Book Series: Office for Humanities Computing (OHC)

Beginning in 1992, the OHC has published a series of monographs and collected papers concerned with the impact of computers in humanities scholarship and higher education (see details below). In a number of cases the publications have arisen from the colloquia or workshops. This programme of formal, refereed publications is an active one, producing at least one or two publications each year. There are plans to produce forthcoming and back issues in parallel in electronic form.

The OHC is also interested in other types of electronic publication. Current activities include the sponsorship of an on-line series, Computing in the Humanities Working Papers (CHWP), edited by Willard McCarty at King’s and Russon Wooldridge in Toronto. In addition, the OHC is a co-sponsor, with the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities at Princeton and Rutgers universities, of Humanist, an international electronic seminar on humanities computing moderated by Willard McCarty.

The OHC is actively exploring other collaborative electronic publishing ventures.

Ordering information is at the bottom of this page.

The OHC is always interested in receiving proposals for publications from authors and editors. Proposals should be sent in the first instance to the Director of Publications, Marilyn Deegan.

OHC Style Guide

For contributors and editors, there is an OHC style guide. Questions about the style guide should also be addressed to Marilyn Deegan.

 

Electronic Publications

  1. Humanist,  http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/.

  2. Computing in the Humanities Working Papers (CHWP), http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/chwp/ (Toronto, Canada) orhttp://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/chwp/ (London).

  3. Overview of Electronic Publication, http://www.ohc.kcl.ac.uk/overview.html

 

Paper Publications: Current Titles

 

1. Computers and Language 

Caroline Davis & Marilyn Deegan, Eds., 1992. £10.00 

(OHC No 2; ISBN 1 897791 02 X  ) 

A collection of ten papers originally given at the conference 'Computers and Language II' at Sheffield City Polytechnic in September 1991. A unifying theme in the collection is how to go about teaching langauge and literature by computer. Practical experiences of integrating computers in Modern Language and English Literature courses are described. Computer-based language learning in a business and commercial context is discussed, and there are also papers on the use of the computer in teaching ancient and medieval languages. 

2. The Politics of the Electronic Text

Warren Chernaik, Caroline Davis & Marilyn Deegan, Eds., 1993, reprinted 1997. £10.00 

(OHC No 3; ISBN 1 897791 04 6  ) 

The proceedings of a one-day conference, 'The Politics of the Electronic Text', held on 12th February 1993 at the Centre for English Studies at the University of London. The conference addressed the opportunities and difficulties created by the impact of new technology on scholarship. Electronic texts, corpora, and hypertext are bringing about changes in scholarly practices and in attitudes to texts and criticism, as well as raising problems in the rights of control over texts, pricing structures, and copyright law. 

 

3. The Digitization of Primary Textual Sources

Peter Robinson, 1993, reprinted December 1994. £10.00 

(OHC No 4; ISBN 1 897791 05 4  ) 

This report reviews work done by individual scholars and projects in digitizing manuscript images and the technologies currently available. It makes positive recommendations as to how digitizing might proceed in the short term, with suggestions aas to what methods of digitization might be appropriate to particular materials. It also indicates problems to be solved in the long term. Four colour plates give examples of digitization processes. 

 

4. The Canterbury Tales Project: Occasional Papers I

Norman Blake & Peter Robinson, Eds., 1993. £10.00 

(OHC No 5; ISBN 1 897791 06 2  )

The Canterbury Tales Project aims to recover the transmission history of the Tales by transcription, collation, and analysis of all the extant manuscripts. The Occasional Papers volumes collect essays relating to this aim. This volume contains papers on editing the Tales, transcription for the computer, computer-assisted stemmatic analysis, a new manuscript catalogue, and the glosses in the textual tradition. 

 

5. The Canterbury Tales Project: Occasional Papers II

Norman Blake & Peter Robinson, Eds., May 1997. £10.00

(OHC No 9; ISBN 1 907701 12 7)

The second volume in the Canterbury Tales Project covers the continuing development and its further expansion since the publication of the first volume in 1993. This collection of essays describes transcription and collation work that has been carried out on the Wife of Bath's Prologue, and the advanced analytical work the project is making possible. 

