely to have been produced by researchers in digital form, and where we have few (if any) established conventions for collecting, normalizing, cataloguing, providing, or preserving such data. A single map or CAD drawing could represent hundreds of hours of research, data gathering, and expert analysis - as valuable, in principle, as a monograph or a journal - and yet libraries might well be unable to accept it, for lack of appropriate systems and procedures.
As a pilot project in this area, we can recruit large existing collections of digital architectural and archaeological data (from The Pompeii Forum, Victorian London, The Waters of the City of Rome, Jefferson's Architecture, and other IATH projects), and use that data to experiment with cataloging, collections, and preservation issues raised in such contexts. At the end of three years, we would expect to have brought several such collections into the library.
Scenario 3: Co-creation of digital resources by scholars, publishers, and libraries
A historian, working together with technical experts in the library's Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, uses census data, eyewitness accounts, military records and contemporary GIS information to generate a time-indexed, geo-referenced reconstruction of troop movements in a famous civil-war battle. The research is going to be published by a university press, and the press has contributed original vector data for the underlying map. At different points in this process, the press, the historian, the historian's graduate research assistants, and library experts all need to share editorial control of the evolving data set. At the end of the process, the data set needs to be published by the press, collected in the library, and connected to textual records of the event.
Increasingly, we believe, scholars and libraries and publishers will enter into collaborative arrangements involving the production of digital primary resources by the library, a scholarly treatment of those resources, and electronic publication of the result. We have already seen many instances of this pattern in IATH research projects. In retrospect, it seems perfectly reasonable that the institution owning the primary resources (a rare book, a painting, a statue, a map) would want to produce its initial digital representation; once that digital representation exists, it seems inevitable that scholars will want to do what they have always done - edit, contextualize, re-present, and analyze the (now digital) object. And, if not inevitable, it seems at least likely that the result of this scholarly engagement with digital primary resources will be the stuff of scholarly publishing. There are many unanswered questions, though, behind these three reasonable assumptions: should it be a goal to have a single authoritative version of the digital object? If so, how might scholars and/or publishers register corrections or revisions to the original, if the original is produced (and presumably owned) by a library or museum? If several scholars disagree on the verisimilitude of the digital representation, how will their range of opinions be recorded and connected to that representation? If electronic editions of the artifact become the norm, instead of an authoritative version with apparatus, then how should those editions be derived and denoted?
At IATH, we already have several projects that raise this sort of problem
- the Valley of the Shadow, the Walt Whitman Archive, the Victorian London
project, and others. We have a document management system (Astoria) that
will help to address some of the practical procedural issues involved in
managing multiple authorship; we will experiment with integrating that
system into the library's production strategies, to address those situations
in which a single authoritative version is necessary or desirable, but
we would also expect to experiment with managing and coordinating multiple
divergent editions of a single base object, or multiple perspectives on
an object.
In order to address the many problems - some technical, some social, some intellectual - raised in these three scenarios, we need to move beyond the simple production and cataloguing of digital collections, and begin to recognize that, in the library of the future as in libraries of the past and present, most materials will be produced by many hands, not few; most materials will incorporate many perspectives, not one; and most materials will need to support specialized and pointed research as well as general, blunt queries.
Recognizing these things, we will undertake a collaborative investigation of advanced digital library problems, including library absorption of scholar-produced digital resources, library/scholar co-creation of such resources, and analytical use of digital humanities data. Within this investigation, our emphasis will be on metadata practices, library systems, and production protocols that support scholarly use. And though we don't promise to solve all the problems that might be raised in this area, we will establish guidelines that will be useful to others, produce examples that others can imitate, and learn which problems are easy to solve and which are difficult.
