About: News and Announcements

TAPoR Research at the University of New Brunswick Supported through the University Research Fund

The University Research Fund provides research support to new faculty in their first year of a tenure-track or tenured appointment at UNB and to established UNB faculty who do not currently hold federal research council funding. Awards of up to $7,500.00 will be made for deserving projects.

Researchers applying for funds from the URF and who will be conducting research involving the application of technologies in the humanities or social sciences may also apply for a fellowship with UNB's Electronic Text Centre (ETC) This carries an additional stipend of $2,500 for a period of one year. These grants and associations with the ETC are intended to promote collaborative research in electronic scholarly communication.

In addition to the financial award, the ETC will provide research support, including: consultation, programming, lab space for researchers and their students, and project definition andmanagement. Support will be concentrated in the year of the grant's award, with the expectation that the research will become reasonably self-sufficient after that period.

Up to two fellowships will be awarded in association with the URF per calendar year. Faculty who pursue a research agenda through the ETC will be eligible to become designated as a TAPoR researcher and to take advantage of its server and lab infrastructure. TAPoR, or the Text Analysis Portal for Research, is a five-institution, 6.85 million dollar Canada Foundation Innovation humanities computing award.

The Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick - A Survey for Its 2005 Summer Seminar Series

The Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick has offered a summer institute for the past eight years on Building Electronic Texts and Images. Last summer the Centre added a course on the Encoded Archival Description with Daniel Pitti. The Centre and its Advisory Board are currently reviewing its summer instructional program in several areas, including course offerings.

You can help us with this process by responding to our Web survey and answering 7 questions. The primary objective of this survey is to help us plan our future course offerings and when the courses will be offered.

We would appreciate you response by November 19th.

For more information about this survey or the 2005 Summer Seminar Series, contact Susan Oliver.

UNB Anounces Release of New Metadata Content Managment System

UNB announces the beta release of the Digitally Unified Collections of Texts (D.U.C.T.) metadata prototype for the description and searching of TAPoR collections. The metadata framework is based on the Research Support Libraries Program (RSLP -http://www.rslp.ac.uk/) Collection Description.Initially UNB would like to inventory collections and any associated metadata in order to develop appropriate indexing procedures and mechanisms as well as to test the efficacy of the tool as refinement continues. TAPoR nodes are invited to create user accounts at http://dev.hil.unb.ca/Texts/Engine and explore the D.U.C.T. environment.

Atlantic Canada Portal Now Open

The Atlantic Canada Portal is a bilingual, multilayered website, designed to explore the use of communication technology to support research related to the Atlantic Provinces of Canada. It is supplemented by an electronic list, that serves as a discussion forum for groups and individuals interested in research, teaching, and policy relating to the Atlantic region.

2004 Summer Seminar Series

The Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick continues its annual Summer Seminar Series with an expanded offering of two one-week workshops and one two-day workshop in August 2004. The workshops are designed to effectively balance technical components with theoretical and practical "hands-on" learning opportunities in state-of-the-art facilities.

• Essentials of Electronic Publishing (August 16-20th)
  Instructor: David L. Gants
• Intensive Introduction to Encoded Archival Description (August 16-20th)
  Instructor: Daniel Pitti
• Fundamentals of Digital Imaging (August 13th and 14th)
  Instructor: Marc Bragdon

Detailed course descriptions and registration information are available at the Summer Seminar Series website.

New High Performance Computing Resources Have Arrived!

The TAPoR group and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UNB are announcing new high performance computing resources. These resources will be used to support activities of both TAPoR and mechanical engineering, and are currently maintained at the Advanced Computational Research Laboratory. For more details on the configuration see Computing Resources.

TAPoR Needs Assessment: Final Report

In October-November 2002, Sue Fisher of the Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick conducted interviews with stakeholders in the TAPoR project in order to:

• synthesize areas of commonality and discrepancy around a core set of discussion points,
• make recommendations to TAPoR principal investigators based on this synthesis; and
• make recommendations to the Electronic Text Centre with respect to the development of a metadata framework for the TAPoR Portal.

The results of this process are included in the following documents:

• Final Report (in PDF)
• Appendix 1: Survey instrument (in PDF)

DUCT TAPoR Metadata Portal available for demo

UNB's Electronic Text Centre has released the DUCT TAPoR metadata portal. This web-based tool will provide a framework for the creation of collection-level metadata, allowing users to search for texts and related software available through participating TAPoR institutions and researchers.

Dr. David Gants Appointed Canada Research Chair

TAPoR at UNB is pleased to welcome Dr. David Gants, Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing at UNB.

Dr. Gants comes to UNB following previous appointments at University of Georgia and the Electronic Text Center at University of Virginia, and is a recipient of a number of major fellowships and grants in Canada, the United States and Great Britain. Over the past decade, his pioneering work in electronic text editing and bibliography (with particular interest in early modern English literature and publishing) has established Dr. Gants as an important presence in humanities computing. Dr. Willard McCarty (King's College London) calls Dr. Gants' appointment as a Canada Research Chair "a highly significant event" for humanities computing, and one with implications for the greater field of literary studies.

The Government of Canada established the Canada Research Chairs Program in 2000 "to enable Canadian universities, together with their affiliated research institutes and hospitals, to achieve the highest levels of research excellence and to become world-class research centres in the global, knowledge-based economy." For more information, visit the Canada Research Chairs Program website at: www.chairs.gc.ca.

CaSTA 2004: Call for Papers

McMaster University will host the third annual Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis (CaSTA) from November 19th to the 21st, 2004. The topic of the conference will be "The Face of Text" and the program chair is Terry Butler (University of Alberta). The call for papers is out.