[FSF] Anyone in Boston area available to represent free software at Harvard event?

[John Sullivan]

RMS is looking for people knowledgeable about free software to attend
this event at Harvard on Thursday and talk to the people in the field
about making their software free. If you can do this, please let us know
at address@hidden It would be a big help. Thanks!

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Digital Humanities: "Humanities Computing: Theoretical Challenges"
Dr. Malcolm Hyman, research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for 
the History of Science, Berlin, will give present.
All faculty, graduate students, librarians, and technologists 
interested in humanist research endeavors which involve any level or 
aspect of computing will find this an interesting and topical 
presentation, as Harvard grapples with how best to support this 
emerging field. (Abstract for this talk appears after asterisks at 
the bottom of this email.)
Thursday April 17th at 2:00 p.m.,  Room 133, Barker Center.


ABSTRACT for Digital Humanities Talk, Thursday April 17, 2:00 PM
This talk will focus on emerging issues in humanities computing and 
the technical and theoretical challenges they raise. Early work in 
computing primarily addressed problems in engineering, the natural 
sciences, economy, political administration, and business management. 
Applications involving human language and textual data followed at 
first only slowly, but led eventually to significant developments in 
document processing, speech recognition and synthesis, and electronic 
communication. Recent innovations in computing have been spurred 
primarily by the needs of the natural sciences: notably, the demands 
of communication in high-energy and particle physics led to the 
creation of the World Wide Web; the challenges of genomics drove 
fundamental research in high performance computing and pattern 
recognition; and biomedicine has prompted substantial work on text 
mining. These developments were possible because of close cooperation 
between computer scientists and researchers in the various scientific 
domains. So far, however, such cooperative endeavors have largely 
been lacking in the humanities. Yet humanistic research poses many 
challenges that may well contribute to the next wave of innovations 
in computing. The aim of this presentation is to formulate some of 
these challenges and to provide key points that can be used in 
initiating a fruitful dialog between humanists and computer scientists.


-- 
John Sullivan
Manager of Operations
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