Director's Report

March 2010

A New Home on the Berkeley Campus

We are pleased to announce that ECAI has a new home. The administration has been moved to the Information School (the former “Library School”) under the leadership of Dean AnnaLee Saxenian.  This provides us with a firm base in a “School” and it is a location that reflects the ECAI focus on digital library resources for cultural heritage.  Our home base will now be in the oldest building on the campus, the historic South Hall, which is the last remaining structure from the 19th century campus.

ECAI Executive Committee

The ECAI Executive Committee makes recommendations to the Director and Co-Director regarding ECAI's mission, vision and direction. The Executive Committee meets twice a year at conferences, and communicates regularly through email. The current members of the Executive Committee are listed on the ECAI website at http://ecai.org/community/executivecommittee07.html

The current membership as of March 22, 2010, is:

David Blundell, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
David Bodenhamer, The Polis Center, Indiana University- Purdue University, Indianapolis, USA
Michael Buckland, University of California, Berkeley, USA, Chair
Duraiswamy Dayalan, Archaeological Survey of India
Paul Ell, Queens University, Belfast, Ireland
Maggie Exon, Curtin University of Technology, Australia
Maurizio Forte, University of California, Merced, USA
Shoichiro Hara, Center for Integrated Area Studies, Kyoto University, Japan
Edith Jimenez, Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico
Ian Johnson, University of Sydney, Australia
Andreas Kunz, Institut fuer Europaeische Geschichte, Germany
Lewis Lancaster, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Simon Lin, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Ruth Mostern, University of California, Merced, USA
Susan Whitfield, British Library, London, United Kingdom
Eric Yen, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Jeanette Zerneke, University of California, Berkeley, USA

ECAI Institutional Committee discontinued

The ECAI Institutional Committee was established in 2003 in part to facilitate a decentralization of ECAI activities to other institutions. The members of the Institutional Committee met jointly with the Executive Committee when they could. However, no separate role has emerged for the Institutional Committee, therefore it has been disestablished. We are very grateful to the people who served on it.

New Project

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has just announced a grant to ECAI of $457,000 for a new two-year project entitled “Editorial Practices and the Web.” Michael Buckland will lead a collaborative effort with the Emma Goldman Papers (Berkeley), the Margaret Sanger Papers (New York University), the Stanton and Anthony Papers (Rutgers University) and the Labadie Collection (Univ. Of Michigan) to align the preparation of scholarly editions of historical papers with current Web technologies. Details to follow in the next Directors Report. 

Future Meetings

Please keep in mind the May 30-June 1 meeting in Shanghai at Fudan University for new cultural atlas projects and collaborations between groups involved in textual studies including  Classics in both Europe and East Asia.

ECAI will have a report at the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics workshop being held August 14-27 at UCLA under the guidance of Professor Tim Tangherlini.

The VSMM 2010 Conference October 19-23 in Seoul will be the site for another ECAI workshop dealing with pattern recognition and 3-D displays.

Later in the year, we will again meet with PNC at their 2010 conference being held jointly with City University of Hong Kong.

Directors Activities

The Director was honored with a banquet at the University of Virginia prior to a conference entitled “Crossings: China and Beyond”.  He also delivered the keynote address for the conference.  A second keynote will be given at the Korea-Thailand EXPO conference in Gyoengju, Korea April 1.

The project dealing with Pattern Recognition in textual material, has been officially opened with a demonstration at UCLA.  Technical work by Howie Lan was the focus for the interface that makes use of software developed with NSF funding.  Howie also reported on the software to the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong. This work will be shown at the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference being held at King’s College, University of London in July.

The Director has held meetings with staff members at the Luce Foundation in New York, NEH, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the East-West Center in Washington D.C.

Michael Buckland gave the opening plenary lecture on “The Suitable Arrangement of Documents” at the Document Academy conference hosted by the University of North Texas on March 19.

Visitors
ECAI continues to entertain visitors on the Berkeley campus.  On February 5 Dominic Powlesland from the Landscape Research Centre, U.K. and Greg Crane of Perseus presented papers dealing with archeology and classical text research for heritage information.

Professor Hara (Kyoto University) and Professor Oketani (Osaka University) joined the ECAI Central staff for a discussion of continued collaboration and current work on metadata for distributed information.

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