Mostly a trip report.

Hello, technology! After years of stereotypically resisting, I finally got hello-technology: a mobile phone. I’ve claimed lack of need for ages; but the need has become very real, what with driving across the country alone in September, so what the hell. Family plans are a sound financial investment, and peace of mind (not to mention convenience, and the fact that I might just turn off telephone service in my home later on) is worth the cost. Plus I get to play with cool beepy talking machines. After a few days of testing out the equipment and service, we’ll be sure whether we’re keeping this set-up; then I’ll publicize the number to those who are likely to want it.

But this isn’t even what I’m writing about. Today, a certain scholar-at-large left a comment on one of my previous posts gently prodding me to write up a trip report on ACH/ALLC 2003. That François Lachance is reading my Web log at all is flattering and unexpected, so now I am giddy and finally eager to summarize this year’s experience. For the record, I’ve been meaning to do this every year, if not in blog then over on Humanist. But I’ve always found it difficult to write a coherent account of everything important – there’s so much. This below, then, is an entirely personal perspective which will never approximate the actual experience. If you’re a computing humanist, make plans and go there. It’s worth the trip.

This is the single best conference I’ve ever attended. In three years it has become my home base, at which to catch up with colleagues, meet new people and spend several days positively buzzing with the academic equivalent of speed. It takes place yearly, alternating between locations in Europe and North America. 2001 was in New York; 2002, in Tübingen, Germany; this year we went down south to Athens, Georgia.

Bill Kretzschmar and his crew down at UGA couldn’t have picked a better venue. An honest-to-goodness conference center, complete with hotel, conference rooms, meeting-up areas, lounges, a business center and food. Most impressively useful, though, was the free round-the-clock wireless ‘net access in key points around the complex. The support and information network, both the center’s own staff and the conference volunteers, were accessible and helpful. All of this justified to me the rather steeper conference price, as compared to last year’s: the expenses taken on by the organizers were not frivolous, but went to cover useful things which helped the whole event go smoothly.

Athens is a cool little city, too. End-of-May weather was perfect for walking around; food was varied, interesting and mostly great; people were friendly. It was safe to walk around late at night, and the streets [we saw] are pretty and green.

All of this would be irrelevant, of course, if not for the people. It pleased me immensely that, for the first time, this year there was a strong allied-organization presence at ACH/ALLC. Several of my friends and acquaintances from the Electronic Literature Organization made it over, put on a panel and a reading, and generally helped bridge what I perceive as an unfortunate gap in communication between the academic side of humanities computing and its more creatively oriented fraternal twin. My only regret with regard to allied-org events, specifically ELO’s panel and the elit reading, is that they weren’t publicized enough. Sure, they were in the program; but the aforementioned communication gap also manifests as an awareness gap. It may have been helpful to, at the beginning of the conference, explicate to the general public of regular attendees who exactly was newly present here, why they were here, and what it is about their work that made it relevant to the more familiar topics of the conference. Perhaps then the attendance at these events would have been greater, and the dialogue richer. Still, even without specific advertising, there was dialogue and productive work both in and outside of the sessions, as always.

(You know, I wrote all of the below and put in empty hyperlinks for the abstracts. Now I find that I cannot fill them in, because the abstracts don’t seem to be online. Something must be wrong with my search skills; but for now, I’ll just take out the links. Strange. The detailed program is available here, anyway.)

The academic presentations were fascinating as ever. My friend and colleague Cristiana Fordyce and I presented a poster on a new Decameron Web project we’ve started, the Electronic Esposizioni. It is nascent, none of it is on the Web yet, but we’ve got some good idea leads about how to work electronically with a text as complex and rhetorically rich as Boccaccio’s exposition on Dante’s Divine Comedy. In the poster abstract, we state that we are leaning on “Michel Meyer’s view of rhetoric as a method of negotiation between two poles – the listener (reader) on one hand, and the writer on the other. We follow Meyer’s lead to consider our role in encoding and presenting the Esposizioni as a formal negotiation between intended audiences.” In light of our interest in rhetoric of/and encoding, we were both enthralled by Willard McCarty’s paper on deep encoding, and the follow-up to it in the same session by Wendell Piez, who asked us, “Whiter Deep Markup?”

Johanna Drucker presented the paper on temporal modelling which she co-authored with Bethany Nowviskie. Theirs is an exciting project: when it goes live, it may make it possible to view different scholars’ electronic work on the same text(s) in chronological progression, and to visualize the strands of research alongside each other. In fact, any set of data which has a temporal dimension may be visualized and analyzed.

ELO’s session was titled “PAD: Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination of Electronic Literature.” I’ve noticed this in several venues: with few exceptions, humanities computing scholars of all sub-trades tend to study only born-non-digital artifacts using computers, or else look exclusively at born-digital artifacts. Most regular conference attendees, from what I’ve seen in the last three years, fall into the former category. They may use born-digital artifacts as tools of the scholarly trade, but they generally do not have a diverse enough awareness of electronic art, nor do they seem to talk much about the important scholarship being done by the artists themselves about their own and their peers’ work (see DAC for more on this). The PAD project is phenomenally useful and well-articulated in general; but it made me particularly happy to see it in Athens, where scholars had an opportunity to become much more familiar with the flip-side of their professional coin.

In this same vein, Talan‘s paper “Beyond Taxonomy: Digital Poetics and the Problem of Reading” was amusing, thought-provoking and relevant to the conference. In our ever-persistent quest for knowledge, we often assume that classification – the process of putting knowledge in neatly labeled boxes – is important and even crucial. But how does one create an overarching taxonomy for works as diverse and complex as what is being thrown into the toybox labeled “digital poetry”? Do we need such a classification system? Or should we perhaps explore this art attentively, and create (a la Ulmer) new digital artifacts, scholarly or artistic or both, in response? Discuss.

Two of the three plenaries (unfortunately, I didn’t make it to one) were enthralling. John Maeda, of MIT’s Media Lab, talked of computers and programming and elegant design, and reminded us to treat the digital hype with a good sense of humour. Marie-Laure Ryan rhapsodized about metalepsis in electronic art and scholarship, far more articulately than I could ever do, especially at nearly 1am, so I won’t even try.

In a more down-to-earth vein, UVA Press’ Electronic Imprint is an exciting new(ish) development. They want to publish born-digital scholarship! This is an exciting prospect; however, I’ve heard that such ventures have been put together before, but that their mere existence does not encourage scholars to create scholarship suitable for publication only in electronic format. Still, I hope that born-digital scholarship catches on as a viable (and justifiable to university administrators!) form of research and publication.

I hear they’re doing a similar thing in Canada. Link soon, if I find it.

There was more, of course, but this is long enough already. I have this feeling that there was one other thing I wanted to mention, but perhaps later, when it comes back. For now, I leave off with a link to next year’s conference in Sweden. Its theme: Computing and Multilingual, Multicultural Heritage. Can’t wait.

(While we’re at it, here are a few other relevant links: Association for Computers and the Humanities; Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing; and the ACH sessions at this year’s MLA conference in San Diego.)