With the usual apologies for cross postings...
AHeSSC workshop at UK All Hands meeting
10-13th September 2007, East Midlands Conference Centre, Nottingham
MINI-WORKSHOP CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
Text and Grid: Research Questions for the Humanities, Sciences and
Industry
http://www.allhands.org.uk/news/textgridws_call.cfm
Textual resources play a pivotal role not only in research, but also
in business. In 2003 alone, 300 Terabytes of textual data were
produced, without counting more dynamic texts like blogs, wikis,
websites, etc. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all working on
creating gigantic digital libraries for textual resources that would
both be more accessible and comprehensible than any other digital
library in history. Project partners in "Cultural Heritage Language
Technologies" like the Perseus Project promote the use of modern
computational and storage techniques to integrate tools and data for
research on and with texts in different formats. In the UK, the AHRC
E-Science Scoping Study expert seminars in textual studies,
linguistics and history have discussed the potential of Virtual
Organisation and Grid technologies for humanist textual analysis.
Innovations in Grids and other e-Science technologies can help
researchers deal with the new requirements stemming not only from the
growing size and number of digital corpora, but also from the
specific characteristics of digital text editing. Rationalisation and
improvement of the editing workflow, and mass text throughput
abilities lead to new research opportunities. For the first time, it
seems feasible to effectively support researchers building editions
encompassing text, images, and deep level annotations in XML, e.g. in
the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) format. With e-Science tools and
methods for computation and storage, many of the repetitive tasks
associated with text editing can be at least semi-automated. Citation
indices can be built as well as authority lists of people, places,
dictionary entries and organizations. Data Grid technologies make it
relatively easy to create new virtual corpora out of existing textual
resources. However, the new technologies also engender new
challenges. The protocols for publishing research need to be
adjusted; peer review and validation of scholarship need to be re-
evaluated.
The workshop is targeted at people working on research or business
applications meeting the challenges of unstructured resources such as
texts for research and business computing. Details on the submission
process can be found on the All Hands website (www.allhands.org.uk).
Submissions are subject to a peer review process and will be
published in the conference proceedings. Informal enquiries about the
mini-workshop can be directed to Dr. Tobias Blanke
([log in to unmask]) or Dr. Stuart Dunn ([log in to unmask]).
Dr Stuart Dunn
Research Associate
Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre
www.ahessc.ac.uk
www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ahessc (mailing list)
Tel +44 (0)207 848 2709
Fax +44 (0)207 848 2980
[log in to unmask]
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
Kay House, 7 Arundel Street,
London WC2R 3DX
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