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2001 Meeting

ACH Executive Council Minutes – 2001

Corrected, Feb 2002, via ACH-EC-L (RGS).

Attending

John Bradley, Chuck Bush (Treasurer), David Chesnutt, Mavis Cournane (Executive Secretary), Julia Flanders, Lorna Hughes, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Bill Kretzschmar, John Lavagnino, Willard McCarty, Elli Mylonas, Geoffrey Rockwell, Allen Renear (Chair), Geoffrey Rockwell, Martha Nell Smith

Opening (Renear, Chair)

The Executive Committee was called to order.

No changes to the Agenda were proposed.

Report on ACH/ALLC 2001 (Lorna Hughes, Local Organizer)

The EC strongly commended Hughes and the program committee for their excellent work. Hughes noted that the conference fee had been waived for eastern Europe; the registrations as of this morning totaled 298, and that plenary sessions would be webcast. Housekeeping details were discussed. Management of online conference papers discussed.

Treasurer's report (Chuck Bush, Treasurer)

The ACH is solvent. (A full report was submitted to the ACH-EX-L mailing list.)

Kluwer has retracted its intention to raise CHum prices for members this year and there was no longer need to act immediately on that issue of raising membership fees. The Chair noted that this issue would return, perhaps soon, and we should prepare to address it.

Program Committee for 2002

Selected for the Program Committee for ALLC/ACH2002 were Lorna Hughes, Martha Nell Smith, Willard McCarty, Wendell Piez.

Nominating Committee

Selected for the Nominating Committee for 2002: Matt Kirschenbaum, Geoffrey Rockwell (Chair), Julia Flanders; It was confirmed with one from outside the council to be found by the committee [since the meeting the fourth member has been added, Adrian Miles. — ahr]

Report on the TEI (David Chesnutt, ACH Representative to the TEI)

The TEI Consortium has been incorporated as non-profit.
There is a membership drive underway.
An NEH Grant has been awarded that will in part be used to fund conversion to XML and development of tools to help people make transition to XML from SGML. A survey to support this is underway.
Flanders, survey in the conference bag, asked EC members to help distribute it encourage others to fill it out.
This is a call for nominations to the TEI council and the board of directors: two slots on board to be filled; six seats on the tech council to be filled.
ACH members can help by getting their institutions to join the consortium
A motion to commend the consortium, passed unanimously.

ACH Publications Group (Bill Kretzschmar, Chair)

McCarty, Kirschenbaum, Unsworth, Ide, Kretzschmar are the members. Kretzschmar noted that the following the survey, which showed respondents polarized on the question of a fully electronic publications strategy, the committee was dormant. The Chair asked the committee to stand by as further work in this area might be needed once discussions resumed with Kluwer about subscription fees.

CHum (Elli Mylonas, Associate Editor)

The lack of papers from web, multimedia or academic community was noted. CHum is trying to get editorial board together to help address it. ACH does not have presence in journal. Having an editorial from the ACH, a note from chair or report from one of the subcommittees would be good. Julia and Willard will work with on this

Membership WG (Julia Flanders, Chair)

The President took an action item: bring report again to our attention and then decide what to do on the list

Employment/Professional WG (Wendell Piez, Chair)

EC was reminded of three things involved in carrying the WG program at the conference: poster, binder of jobs on the academic side, and mentoring. On badges have M for mentor The EC voted to commend the WG on its excellent work.

MLA (John Lavagnino)

Two sessions: Rockwell's sessions with MacTavish on Computer Games. Donna Reiss is on teaching. Available on the ACHWebsite.

ACHWeb (Elli Mylonas)

Request of membership committee made a subtree.

Busa Award (Willard McCarty)

Five people on committee, 12 nominations. 3 people nominated for contributions to scholarship in HC, 3 for scholarship in another field related to HC, three identified by large project, three for institution building. Not an easy choice. Burrows unanimously elected.

