Author Biographies

Johanna Drucker Johanna Drucker is currently the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and Professor in the Department of English. In 2000, she helped establish the Speculative Computing Laboratory, a research group dedicated to exploring experimental projects in Humanities Computing. Her recent work focuses on aesthetics and digital media, particularly graphical communication and the expressive character of visual form. She is well known for her publications on the history of written forms, typography, design, and visual poetics. Her most recent critical work, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity was published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2005.

Julia Flanders Julia Flanders was born and raised in the New Jersey suburbs, and attended a local public high school where computers were taught as Computer Math. She received her first undergraduate degree from Harvard in History and Literature, and her second from Cambridge University in English Literature. In 1989 she began a PhD in English at Brown University, but migrated early in her graduate studies into humanities computing. She started working at the Women Writers Project in 1992, first as a proofreader, then as Managing Editor, Textbase Editor, and Project Manager. Upon completing her doctorate in 2005 ("on Digital Humanities and the Politics of Scholarly Work") she found herself with enough free time to work on the founding of a digital journal.

Julia currently works as the Director of the Women Writers Project at Brown University, where her research focuses on the challenges of digital text representation, text encoding, and scholarly communication. She also does a variety of freelance technology consulting. She has written and spoken on a variety of issues including the gender politics of scholarly digital editing, documentation, the history of quantitative methods of literary analysis, digital textuality and materiality, and various practical problems in text encoding. She has served as Vice President of ACH and Chair of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium.

Jeff Howard Jeff Howard teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, where he studies New Media and literature. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Tulsa in May 2000 and his M.A. in English from the University of Texas in May 2002. He successfully defended his dissertation, entitled Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy, in fall 2005 and will receive his Ph.D. in English in May 2007. He is currently working on a book-length project called Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives.

Linda E. Patrik Linda E. Patrik, Professor of Philosophy at Union College, works on bridges between Asian philosophy and western philosophy, particularly with regard to ethical issues and philosophical issues concerning the nature of consciousness. She has studied and taught with Tibetan Buddhist philosophers at the Nitartha Institute, and she is part of a Tibetan text preservation effort based at Nitartha International's Document Input Center in Kathmandu.

Wendell Piez Wendell Piez was born in Frankfurt, Germany to American parents, and raised in Somerville (Massachussets), Kabul (Afghanistan), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), Manila (the Philippines), Reston (Virginia), and Tokyo (Japan), before attending university in New Haven (Connecticut). A graduate of the American School in Japan and of Yale College (MC 1984), where he received a BA in Classics (Ancient Greek), he has been using and programming computers since 1977 (BASIC, 6502 Assembler). From 1985 to 1998 he attended and taught at Rutgers University, where he specialized in English literature, critical theory, poetics and rhetoric. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1991 (writing on the aesthetic theory and prose practice of the Victorian literary critic and belletrist Walter Pater), he worked in Rutgers University Special Collections and Archives (1991-1995) and on the faculty at CETH (the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities, 1995-1998). Since 1998, he has been employed by Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consultancy in private practice, where he is responsible for the development and application of electronic text technologies both for clients and in house. Author and presenter of journal articles, papers and courses presented at academic and industry conferences and teaching events, he is a regular contributor to HUMANIST, TEI-L, and XSL-LIST, a recognized expert in XML, XSLT and related technologies such as SVG, and co-originator of LMNL, the Layered Markup and Annotation Language. He resides in scenic Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

Joseph Raben Joseph Raben is a professor emeritus of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, where he taught for 30 years. Before that he was a teaching fellow at Indiana University and an instructor at Princeton University. He was awarded a B.A. with honors at the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. at Indiana University, where he minored in folklore under Stith Thompson. His bachelor's honors thesis was on pronunciation as revealed by rhyme schemes in American folksongs, and his doctoral dissertation studied folk speech in Scott's novels. After graduating from Wisconsin, he worked as an engineering aide on the construction of the Hanford Engineer Works, and then entered the Army, where he was trained in spoken Japanese and served in Tokyo as an editor of translations in the Allied Translator and Interpreter Service, attached to GHQ. In this service he translated documents used in the war crimes trials.

At Queens he developed an interest in using computers in humanities research and in 1966 founded the innovative journal Computers and the Humanities to provide a platform for younger pioneering scholars to publish their research. He both edited and carried a large share of this journal's publication chores for 20 years. Among its most useful features was a semiannual Directory of Scholars Active, which informed practitioners around the world of recent applications of computer technology to humanities and related social science problems. These notes he cumulated into a print volume, Computer-Assisted Research in the Humanities (New York: Pergamon Press, 1977). In 1978 he founded the Association for Computers and the Humanities and served as its president for two years before turning it over to younger successors. During this same period, he helped to organize several international conferences at the University of Southern California, Grinnell College, Dartmouth College, Rutgers University, North Carolina State University and Auburn University. He also presented papers at many international conferences organized by others and represented humanities computing at conferences organized by groups within the computer industry, such as the ACM, the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, the International Federation for Information Processing, and the American Society for Information Science. He organized special interest groups at several MLA conventions and within the ACM. He was an invited lecturer at academic institutions all over the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, and in India, China, and Japan. Much of the same effort was contained in articles published in a variety of journals, along with his contributions to Shelley scholarship, some of it based on the manuscript materials in the Bodleian Library.

Melissa Terras Melissa Terras hails from Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland, and ignored computers until her final year of her undergraduate MA, in History of Art and English Literature at the University of Glasgow (1998). Discovering the Internet (and something that she was good at) led to an MSc in IT (Software and Systems), also at Glasgow in 1999. In 2002 she completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford, which was a joint project between the Department of Engineering Science and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, on using image processing and artificial intelligence to try and read the Roman documents from Vindolanda.

Melissa then spent a year at the Royal Academy of Engineering, as assistant manager of the Policy unit, providing impartial advice to the UK government on matters scientific. Now at University College London, she is a lecturer in the School of Library, Archive, and Information Studies on Internet Technologies, Web Publishing, and Digital Resources in the Humanities. She is acting Secretary of ALLC (2005/6) and an Officer of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (2005-8), as well as being involved in other consultancy activities within the Digital Humanities field. She is interested in computational techniques which would allow research in the Humanities that would otherwise be impossible.

Drew VandeCreek Drew E. VandeCreek is Director of Digital Projects at Northern Illinois University Libraries. Please see http://dig.lib.niu.edu to examine digital history projects he has directed. He holds a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Virginia, where he worked on the Valley of the Shadow Civil War History Project at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.

Mark Wolff Mark Wolff is an Assistant Professor of French at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. His research interests include the 19th-century French novel, canon formation, the Oulipo, and humanities computing.