Content:
We will focus in particular on visual and spatial data, with an emphasis on architecture and archaeology, but also considering visual arts, especially in complex spatial and temporal contexts. There are a number of research projects already underway in scholarly contexts that are producing and freely distributing digital data in architecture and archaeology. The problem these disciplines face is that there is no well-established institutional mechanism for collecting, preserving, or publishing digital objects of this sort (CAD drawings, digital topo-maps, 3D models, even digitized photo or slide collections). Moreover, the strategies for cataloguing and describing of art objects do not work very well with the more hierarchical and complex information structures that characterize architectural and archaeological data. With respect to visual arts, we are particularly interested in developing and applying metadata structures that would support comparison, contextualizing, and analysis of art works, and in producing some sample applications that would demonstrate to other libraries and scholars the value of spatial and temporal metadata.
Part of the budget for this project will go, in small one-year awards, directly to ongoing faculty research. A library/IATH committee will administer these funds, and they will be used to support experimentation, in the context of faculty research, the results of which would generalize readily to other contexts. Normalizing data, standardizing metadata, capturing new data in accordance with recently specified best practices - all of these are appropriate activities for this committee to fund.
Intellectual Property:
The University of Virginia will grant to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation a non-exclusive, royalty-free right to access, use, and distribute for educational, social and/or charitable purposes, the software technologies, tools, and related documents developed as a result of this project and to incorporate such software technologies, tools, and related documents in other projects supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Systems, Procedures, and Standards:
This project raises technical challenges at the level of information systems design and at the level of standards design and implementation, and it requires a coordinated investigation of these issues by IATH and the Library's Digital Library Research and Development Group. Fairly high-level staff will be needed for this: at IATH, we need to support cutting-edge technical work in architecture, archaeology, mapping, and other visual-data fields. We also need to hire a second person at IATH, to concentrate on database and document management systems, as the production end of a continuum that delivers data to library systems. In the Library, we would like to add a position to the Digital Library Research and Development Group to implement systems and standards for producing, managing, and disseminating visual and spatial data in library contexts, to ensure that those library systems respond appropriately to the needs of research users, and to work with IATH and others on the difficult issues of adoption and co-creation, mentioned above.
Software tools and environments for producing, managing, and publishing large image collections are of interest to IATH, and even more so to the Library, inasmuch as many of our research projects involve the creation and use of extensive image collections. IATH's principal interests in this area would be workflow and data management: on the library side, Thornton Staples has been working with the Cornell Digital Library Group (Carl Lagoze) on technical issues involved in the creation of digital repositories, and on the implementation of Lagoze's Flexible and Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture.
Both IATH and the Library are very interested in applications of SGML, XML, and HyTime to the problem of describing art, architecture, and archaeological sites. In particular, we believe there is significant work yet to be done in the description of art collections, the treatment of three-dimensional objects as information structures, and capturing the passage of time as an element of these collections and structures. Thornton Staples has been working in this area, developing something he calls the General Descriptive Modeling Scheme (GDMS), an Extensible Markup Language (XML) document type definition (DTD) that is intended to be used to create textual models describing real-world phenomena (such as creations, events, places and people) and giving a context for describing the content of, and relations among, digital objects.
All of these interests could have a direct relevance to Mellon's projected work in the areas of art, architecture, and archaeology, in ARTSTOR. In order for collections of two- and three-dimensional image data to be useful for teaching and research, the ARTSTOR collections will need to be embedded in data structures that can support annotation, multiple spatial and temporal arrangements of works and sites, and the representation of change over time.
Personnel:
Library and Institute staff directly involved in design aspects of this project throughout the three years, as part of their regular duties, include Worthy Martin, Technical Director, IATH and Associate Professor, Computer Science; Daniel Pitti, Project Director, IATH; Thornton Staples, Director, Digital Library Research and Development; John Unsworth, Director, IATH, and Associate Professor, English
Other Library personnel who would contribute some part of their time to implementation, as part of their regular library employment, would include Edward Gaynor (Special Collections); Rick Provine (Digital Media Center); David Seaman (Electronic Text Center); Ross Wayland (Digital Library Research and Development); Patrick Yott (GeoSpatial Information Center).
