Director's Report
January 2008
The 21st Conference of ECAI and the Tenth Anniversary of
the founding of the organization were held in conjunction with
PNC at Berkeley in October. There were 182 registered delegates
for the three day event. I want to thank Peter Zhou and Deborah
Rudolph of the C.V. Starr East Asian Library for their great
help in organizing our meeting in coordination with the opening
of the new building for the library.
The ECAI project focused on the Batanes Islands between Taiwan
and the Philippines was awarded $30,800 by the UC Berkeley Shung
Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines Endowment Fund for continued
research and construction of the atlas within the larger Austronesian
work being conducted by Co-Director Michael Buckland, Professor
David Blundell, and Jeanette Zerneke.
We are in a period of expansion for the ECAI community and a
number of training workshops have been planned to help bring
new projects into operation. In August, Howie Lan from Berkeley
and Damian Evans from U of Sydney worked with 30 students at
the Vietnam Buddhist University in Ho Chi Minh who are constructing
an Atlas of Vietnam Buddhism. In December, Damian Evans did
a similar training at the Yang Heng Graduate School of Buddhism
in Taipei for 18 students who are creating two atlases related
to Buddhism in Taiwan. February will find Howie doing a workshop
at Fagu University in Taiwan. We are also arranging for such
training at the United Nations Vesak Day Celebration in Hanoi
in May followed by a special workshop with the Ecole francaise
d’extreme oriente staff in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and a first ever
ECAI working session in India.
Both the Director and Co-Director have been traveling to various
meetings around the world giving lectures. The Director gave
keynote addresses at the Chicago Colloquium for Computer and
Humanities, the conference in Seoul, Korea jointly sponsored
by the Tripitaka Koreana Institute and Nanzen Temple of Kyoto
celebrating the joint efforts to digitize images of the Nanzenji
Archive, and Computing and Humanities Conference at Vietnam Buddhist
University, Ho Chi Minh.
We look forward to seeing members at the 22nd ECAI Conference,
the Fourth Congress of Cultural Atlases being held April 21-25,
2008, on the campus of Curtin University of Technology, Perth,
Australia. The Fall 2008 meeting will be held jointly with the
Pacific Neighborhood Consortium and the Japanese Geo-Informatics
Projects in Hanoi in December. Spring of 2009 will find us in
Williamsburg, Virginia meeting jointly with the Computer Applications
in Archaeology group.
Events
Place and Time Mapping for Information in Religious
Studies - Workshop
2/19/2008
Location: Fagu University, Taiwan
Description: Howie Lan, UC Berkeley, instructs participants in
this one day workshop featured as part of the EBTI after 15 and
CBETA at 10 Years: Joint International Conference on Digital
Buddhist Studies, February 15-17 with post-conference workshop
Feburary 19-20, 2008, Taipei, Taiwan.
See more on this event: http://www.ddbc.edu.tw/eng/conferences/program.html
Association for Asian Studies
4/3/2008-4/6/2008
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Description: ECAI will hold a panel discussion at the 2008 meeting.
ECAI Congress of Cultural Atlases IV
4/21/2008-4/25/2008
Location: Curtin Technical University, Perth, Australia
United Nations Vesak Day Celebration
5/13/2008-5/17/2008
Location: Hanoi, Vietnam
Description: ECAI will hold a workshop at the UN Day of Vesak
and the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha.
ECAI Congress of Cultural Atlases V
3/22/2009-3/26/2009
Location: Williamsburg, Virginia, USA
Funding Announcements
Text Analysis and Pattern Detection: 3-D and Virtual Reality
Environments
The National Science Foundation has awarded $99,000 grant for
a one year
research project that focuses on searching for patterns in the
Korean Buddhist canon. This project is part of the ECAI
approach that deals with the context of where, when, and who. All
of the canonic data is to be searched for these three elements
in a surrogate form of colored dots. We will give demonstration
of the work at meetings in Taiwan, Vietnam, and Perth.
Context and relationships: Ireland and Irish Studies
ECAI has received a grant of $349,996, one of three awards from
the new “Advancing Knowledge” program administered by the National
Endowment for the Humanities and jointly funded by the Endowment
and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The award
funds a project entitled “Context and relationships: Ireland
and Irish Studies,” which builds directly on our earlier IMLS-funded
project “Support for the Learner: What, Where, When and Who.”
The new project is a collaboration between ECAI, the Celtic
Studies Program, the Emma Goldman Papers Project (at Berkeley)
and the Queen’s University, Belfast. At Belfast, the Centre
for Data Digitisation and Analysis and the University Library
have been funded by the British government (JISC) to scan and
digitize back-files of a hundred journals important for the
study of Irish culture an history.
ECAI will develop techniques to enable anyone reading these digitized
articles to find explanations of persons, places, institutions,
events and other topics mentioned in the text. More at http://ecai.org/neh2007/
Orchid Island (Lan-yu) and the Batanes: A Cultural Atlas
Over the years the ECAI Austronesia team, led by Dr David Blundell,
has benefited from as series of grants to David Bundell and
ECAI Co-Director Michael Buckland from the University of California
Berkeley Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines Endowment Fund.
The largest and most recent of these grants ($30,800) is to
complete a cultural atlas designed by Jeanette Zerneke of the
indigenous cultures and ancient migrations of the inhabitants
of the islands in the Bashi channel between Taiwan and the
Philippines. For details see http://ecai.org/batanesatlas/
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