Some organizational issues emerged. The committee didn't have the secretarial or student support to research the nominations. Relied on what they knew. CMSMCQ will be circulating some recommendations. There will not be a significant cost to ACH for the award this year.

Humanist (Willard McCarty)

Membership is 1,100 but many are subscriptions that redirect; recently started to climb to 1200 members from South America, Russia, Slovenia. Humanist remains a pulpit, prefer round table. Announcement and discussion postings should continue to be sorted. Publication Committee will continue discussion of electronic publications.

ALLC/ACH 2002 information (Wilhelm Ott, Local Organizer)

Ott updated the EC on the preparations for ALLC/ACH 2002, which are going well.

Bids for ACH/ALLC 2003

Bids for ACH/ALLC 2003 were made from the University of Maryland (MITH) and by the University of Georgia. After a difficult deliberation the EC voted in favor of the University of Georgia

The EC made a unanimous and emphatic acknowledgement that this was an extremely difficult decision. Both bids were superb and clearly both institutions would do an excellent job of hosting. The University of Maryland was strongly encouraged to submit a bid for ACH/ALLC 2005.

Program Committee Proposal

The following was submitted to the EC by the ACH members of the ACH/ALLC 2001 Executive Committee.

The program committee should be appointed in April, and should plan on having a working meeting at the conference following e-mail discussions in May to set the agenda.

There's no reason to wait till the conference to appoint the committee. And if this change is made it becomes possible to have a real working meeting at the conference: many of the issues that our committee discussed in August and September 2000 were things that called for a face-to-face meeting. It's not practical to arrange such a meeting except at the conference, and there needs to be some time for e-mail discussion to set the agenda first; nobody has had time to think things over if they only learn they're on the committee when they show up at the conference.
Plenary speakers should be selected before the end of the summer before the conference, and they should be named in the call for papers.

It's good publicity and it makes it clearer what the conference is all about. Good people often need to be approached a year in advance anyway.

A discussion about plenary speakers is one thing that would be particularly appropriate for the committee meeting at the conference. It doesn't work that well in e-mail.
More work needs to be done to recruit reviewers in a wide variety of disciplines and to keep the list up to date; creating a separate committee to carry out this task should be considered.

This year we worked very hard to increase the number of reviewers, but more needs to be done. With more reviewers, each person has fewer reviews to do, and we're more likely to get useful comments to pass on to the authors. It is also a way to involve more people in the community.
A committee needs to be convened to talk about the question of URLs in abstracts and develop a policy.

It's notoriously hard to anonymize the papers, but URLs raise some further problems in this line. It becomes unclear what the reviewers are reviewing: they should be judging a proposal for a spoken presentation at the conference, and not a web site; and they shouldn't feel any obligation to read through a web site that might be very large. There is also a potential for authors to glean information about who's reviewing them by using various well-known tricks for tracking web-site access.
The question of abstract length should be considered once more.

The conference web site will publish the abstracts soon, and so everyone will be able to judge whether the abstracts have gained or suffered from a change in requested length. We've also compiled statistics on all the proposals submitted this year, their length, and how they fared.

Discussion ensued and these recommendations endorsed. Renear reported that he had been discussing this proposal with Harold Short (who also received it, from the ALLC members) and that both he and Harold were in favor of all its recommendations. The EC resolved to select the Chair for the ACH/ALLC 2003 during the year, using the ACH EC listserv for discussion. The EC was furthermore in favor of convening the Program committee as soon as possible and commissioning the current Program Committee as a workgroup to harmonise these recommendations on behalf of the ACH. Hughes suggested get past conference organizers to help.

Other recommendations were also discussed, including: that the ACH website have placeholder page to announce where the next conference will be held and that the first call for papers at the conference for the next year Plenary speakers be chosen before the end of the summer.

Submitted

Respectfully, Allen Renear (President) and Mavis Cournane (Executive Secretary)