ACH/ALLC 2003

ACH/ALLC 2003 (dubbed "Web X" this year) is getting underway at the University of Georgia, in Athens. ACH/ALLC is the joint annual meeting of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. The first of the joint meetings was in Toronto in 1989 and since then ACH/ALLC may have the distinction of being the oldest annual academic meeting on the general subject of technology and the humanities. I've been a regular since 1997, and have attended the conference when it was in Kingston (Ontario), Charlottesville (I was on the local organizing team then, finishing my PhD at the University of Virginia), Glasgow, and NYU. Alas, I will be sitting out this year's conference as I am effectively grounded by a publisher's deadline.

Historically the conference has had an emphasis on linguistic computing, text analysis, and text encoding; that's changed in recent years, however, with more and more "theory" and "new media" on the program. This year, for example, the Electronic Literature Organization is sending a delegation, and the conference will include a reading/performance of creative pieces; Marie-Laure Ryan and John Maeda are keynoting, further indication of a shift towards new media (and the spectacular NYU keynotes were from Johanna Drucker and Alan Liu). In any case, ACH/ALLC is a fabulous mix of topics and ideas, is truly international, and what may be even harder these days, truly interdisciplinary, with people from various humanities fields, library and information science, and computer science. A long-distance wave to anyone reading this who I won't get to see in Athens.