IATH fellows whose ongoing research will be directly involved in this project include: Ed Ayers et al., Valley of the Shadow; David Blair, WaxWeb; John Dobbins, Kirk Martini et al., The Pompeii Forum Project; Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, Joseph Viscomi, The Blake Archive; Lavahn Hoh, The Circus in Europe and America; Jerome McGann, The Rossetti Archive; Michael Levenson et al., Monuments and Dust (Victorian London); Kathy Poole, Boston Back Bay Fens; Ken Price et al., Walt Whitman Archive; Ben Ray, The Salem Witch Trials; Katherine Rinne, Waters of the City of Rome; Marion Roberts, Salisbury Cathedral; Ken Schwartz, Charlottesville Urban Design; Richard Guy Wilson, Jefferson's Architecture
Management Plan:
This project will be jointly managed by John Unsworth and Thornton Staples, with close cooperation among IATH personnel, faculty fellows, and library staff. Fellows will provide digital objects (maps, photographs, models, etc.) and the metadata to accompany those objects, as well as some functional specifications for scholarly use of those objects. The Digital Library Research and Development Group will work with IATH and its fellows to establish guidelines for the production of digital data and metadata to be collected and disseminated by library systems, and they will advise IATH and its fellows on the systems design and development issues that attend the adoption of information produced by IATH fellows. IATH staff will support data production to agreed-upon standards, will consult with fellows and library staff on the specification of those standards, and will work with library staff to prototype the functionality requested and specified by the scholars who produce (and intend to use) the data.
Work Plan:
Year One: Primary objectives in the first half of this year will be hiring, training, and information-gathering (which would include external consultation as well as a thorough analysis of our own data and systems). In the second half of the year, we will finalize a first version of the General Descriptive Modeling Scheme, while working with individual projects to establish and document standard procedures for producing descriptive, structural, and administrative metadata.
Year Two: In the second year, we will attempt to deposit information from the Waters of Rome, Boston Back Bay Fens, and the Pompeii Forum projects into the Digital Library, and we will experiment with Java applets provided via Fedora as disseminators for the comparison and analysis of visual art objects based on metadata, probably using projects on Blake, Rossetti, and Salisbury Cathedral.
Year Three: In the third year, we will focus on the difficult issues involved in co-creation of scholarly resources, both technical and social. We will experiment with multi-author/single version solutions (in the Valley project, Jefferson's Architecture, and Victorian London), and we will also look at multi-author/multiple edition solutions (with some of the same projects, plus Whitman, Salem, and others).
Dissemination:
Information about the problems encountered and lessons learned in the experiments described here will be reported at the conferences that project participants normally attend - annual meetings of the Association of Research Libraries, the Research Libraries Group, the Digital Libraries Federation, the American Association of University Presses, the Modern Language Association, the Association for Computers in the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, the annual XML/SGML conference, the Markup Technologies conference; these results would be appropriate to publish in the journals associated with some of these professional associations as well. Our presentations at these and other conferences would be supported in many cases by the travel portion of the budget.
In addition to these venues, the Web itself is obviously an important medium in which to publish project results and documentation - for example, Document Type Definitions, production manuals, best practices, and reports on our failures and successes. Reusable technical products of the research such as DTDs or software will be freely distributed, updated, and documented through the Web. Finally, the web-based content that is produced in the different scholarly projects that participate in this research can provide links to "how-to" information.
The Role of the Scholarly Associations in Humanities Education
Chair: Harold Short
King's College London, UK
Elisabeth Burr
University of Duisburg, Germany
Laszlo Hunyadi
University of Debrecen, Hungary
Susan Hockey
University College London, UK
Stuart Lee
Oxford University, UK
Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen
University of Joensuu, Finland
Allen Renear
Brown University, USA
David Robey
Reading University, UK
The use of computer-based resources and techniques in higher education in the humanities disciplines is growing rapidly. Scholarly associations such as ALLC and ACH have played and continue to play a part in this, although the main imperatives are, of course, much more broadly based.
