Director's Report

August 2008

Priority Announcements

Dosan – Bridging the Pacific . . .
ECAI is co-sponsoring a seminar “Dosan – Bridging the Pacific . . .” to celebrate the legacy of the Korean national and spiritual leader Dosan Ahn Chang Ho, 1878-1938, who lived for several years in southern California. The seminar is designed to foster public awareness about his work as an educator, labor organizer, political activist, and spiritual leader of Koreans and Korean Americans.
Event locations:
Oakland Museum James Moore Theater, August 23rd, 2008, 4:00 p.m.
Good Samaritan Hospital Moseley- Salvatori Conference Center, August 28, 2008 10:00 a.m. For details see http://www.dosan.org

In addition, a Dosan Digital Library is being planned to house about 6,500 historical items ranging from photographs to letters, writings, official documents, songs, and poetry.
http://www.dosan.org/dosandigitallibrary.html

ECAL Fall Meeting
Dec 4-6, 2008, Hanoi, Vietnam
The International Joint GIS-IDEAS, PNC and ECAI Conference 2008 will be held December 4-6, 2008, in Hanoi, Vietnam. The Conference program is currently being finalized. Anyone who has not yet submitted a proposal for a presentation and wants to do so should contact Dashielle Vawter, smashel@berkeley.edu, immediately. For details see: http://www.pnclink.org/pnc2008/english/index.htm

Lewis Lancaster reports

I have been teaching at the Summer Institute of Korea University and giving local lectures in Korea. The Won Buddhist Leadership Council invited me to their headquarters to discuss ways in which they could start doing more in the digital world.  This group, organized over a century ago, has a million members with major external sites in the U.S.

The Tripitaka Koreana Institute has received a major grant from Korean government to continue work on the digitization of rubbings from the 12th century printing blocks of the Korean version of the Chinese Buddhist canon.  The examples are housed in Nanzenji Temple in Kyoto.  They will hold a major celebration in 2011 for the 1000th year anniversary of the carving of the printing blocks used for the Nanzenji collection.

I will give the keynote address at the International Association of Buddhist Universities being held in Bangkok in September. 

ECAI Projects Update

Context and Relationships: Ireland and Irish Studies
A one-page handout “Making Contextual Resources Accessible for Digital Resources,” explaining this project available at http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/belfasthand.pdf and a PowerPoint presentation at http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/belfastbuck08.ppt
Both were prepared for a joint presentation by P.I. Michael Buckland and Paul Ell at the JISC - Coalition for Networked Information in Belfast, Northern Ireland, June 10-11.  http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/jisc-cni-2008/

Recent Meetings

Co-Director Michael Buckland was a keynote speaker at the International Conference on Analogous Spaces: Architecture and the Space of Information, Intellect and Action, held May 14-17 in Ghent, Belgium. The theme was on spatial and architectural imagery in the representation and organization of information, with special reference to the work of the Belgian pioneer of Documentation Paul Otlet 1968-1944. No plans for a conference proceedings have been announced but the program, with abstracts and PowerPoint presentations can be found at http://www.analogousspaces.com

The Congress of Cultural Atlases IV, April 21-25, 2008, was co-hosted by ECAI and Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia. The conference website is at http://cedar.humanities.curtin.edu.au/conferences/cca4/
and the program details are at http://ecai.org/Activities/2008_Perth.html

United Nations Vesak Day Celebration, May 13- 17, 2008, Hanoi, Vietnam.
Some 1,500 Buddhists and dignitaries participated the the Vesak Day honoring the Buddha’s birthday. ECAI Director Lewis Lancaster was a member of the International Organizing Committee. ECAI affiliates were strongly represented and ECAI organized four panel sessions. The Celebration website is at http://vesakday2008.com/indexnew.html
The ECAI panels are listed at http://ecai.org/activities/2008_vesak.html

ECAI has helped to sponsor a workshop hosted by the Center for Korean Culture at Korea University in Seoul entitled “Turkic Influences on East Asia.”  The featured speaker was Professor James Millward of Georgetown University, a historian who concentrates on the Uyghur issues over time. Because of the great interest, we are planning a full conference in 2009 with plans to bring as many as 50 scholars to Seoul to discuss Eurasia as a cultural unit.  Korea University would then plan to publish the edited proceedings. The conference will be done in cooperation with Dr. Susan Whitfield and the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library.

On Sunday July 27th, representatives of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), the Electronic Buddhist Text Initiative (EBTI) at Dongguk, the Research Institute of the Tripitaka Koreana (RITK), the Nagarjuna Institute, and Dharma Drum Buddhist College (DDBC) held a workshop at Dongguk University, Seoul, Korea, to discuss the creation of an improved catalog of
Buddhist texts. Howie Lan and Lewis Lancaster participated. It was suggested that a new catalog should reference existing manuscript witnesses of the text and there was widespread agreement that a new catalog should incorporate recent research, especially regarding the attribution of texts and the exact date of their production. The working group has agreed to meet again at the next ECAI/PNC meeting in Hanoi, December 4th-6th. The meeting is open to all interested parties.

Future Meetings

ECAI Spring 2009 Meeting
March 22-26, 2009, Williamsburg, VA, USA
ECAI’s Spring 2009 meeting will be held in conjunction with CAA (Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archeology) on March 22-26, 2009, Williamsburg, VA, USA, with the theme “making history interactive.” Conference website: http://www.caa2009.org/