 

6. The Transcription of Primary Textual Sources Using SGML

Peter Robinson, 1994, reprinted October 1999. £10.00

(OHC No 6; ISBN 1 897791 07 0  ) 

This report explains the recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for transcription of primary sources, based on Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). There is liberal use of worked examples of coding of real texts. The report is intended to enable scholars beginning new projects, or working on existing projects, to use the TEI proposals in the preparation of electronic versions of primary texts. 

 

7. Beyond the Book: Theory, Culture, and the Politics of Cyberspace

Warren Chernaik, Marilyn Deegan & Andrew Gibson, Eds., 1996. £10.00

(OHC No 7; ISBN 1 897791 09 7  )

The essays in this volume had their origin in two conferences co-sponsored by the CTI Centre for Textual Studies, Oxford University, the Office for Humanities Communication, and the Centre for English Studies, University of London. The first of these, organized by Andrew Gibson and Noel Heather, and held on 13 January 1995 in London, was entitled Theory and Computing Culture, while the second, organized by Marilyn Deegan and held in Oxford on 17 February 1995, was called Beyond the Book: Text in the World of Electronic Communication. A common theme in the essays is that some sort of epistemic shift is in progress, prompted and made possible the increased access to and familiarity with electronic technology, and that the new world of the Internet and the electronic archive can be characterized as postmodernist. 

 

8. Textual Monopolies: Literary Copyright and the Public Domain

Warren Chernaik & Patrick Parrinder, Eds., April, 1997. £10.00 

(OHC No 8; ISBN 1 897791 11 9  )

The essays in this important and ground-breaking volume are based on a conference at the Centre for English Studies, University of London, in December 1994, occasioned by changes in copyright law brought about by a 1993 European Directive, and have been brought up to date to reflect significant developments since that time. According to John Sutherland's preface, "the London conference on copyright proved extraordinarily educative for those attending. It enlarged horizons and created points of intellectual connection between traditionally separated sectors of the book publishing world and the academic community... publicizing an issue of cultural importance that was in danger of passing into law without anyone noticing." Contributors to the volume include legal and literary scholars, publishers, and authors, expressing both practical and political concerns, in a searching consideration of changing ideas of intellectual property in the electronic age. According to Richard Morrison in the London Times, May 17, 1997, this collection of essays is a "real gem", "compulsive reading", "a brilliant anaylsis". "I have been riveted, enthralled, consumed to the exclusion of all other matters, by the marvellous Textual Monopolies ... If you want to glimpse human nature, red in tooth, claw, and legal fees, then Textual Monopolies ... is required reading". 

 

9. Knowledge Lost in Information: Patterns of use and non-use of networked bibliographic resources

David Zeitlyn, Matthew David & Jane Bex, Eds., 1999. £10.00

British Library Research and Innovation Centre Research Report no. RIC/G/313

(OHC No 11; ISSN 1366-8218)

The widespread and rapidly increasing availability of electronic information services is raising difficult and complex questions for academics and academic institutions, about who uses the services, who does not, why or why not, and about the effects and implications of the new services and the way they are introduced and managed. This timely volume reports on qualitative research carried out to begin an analysis of some of these questions, and includes a number of observations and recommendations that should be of interest not only to researchers and teachers but also -- perhaps especially -- to administrators and those who develop and manage the information services in our higher education institutions. 

 

10. Digital Resources for the Humanities conferences

 The DRH conferences are a major forum for all those affected by the digitization of our common cultural heritage. The OHC annually publishes a selection of papers from the conference. Digital media and methods present new opportunities and challenges for the humanities and for humanistic scholarship. Interpretation and analysis of data has always depended upon access to resources, both primary and secondary. This access is being made at the same time much wider, more precise, faster, and more interactive through the new technologies. The changes are qualitative as well as quantitative. The annual DRH conferences bring together the key players in these developments: the scholar producing or using an electronic edition; the teacher using digital media in the seminar room; the publisher finding new ways to reach new markets; the librarian, curator, art historian, or archivist wishing to improve both access to and conservation of the digital information that characterizes contemporary scholarship and culture. 