This session aims to provide a forum for open discussion of the role or roles, formal and informal, that scholarly associations such as ALLC and ACH could and/or should have in the future development and practice of learning and teaching in higher education in the humanities, specifically with reference to the inclusion of advanced computing, both as part of the curriculum and of teaching methodology.
From an ALLC perspective, this question has an immediate and direct relevance. The ALLC has been formally a partner in the ACO*Hum Project, and indeed has played a leading role in it, with a number of members of the ALLC Committee serving on one of the main working groups of the project, concerned with 'Textual Scholarship and Humanities Computing'. ACO*Hum is a 'thematic network' funded by the European Union as part of its SOCRATES programme. It is now approaching the end of its funding, and discussions are in progress about what should happen next. The ALLC is taking an active part in these discussions, including at national and European Union level.
Members of the panel will report on the work of ACO*Hum and will give their perspectives on the future development of computing in humanities education. They will address specifically (but briefly) the questions surrounding what role(s), if any, should be played by scholarly associations such as ALLC and ACH. A number of possible roles have been suggested, from continuing support for initiatives and projects such as ACO*Hum through to a formal role in the validation or accreditation of courses and diplomas. Allen Renear will present North American and ACH perspectives on the issues raised.
The brief presentations by each of the panelists will be followed by open discussion in which all those attending will be invited to comment on what the panelists have had to say, or to raise any additional issues they believe to be relevant. From the ALLC perspective, the session is a significant opportunity for dialogue on a range of issues that are important to the associations, and on which the coming months will offer opportunities and the need for decisions. Viewed in a wider context, now is a critical time for fundamental thinking, and for initiatives to be taken unless the associations decide they have no role to play.
(8.4.1) New Tools for Learners
Larry L. Stewart
Peter L. Havholm
The College of Wooster, USA
In a recent essay in Salon, Christopher Ott argues that much of educational technology is used in the service of a model of education as "a passive transfer of information ...." As Ott says, "Web sites and CD-ROMs are very good at delivering information, but not so good at teaching what it means or raising difficult questions about it." During the last ten to twelve years, we have assembled a portfolio of technological tools which we believe lead students in the undergraduate classroom to ask those difficult questions and to become active learners rather than passive recipients. We have developed two of these programs, and the others are readily available. This demonstration will allow participants to experiment with several of these tools, to see examples of student work, and to consider how the tools might be used in their own classrooms. Of the tools we use, we propose to have four available for demonstration.
We will demonstrate the two programs we have developed (and, in earlier versions, discussed at ALLC/ACH '98): the Linear Modeling Kit (LMK) and the Stylistic Analysis Kit (SAK). As well, we have also used and will demonstrate a freeware beta version of PennMUSH and SemNet(r), a tool for creating conceptual networks. The Linear Modeling Kit or LMK is an authoring system which allows users to create applications that generate any kind of text according to principles proposed by the user. For example, a student can use the LMK to create a "tragedy generator" by entering what the student perceives to be the parts or elements of a tragedy, any principles of order among those parts, and characteristic text for each part. Depending on the complexity of the input, the generator will produce hundreds, thousands, or millions of different texts. The task of creating a generator calls for students to think abstractly insofar as they are dealing with stories, not simply a story. That is, students must know well a number of tragedies or romance novels or bildungsroman in order to abstract those qualities or elements that the texts share or that seem central to the genre. However, they must also think very precisely in order to translate their understandings into the unforgiving and unambiguous language of what is essentially computer programming. In essays or articles, we, as well as our students, know how to smooth over those things about which we are not quite sure; we know how either to hide ambiguity or to make it a virtue. Obviously, one cannot do that when creating a generator.
