Director's Report

September 2008

Priority Announcements

ECAI Director Lewis Lancaster is now a media star!
On April 10, Lewis Lancaster gave a lecture on Buddhism in a Global Age of Technology as part of the Burke Lectureship on Religion & Society at the University of California, San Diego. It was posted in youtube.com three months ago, where it has already received more the 12,000 viewings, a five-star rating, and many favorable comments. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX2f6QHkU-I

A new grant from the National Science Foundation.
NSF has awarded ECAI a second Small Grants for Exploratory Research award of nearly $100,000 for a second year of work on Text analysis and pattern detection. The project explores the use of high dimensional visualization for analyzing text structure and patterns for scholars in the humanities, using the Korean Buddhist Canon, the oldest complete set of the texts that make up the Buddhist canon for East Asia.

The next phase of research will focus on enhancement of the user interface and integration of a statistical analysis toolkit.  In addition, the functionality of the user interface will be expanded to include a Context Builder for search and retrieval of reference works external to the data repository.  A multi-lingual capability will be explored through the collaboration with ECAIs Context and Relationships: Ireland and Irish Studies project:  http://ecai.org/neh2007
See project website: http://ecai.org/textpatternanalysis

ECAL Fall Meeting in Hanoi, Dec 3-6, 2008.

Join us at the International Joint GIS-IDEAS, PNC and ECAI Conference 2008 to be held on December 4-6, 2008, in Hanoi, Vietnam. ECAI meetings will be held December 2nd and 3rd.  For more details see the ECAI web site, http://ecai.org, and http://www.pnclink.org/pnc2008/english/index.htm

Research Reports

The latest issue of the International Journal of Geographical Information Science is a special issue on digital gazetteers. It includes an article from Ian Johnson and Ruth Moster on "From named place to naming event: creating gazetteers for history."


The two related ECAI projects Context and Relationships: Ireland and Irish Studies and Bringing Lives to Light: Biography in Context were summarized at the International Society for Knowledge Organization conference in Montreal on August 7. The text of the paper is available at http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/ISKO08.pdf.
The Biography project has received a no-cost extension through September 2009.

Recent Meetings

Dosan Bridging the Pacific . . .
ECAI 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. Events were held in Oakland on August 23rd, and in Los Angeles on August 28, 2008. For details and the planned Dosan Digital Library see http://www.dosan.org

Future Meetings

ECAIs 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. CAA’s call for papers is out.  See the conference website: http://www.caa2009.org/