Friday, February 8, 2002

Canadian Universities Will Create an Online Portal for Studying Texts By KAREN BIRCHARD Scholars at six Canadian universities will create an online portal for researchers in that nation -- and perhaps around the world -- who study electronic texts. The Text Analysis Portal for Research will offer access to databases of electronic texts and software for studying them. In addition, each of the six participating universities will create laboratories equipped with scanners, computers, and other hardware and software that scholars could use to study texts. "It's exciting," said Elaine G. Toms, associate professor of information science at the University of Toronto, one of the collaborating centers. "Each university center has something different to offer, and we'll be developing some new software capabilities for researchers to use to make electronic databases more accessible." "It's also a chance for us to look at other issues, such as archiving and preserving electronic editions," said Alan C. Burk, director of the Electronic Text Center at the University of New Brunswick. Canadian scholars have developed a number of databases -- including collections of Old English and Middle English texts, Canadian aboriginal material, multimedia oral texts, and rare poetry -- that will become accessible to scholars through the portal. "During the last 20 years there have been a lot of electronic texts published by scholars that have not been widely available," said Susan R. Fisher, electronic-services librarian at the University of New Brunswick. The portal will probably offer several different levels of access, according to the project's coordinator, Geoffrey M. Rockwell, an associate professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University, in Ontario, and currently a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia. "Canadian researchers will be given priority -- this is infrastructure paid for by Canada and therefore should support Canadian researchers," Mr. Rockwell said. The universities involved are McMaster University, the Université de Montréal, and the Universities of Alberta, New Brunswick, Toronto, and Victoria. The project received an award from the Canada Foundation for Innovation of $1.6-million (U.S.), which researchers say is the largest grant ever given to a humanities project in Canada. The universities will also contribute, giving the project an overall budget of approximately $4.3-million. The grant "reflects the increasing importance of computing in the humanities," said William A. Evans, an associate professor of communication at Georgia State University who tracks developments in electronic-text analysis. Mr. Evans said that institutions in the United States often are wary of humanities-computing programs and that researchers in the field can find themselves marginalized within their departments. As a result, he said, many use the Internet to keep in touch with other scholars, build a sense of community, and commiserate over their isolation. The Canadian researchers "are no longer merely commiserating via the Internet," he said. "They are harnessing the Internet to build an infrastructure that will sustain them and their programs at their home institutions." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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