In short, students have to work at a level both of abstraction and of detail that may be greater than that forced by a paper. The Stylistic Analysis Kit is a combination concordance and counting program. When a text is opened from within the program, the SAK displays basic statistical information about word, sentence, and paragraph lengths and a word list, which can be arranged by frequency or alphabetically or which can show punctuation. Students can learn to use the SAK with less than five minutes of instruction, a significant factor in undergraduate education. In our classes, students have used the SAK to consider both literary texts and their own essays. In either case, students find themselves having to confront and explain the relationship between the abstract and the specific or concrete. When analyzing their own essays, for example, students constantly are driven back to their own texts to account for the statistics they have discovered. Nearly all find themselves, to return to Ott's phrasing, raising difficult questions about information. SemNet(r), by the SemNet Research Group, allows users to create layered and linked conceptual maps or networks. Our use of SemNet(r) has been primarily in writing courses although, again, students have used it both with professional writing and in the creation or analysis of their own essays. We have found that asking students to create Semnet networks causes them to think deeply about the relationships between concepts either in their own papers or in professional essays we have assigned. Creating a visual map of relationships forces students not only to be explicit about the connections between ideas but to recognize when those connections are missing.
In the demonstration, participants will be able to look at networks
created by students and experiment with the program by creating their own
networks. Students at our college have also used a MUSH to improvise an
on-line serial drama as a laboratory section of an English course in dramatic
structure. In the course, students play characters and invent actions on-line,
edit the logs of their online sessions into scripts, and then publish a
final version on the web. By writing and publishing a play, students in
the class are testing the principles of structure they have learned from
their reading of a dozen plays and Aristotle's Poetics. They are
forced to confront the concrete implications of abstract ideas. While it
would be impractical for this demonstration to set up a full-scale MUSH
environment (which would require at least two Macintosh machines linked
to the internet), we can show samples of student work in our MUSH and the
ultimate form of those samples as a drama published on the web. The tools
we will demonstrate engage students in making or doing, not in receiving
information passively. Using such tools, students learn to use the new
technology to explore and test ideas.
Robin Shaw
University of Glasgow, UK
A three year project to develop a computer based learning package in drawing.
Until the latest round of funding, United Kingdom Higher Education (UKHE) through the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP), despite an overall budget of around £75 million, had not made any sizeable investment in learning technology for art and design. Art schools have always been in the forefront of the use of computers as tools. In design, in layout, in the manipulation of images, and in the creation of art, lecturers and students have possibly formed the most expert group of computer users and their needs have driven some of the most innovative packages.
However, there has always existed a healthy scepticism as to whether computers have anything to contribute to teaching and learning in art schools. This is not surprising. Apart from the provision of ready access to resources through the internet, learning technology has been dependent on pedagogic situations where new skills or concepts had to be acquired by the student and where the class as a whole would move ahead in expertise which would be tested by the examination. The computer is ideal for a situation where, for example, the student has to learn the basics of a scientific discipline. Information can be given, processes can be simulated and at each stage of the package the student can discover whether they are understanding the material. Questions can be posed and often quite sophisticated feedback given to the student. Contrast that with the situation in art. In art there are few certainties. The emphasis is less on facts, the needs of the student are individual and the assessment of the student is through a piece of work demonstrating creativity and the development of ideas.
With a grant from TLTP of £300,000 and matching funds to give a budget of around £800,000 a consortium of art schools and universities led by the London Institute is engaged on a three year project to create interactive multimedia learning packages on drawing. Drawing is central to all that is produced within the broadest spectrum of art and design. It is the core around which the conceptual and intellectual development of students takes place. Drawing allows individuals to learn to look, to record what they see, and is used to develop thought and ideas for artwork and for design, in both two and three dimensions.
In 1995-96 almost 5% of students in UKHE were in art and design. If related subjects with a clear interest in drawing such as architecture, engineering and technology are included the total rises to almost 16%. This growth in numbers has created problems which the package seeks to address.
