Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities

OPPORTUNITIES FOR FELLOWSHIPS AT THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IN THE HUMANITIES

The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities was established in 1992 to provide researchers in the arts and humanities with an opportunity to employ sophisticated technical support and advanced computer technology in the service of their scholarship. The Institute encourages collaborative research proposals from humanists on the internet, and it can offer creative technologists a broad range of research needs and opportunities. The Institute's Fellowships are open- ended, continuing until the termination of the research for which they are awarded, but in all cases the Institute's technical consulting is intended to be concentrated in the first year, with the projects becoming more or less self-sufficient after that time.

Call for Proposals: Each year the Institute awards several fellowships for computer-assisted research in the humanities. Members of the arts and humanities faculties of the University of Virginia are eligible to apply for On- Campus Fellowships; successful applicants will be designated by the selection committee as Fellows in Residence or Associate Fellows. Faculty at other institutions, technologists with an interest in the work of the Institute, and independent scholars on the internet are eligible to apply (individually or in groups) for Networked Associate Fellowships. All those selected as Fellows of the Institute are expected to publish a research report, via the Institute's networked publishing facilities, at the end of the first fellowship year. All proposals should address the questions on the form at the end of this announcement.

Facilities: The Institute maintains a suite of offices on the third floor, west wing of Alderman Library. Each Fellow in Residence is provided with an RS6000 workstation, and all on-campus Fellows are given access to X- stations, laptops, scanners, PCs, fax machine, printers, and telephone service.

All Fellows, on-campus or networked, have the use of the suite of networked services maintained by the Institute: these include an anonymous ftp site, a gopher server, a World-Wide Web server, Listserv, and real-time virtual conferencing facilties (in the form of a MOO). In addition, the Institute maintains nearly 300 gigabytes of data storage space for use by its Fellows. Most importantly, the Institute gives its Fellows access to one another and to the accumulated expertise of its technical staff.

History and Goals of the Institute: The Institute was founded in 1992 with a major grant from I.B.M. and a commitment of support from the University of Virginia. The Institute is unique among humanities computing facilities for its combination of a broadly interdisciplinary charge with a project-centered and research- oriented plan of work. In ddition, it is unusual for its success at bridging the gap between the two cultures of academe: from its inception, the Institute has depended on the synergy of computer science and humanities; its fellows meet regularly with computer science faculty and graduate students, and they confer and collaborate on a daily basis with the Institute's staff of computer professionals.

The principal goal of the Institute is to see that humanists have the tools, the training, and the support to make the most of computer technology. In part, this entails a consolidation of existing facilities in order to produce an integrated environment for the use of networked information resources. In addition, the Institute's support is often concentrated on converting information into electronic form and addressing issues of standards and formats that arise in the process of that conversion. Finally, where existing software does not meet the needs of scholars in the humanities, the Institute's technical staff will work with the Institute's Fellows to produce broadly useful software tools.

The Institute also addresses itself, wherever possible, to topics and challenges of general importance for electronic scholarship across the disciplines. These include (but are by no means limited to) testing methods for collaborative networked research, peer-review, and editing, investigating the possibilities for networked hypermedia archives, developing practical models for cost recovery in networked scholarly publishing, exploring the creative potential of the networks, negotiating cooperation with the private sector and with government, studying the implications of the digital library, and addressing the impact of electronic media on intellectual property, with regard to both the author's right to credit and the user's right to access.

On-Campus Fellows: Fellows in Residence: Fellows in Residence receive office space, teaching release time, partial support for a graduate research assistant, computr equipment, software, and maximum technical support. Past Fellows in this category are Jerome McGann and Hoyt Duggan (Dept. of English), Ed Ayers (Dept. of History), and John Dobbins (Dept. of Art). These Fellows have embarked on ambitious, multi-year projects that will, in many cases, redefine scholarship in their respective disciplines. Much of the work of the Fellowship year is devoted to project design, collection of primary data, digitizing of analog information, and testing of technical and methodological approaches. Fellows in Residence become associate fellows after the first year.

