Director's Report

April 2009

Future Meetings

"New Approaches to Computational Humanities" workshop, June 2-3, 2009
ECAI will have a workshop at George Mason University campus in Virginia June 2-3 for a preliminary exploration of "New Approaches to Computational Humanities."  The workshop will be by invitation and ECAI affiliates who are interested in the meeting should contact the ECAI Central office as soon as possible (ecai@berkeley.edu). The agenda for the workshop will include methods of doing time stamped pattern searching.

Third International Conference on Remote Sensing in Archaeology
17th - 21st August 2009, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India (near Chennai).

The IIIrd International Conference will be organized jointly by  Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli, the University of California,  Merced and Berkeley, the
University of Siena (Italy) and the REACH  Foundation, Chennai.
The conference will discuss a wide range of perspectives, approaches and  issues on the use of remote sensing and digital technologies in  documenting, analyzing and interpreting archaeological and  anthropological contexts. Innovative contributions, case studies,  research projects and posters are invited on Digital Cultural Atlases (projects and prototypes) and cultural atlas  components (gazetteers, time-periods, biography and social networks,  thesauri, technical infrastructure, content sources and display models) and many related topics.

An impressively large and international paper proposals have been received.
See http://www.spacetimeplace2009.org for details.

Workshop, Pondicherry, India, with the Ecole Francaise d'extreme orient, August 23-25, 2009
Following the August 17-21 conference on Remote Sensing, ECAI will join with the Ecole Francaise d'extreme orient in Pondicherry, India for an invitational workshop dealing with the input of Sanskrit materials and the methods of handling Sanskrit manuscripts September 23-25.

“Using the Cultural Atlas for Basic Research” Workshop with Academia Sinica
4-5 October 2009, Tapei, Taiwan

ECAI will hold a workshop on October 4-5 at Academia Sinica in Taiwan dealing with "Using the Cultural Atlas for Basic Research"  A small group of scholars will make use of the Atlas of Chinese Religions that is being officially launched at that session.  After the workshop, the group will make reports on the results to the PNC meeting October 6-8 and the GIS joint meetings "GIS in the Humanities and Social Sciences 2009 International Conference" 7 - 9 October 2009. A separate announcement on these three meetings will be issued shortly.

See http://gis.rchss.sinica.edu.tw/gishs2009/ for details.

Other Developments

The Director has been co-organizer with Professor Philip Stanley for the workshop at the United Nations Day of Vesak meeting in Bangkok May 2-6 "Constructing a Digital Catalog for Buddhists Texts." The workshop brings together 25 scholars who represent major input and translation projects around the world.

ECAI was represented by the Director at the Second World Buddhist Forum held in Wuxi and Taipei in April. Following the closing ceremonies in Taiwan, a planning session for the new interface of the Atlas of Chinese Religions was held at the GIS Center on the campus of Academia Sinica. This interface will be tested at the workshop being planned for October 4-5.

Recent Meetings

The Association of Asian Studies conference in Chicago featured a joint ECAI / TELDAP panel session on  March 28, 2009. The theme was “Digitization -- Paradigm Shift for Asia Studies.” The session, chaired by Prof. Ruth Mostern (University of California at Merced, USA) included papers by Dr. Simon C. Lin (Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre, Taiwan), Dr. I-chun Fan (Institute of History & Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan), Dr. Karl Ryavec (University of Wisconsin, USA), Dr. Peng-shan Chiu (Institute of History & Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan), and Dr. Jiang Wu (University of Arizona, USA). Details are at http://ecai.org/Activities/2009AAS/aas2009.html

ECAI’s Spring 2009 Meeting was 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.” The conference website: http://www.caa2009.org/

ECAI sessions with titles and abstracts of papers presented are listed at
http://ecai.org/Activities/2009CAA/caa2009.html

Past ECAI Directors’ Reports
Past ECAI Directors’ Reports are available at http://ecai.org/about/directorsRpts.html