The approach adopted by the London Institute and its partners in the Falmouth College of Art, Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication and the Universities of Ulster and Brighton is intended to create materials which give full respect to the richness of the subject. The packages will come at drawing from many different angles and controversy will be welcomed rather than shunned. In addition to a thorough treatment of the basic skills such as drawing on paper, drawing with the computer and draughting, the programs will explore the historical development of our understanding of spatial representation from the origins of perspective, through drawing machines to 3D and computer graphics. In all the work the importance of how to see, how to interpret, and how to innovate will be paramount and due weight will be given to the theoretical, philosophical and contextual elements. Considerable use will be made of video to show practitioners at work and discussing their particular approaches to drawing.
The project got underway in June 1998 and the initial period was spent in blocking out the areas of drawing we wish to address, and researching our pedagogical approach. The second phase of the project was to write detailed descriptions of the planned modules focusing on the aims and objectives of the module and how the content was to be presented and made interactive. The project is now in the development stage which is using Director.
There is a considerable body of evidence that in order for learning to take place effectively on the computer, the user has to be involved in tasks where decisions have to be made. The learning should be active and consequently there is a continual pressure to find ways of engaging the student. While assessment within the field of drawing is difficult, we are convinced that the student will gain by reviewing what has been learned and by receiving sensitive feedback on progress, so we are exploring ways in which this can be possible.
In a project of this nature it is vital to expose ideas to the widest audience before committing them to development and we have been disseminating information about the project to art colleges and other institutions with an interest in drawing. To date, staff from more than ninety institutions in the UK and the USA have expressed an interest and we are allowing them access to our deliberations. We are eager for as wide a participation as possible and interested faculty can sign up to the list from our website at <http://tltp.linst.ac.uk/>.
The finished package will be distributed on DVD since that medium allows the packaging of the product on one disk with a more than adequate space for high quality graphics. The finished product will be available to UKHE at the beginning of 2001 though beta versions will be widely distributed for testing well before that date. As the project progresses, prototype modules will be trialled in the classroom situation, both in the consortium partners and also in a number of other interested institutions. From the evaluation of these prototypes, which will be carried out by the University of Glasgow, we will make changes to incorporate what we learn from student and staff use. The results of these evaluations will be widely disseminated. The project intends that the package will be made available outside of the United Kingdom though its primary audience is first year degree students in that country.
Since the project is probably the largest investment ever in learning technology in art it poses a considerable challenge. Its aims are ambitious and wide-ranging and while it in no way seeks to supplant the traditional relationship between staff and student, it intends to make a significant contribution to the richness of the learning environment in the area of drawing. It will do this by producing products which will emphasise the development of observation, skill and accuracy and the understanding of form and space. Though the package will encourage the use of the computer for drawing, the focus of the materials will remain on traditional drawing tools. However, it will certainly promote the new approaches to drawing which are made possible through technology, and will aim to improve the ability to utilise software applications for three-dimensional modelling and to enhance the teaching of formal drawing systems such as projection and perspective. When completed it will be a valuable resource for use in the classroom and for the independent student.
The proposed presentation will demonstrate examples of the development
to date, deal with project management issues and invite discussion and
participation from interested faculty.
(8.4.3) Caught in the Decameron Web: New Tools for Scholars and Teachers
Michael J. Hemment
Massimo Riva
Giovanna Roz Gastald
Brown University, USA
Michael Papio
Holy Cross College, USA
Since 1995, Brown University's Decameron Web has endeavored to assist students with the study of Giovanni Boccaccio's life and works. From its humble beginnings as a series of hyperlinked student essays in a storyspace environment, the site has been in a constant state of regeneration, metamorphosing itself in new directions. Most recently, a National Endowment for the Humanities grant from the Division of Education and Technology has enabled our team to enrich the site with a variety of research and pedagogy tools for students, literary scholars, historians, and teachers, including an SGML-encoded text and correlated Detailed Search, a Pedagogy Module, and an electronic Boccaccio journal.