Associate Fellows: Associate fellows receive equipment, software, and technical support appropriate to the project. Past fellows in this category are Ellen Contini-Morava (Anthropology), Bernie Carlson and Mike Gorman (Engineering Humanities), and Duane Osheim (History). Associate fellows often come to the Institute earlier or later in the development of their projects than do full fellows: what this means is that their projects often no longer need, or are not yet ready for, the intensive technical support and equipment provided for Fellows in Residence. Associate fellows are provided with consulting on project design and on technical issues, are invited to attend Institute staff meetings with the Fellows in Residence and the technical staff, and are given access to a wide variety of Institute-maintained facilities. Associate Fellows retain their status until the completion of their projects or until they are selected as Fellows in Residence.

Networked Associate Fellows: Networked Associate Fellows receive access to Institute facilities via the internet, project design consultation, and support for a wide range of software facilities (described below) for collaborative networked scholarship and networked publishing. Scholars may apply for these fellowships individually or as workgroups. The Institute particularly encourages applications involving open-systems or unix-based projects, projects that require large storage facilities for text and image data, projects that would benefit from collaborative editing facilities, and projects that aim to publish their results with the assistance of a university press.

The Institute also invites applications from technologists interested in the work of the Institute. At the moment, our research technical development priorities include (but are not limited to) the implementation of SGML in networked applications, World-Wide Web (especially the development of the Web's annotation facilities), MUDs and their scholarly uses, distributed databases, query-by-example, and optical character recognition.

Networked Associate Fellows retain their status until the completion of their projects, or until they or the Institute find outside funding to bring them on campus as Fellows in Residence.

Publishing: Through World-Wide Web, the Institute can provide the means for publishing networked hypermedia. The Web is platform-independent, which means that it can be accessed from Macs, DOS machines, or Unix workstations. Using the Web, the Institute publishes its own technical/research reports, and it can permit scholars to share their research among limited working groups, or to publish it for the general public. In the latter instance, we encourage scholars to work with university presses, and we hope to provide a workable, realistic model for scholarly production and non-profit cost recovery in this medium. As a first step in this direction, a World-Wide Web version of Postmodern Culture is now available on the Institute's server, http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/home.html.

Seminars: From time to time, the Institue hosts visiting lecturers, roundtable discussions, and networked conferences. Information on these events is available through the Institue's WWW server. If you have a suggestion for a topic or speaker, please let us know.

Deadlines: Applications for fellowships in the 1994-95 academic year are due by January 31st, 1994. Decisions of the selection committee will be made by the end of February. Applications should answer the questions listed on the form supplied below.

Information: For further information concerning the Institute and its research, please contact us in one of the following ways:

electronic mail:iath@virginia.edu World-Wide Web http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/ho me.html U.S. Post:Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities Alderman Library Charlottesville, VA 22903

MOO: hero.village.virginia.edu 8888 Voice: (804) 924-4527 Fax: (804) 982-2363

----------------------------------------------------------------

Fellowship Application: Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities

Deadline: January 31st, 1993 Applications may be submitted by e-mail (iath@virginia.edu), U.S. Mail (Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903), or U.Va messenger mail.

(Note: Scholars applying for Networked Associate Fellows, as part of a workgroup, should fill out the "workgroup" line consistently. Others may leave this line blank.)

Name: Dept.: University: Workgroup: E-mail: Phone: Postal:

Applicants should respond to each of the following items in their Fellowship proposals, and may include whatever other supporting information they wish to provide.

1) Please describe the research that you would pursue if you were granted a fellowship at the Institute. 2) Please describe the role of information technology in your project. 3) Please suggest ways in which the Institute's tool-building or data- gathering efforts, on behalf of your project, might also benefit the research or teaching of other scholars. 4) Please list any specialized equipment, software, analog-to-digital conversion, or electronic information that you think will be necessary to the successful completion of your project, and estimate the cost of these items. 5) What other grant or teaching-release support have you secured, or do you plan to seek, for this project? 6) What other electronic research are you aware of that is relevant to your own project, either in content or in method?

Please include the following with your application: a current curriculum vitae.

------------------------------ _________________________________________________________________ Karen Fung Internet: fung@hoover.stanford.edu Africa Collection Bitnet: fung@hoover Hoover Institution Fax: 415 725 4655 Stanford, California 94305 Phone: 415 725 3505