 

11. The Digital Demotic: A Selection of Papers from DRH97 (Digital Resources for the Humanities 1997)

Lou Burnard, Marilyn Deegan & Harold Short, Eds., 1998. £10.00

(OHC No 10; ISBN 1 897991 12 7)

This volume is a representative collection of papers from the DRH conference held at St Annes's College, Oxford in September 1997. 

 

12. DRH 98 (Digital Resources for the Humanities 1998)

Marilyn Deegan, Jean Anderson & Harold Short, Eds., 2000. £10.00

(OHC No 12; ISBN 1 897791 13 5  )

DRH 98 was held at the University of Glasgow in September 1998. 

 

13. DRH 99

Marilyn Deegan & Harold Short, Eds., December 2000. £10.00

(OHC No13; ISBN 1 897791 14 3  )

DRH 99 was held at King's College London in September 1999. 

 

14. DRH 2000

Marilyn Deegan, Mike Fraser & Nigel Williamson, Eds., December 2001. £10.00

(OHC No14; ISBN 1 897791 15 1  )

DRH 2000 was held at the University of Sheffield in September 2000. 

 

15. Do we want to keep our newspapers?

David McKitterick, Ed., July 2002. £10.00

(OHC No 15; ISBN 1 897791 16 X  )

This collection of essays is based on the conference of the same name held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London,in March 2001. It examines in some detail the vexed questions of access to and preservation of historic newspapers in major research libraries. The essays present views from many of the key figures in publishing, libraries and academia who are concerned with the historic record represented by newspapers. Nicholson Baker, Karen Wittenborg, Jan van Impe, Ronald Schuchard, Robert Tombs, Jim McCue, John B. Hench, Peter Mandler, Ronald Milne, Mike Crump and H.R. Woudhuysen debate a wide range of the fundamental issues raised at the conference, and the result is a thought-provoking and stimulating volume. 

 

16. DRH 2001 and 2002

Jean Anderson, Alistair Dunning & Michael Fraser, Eds., August 2003. £10.00

(OHC No16; ISBN 1 897791 17 8  )

DRH was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in September 2001 and at Edinburgh University Library in September 2002. 

 

17. Augmenting Comprehension: Digital Tools and the History of Ideas

Dino Buzzetti, Giuliano Pancaldi & Harold Short, Eds., August 2004. £10.00

(OHC No 17; ISBN 1 897791 18 6  ) 

These papers are based on the proceedings of the conference on 'Humanities Computing: Philosophy and Digital Resources', held in Bologna in September 2000. The conference was part of a project funded by the University of Bologna to assess recent advances in humanities computing and, more specifically, the impact of digital tools on the development of fields such as the history of philosophy, and the history of science and technology. The common threads linking the papers published here are computer-based textual analysis and criticism, with the software development issues involved, together with methodological questions. The opening speaker was Father Roberto Busa, the much-esteemed and original pioneer of humanities computing. The rest of the papers fall into two sections: ‘Developing tools’ and ‘Approaching analysis’

 

18. A Guide to Good Practice in collaborative working methods and media tools creation

By and for artists and the cultural sector; Lizbeth Goodman and Katherine Milton Eds. Advance Order £10.00 

It documents the process and products of Project RADICAL one of the first major art-technology collaborations to be funded by the European commission’s IST Programme. The guide is one of a series of titles commissioned by AHDS Performing Arts at the University of Glasgow and published by the Office of Humanities Communication at King’s College London.

 

Ordering

Copies of OHC publications can be obtained from:

The Office for Humanities Communication
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
Kay House
7 Arundel Street

London WC2R 3DX

Please enclose a cheque made payable to King's College London. Addition for postage and packing per copy: £1.00 for one book and 50p for every subsequent item UK, £2/£1 Europe, and £3/£1.50 outside Europe.