The text of the Decameron has been encoded in SGML using a DTD based on TEI-Lite. The software, Dynaweb 4.1, is currently used to deliver the SGML encoded text. The structural encoding embodied in SGML permits searching on selected structural units, such as whole text, frame, and novella. All named characters and geographic locations in the text are tagged and can be retrieved through an advanced search procedure.
The Decameron Web's new Detailed Search identifies and defines each character and location (both named and unnamed) in Boccaccio's masterpiece using a series of easily searchable encoded attributes. Characters are defined in terms of their age, sex, origin, estate, role, religion, marital status, and disguise; places are encoded to reflect their geographic location (city, region, country) and type (bridge, castle, church, etc.).
One of our greatest challenges has been to design an HTML interface that is comprehensive in terms of search options, but also intuitive and user-friendly. We settled on a design solution that divides the search into three principle categories: "Characters," "Geographic Locations," and "Single and Multiple Words." Within each of these categories, users may easily define their search by either (1) typing in the name of the character or place they are looking for (if they know it), (2) finding their subject by selecting a combination of attributes from pull-down menus, or (3) viewing the results of our pre-searched lists and tables. The results produced by these searches do more than merely provide researchers with textual references: they bring the user to the exact point in the online text where their character or geographic location appears. Additionally, many characters (for example, all historical characters and members of the brigata) have special philological notes that can be easily accessed through hyperlinks.
The Decameron Web's Detailed Search allows Boccaccio's text to be searched like never before. Humanities students and scholars will be able to instantly examine Boccaccio's characters based on their social status, sex, and profession, and a series of other attributes. How, for example, do Boccaccio's medieval representations of artists such as Giotto differ from contemporary "portraits of the artist"? What is significant about Boccaccio's depiction of married vs. unmarried women in the text? And is there any correlation between a character's economic status and his/her fortuna?
Scholars interested in exploring the vast geography of Boccaccio's world will benefit greatly from the detailed geography search. This tool will enable researchers to determine, for instance, what thematic or representational differences exist between the novellas set in Italy and those set in other countries; and what role geography plays in the structure and organization of the Decameron. Having completed, together with STG (Scholarly Technology Group, Brown University), the prototype of our Detailed Search page at the closure of 1999, its functionality and design will be rigorously tested and refined by members of our Advisor Board and Brown students taking our Spring semester Boccaccio course. A public release date is expected by early Summer 2000.
Another recent addition to the Decameron Web has been the creation of a Pedagogy Module, providing high school and university teachers with supplementary classroom materials, including course syllabi, exams, class project ideas, and essay questions. Comprehension exercises and sections dedicated to "Further Research" and "Topics of Discussion" will be integrated with an eye to helping disseminate ideas for successful teaching approaches. These will be contextually linked to all other pertinent modules including Bibliography. There will also be a teacher's forum, where innovative pedagogical approaches to Boccaccio's works can be openly shared and discussed, and student guides to essay writing, Internet research, and classroom presentation. Finally, each semester we will accept nominations for "the best" Boccaccio student essay, which will subsequently be published on the site.
The Decameron Web's new electronic Boccaccio journal will be of particular interest to medieval literature specialists and students. It will serve as a forum where scholars can publish and debate their latest research on Boccaccio's works, discuss humanities computing initiatives and pedagogy, submit book reviews, and debut new translations of the author's works. The online journal will be multilingual and will accept submissions from an international community of scholars, all contributing their own unique didactic and interpretive perspectives. Unlike traditional print publications, the electronic Boccaccio journal will capitalize on its hypertext nature, facilitating greater editing and publishing efficiently of contributions, allowing users to comment on what they have read, and promoting joint scholarly projects on Boccaccio.
If properly utilized, we believe that these new research tools can bring a new dimension of excitement to the study and teaching of Boccaccio and his works. The Detailed Search will enable researchers to gain new insights into the complexities of Boccaccio's characters and geography; the Pedagogy Module will provide teachers with a broad range of Boccaccio-related activities and resources intended to challenge and engage their students; and the electronic Boccaccio journal will allow graduate students and literary scholars to publish, research, and discuss the latest advances in Boccaccio studies and humanities computing. Naturally, the success of all of these initiatives is ultimately contingent upon the active collaboration of an international community of Boccaccio students, teachers, and specialists.
(8.4.4) Like a Bird on a Wire: WWW and Remote Learners in British Columbia
Deneka MacDonald
University of Glasgow, UK
Stan Beeler
University of North British Columbia, Canada
The World Wide Web has not only the potential to expand our conceptions of the processes of teaching and learning, it also has the power to help overcome some of the physical limitations imposed by the standard approach to classroom based learning. This "poster" addresses issues of web delivery in remote access locations, specifically in Northern British Columbia, Canada. Examples from online course pilot projects at UNBC will be used to illustrate both advantageous and problematic areas related to instructor delivery, the WWW as a financial and time saving device, and more recent developments in web based delivery at UNBC.
Location:
In order to explain why the use of computer based instruction is particulary important to teaching and research in our own institution, we should give a short introduction to the physical situation of The University of Northern British Columbia. Prince George, the location of our main campus, is in the central interior of British Columbia. Although the city has over 70,000 inhabitants, the area served by UNBC is - on the whole - sparsely populated. Prince George is about 700 kilometres from the nearest city of any size: Vancouver to the south and Edmonton and Calgary to the east. Our mandated area covers an enormous physical space; larger than some European countries. UNBC was created, in part, because the inhabitants of Northern British Columbia petitioned the provincial government to establish a place for post secondary education which would not require the youth of the area to move to the south. In 1994 this political pressure resulted in the opening of a University in Prince George.
Distance Education:
Distance classes at UNBC are delivered to communities as far as 700 kilometres away from the central campus (Prince Rupert on the coast). Courses have been, and continue to be, successfully delivered by means of simple conference type telephone hook-ups, digital video transmission, and even some early courses delivered in part by means of video tapes sent by courier. In addition some departments have hired instructors to live in these areas to convene courses.
WWW at UNBC:
Through a government grant in 1995-96, the English Department at UNBC was able to launch three pilot web-based courses. The package developed for our English Web courses used a database structure to create virtual web pages of manageable size and transmit these on demand to the student. This greatly reduced the load on web connections and increased the load on the server. The package included monitoring software to allow instructors to have some idea of the time that students spent in various sections of the material as well as a web conferencing system which was designed to replace classroom discussion.
Design and Format:
At the time that this project started there were very few efficient web authoring packages, so it was assumed that instructors would write their class notes in simple word-processing form, convert them to ASCII text and these would be converted to the database format for delivery to students. Web page design was to be standardized and instructors could focus on the traditional business of writing up lecture notes. By the time the project was half-finished, commercial web design software had advanced far enough that all of the instructors in the pilot project rejected the standardized format and began to customize the look and feel of their lecture notes. We were able to accommodate this with some radical modifications of the software package, but there was never a comfortable interface between the commercial web design packages and the database software that was supposed to deal with the special problems of teaching over northern networks.
Instructor/WWW Conflicts:
At UNBC web teaching has always been considered to be a good way to overcome the logistic problems of our geographical location. Most people at our institution understand that teaching distance courses is going to be more difficult and expensive than teaching in our central location. However, there is the assumption that a web course is an automated one and that once created, the students can dispense with the instructor until it comes time to mark papers; for a variety of reasons, this is simply not the case.
New WWW Developments at UNBC :
In 1998 Dr. Stan Beeler received an Industry Partnership Grant with Ross Niebergall, a Mathematics Professor, to develop a software package to deliver science and technology courses in a northern environment where we launched a new project called W.I.D.E. WIDE concentrated on all of the above issues and its goal was to implement a successful teaching package that could be used over the world wide web with ease for both instructors and students.