1. A New Model for Peer Review of Electronic Scholarly Publication in Language and Literature

The crisis in commercial and academic publishing is urgent and we believe that a turn to new models of publication is timely and necessary. Therefore we propose to create a new model of peer review for scholarly publication on the web. The model will include an editorial board that would convene groups of experts to provide peer review for electronic scholarly publication in the fields of language and literature. This review process will assess and document scholarly quality for publications that do not reside in traditional venues.

Project goals are:

1. To encourage the dissemination of scholarship via the Web, especially for projects that may not fit in traditional venues of publication.
2. To create a new mechanism of peer review for electronic projects.
3. To enable scholars working in new media to receive appropriate peer recognition and institutional reward.
4. To evaluate the new model at the end of the project.

The project will require an initial planning conference of scholars, computer scientists, librarians, representatives of scholarly societies, and academic publishers to design the board and procedures of review, as well as consider the professional and technical issues raised by electronic publication (e.g., access, indexing, stability of the document, long-term preservation, etc.)

We envision an editorial board in place for two years and comprised of scholars in language and literature, computer scientists, librarians, and academic publishers. This board would select and convene specialized editorial groups appropriate to review of online publication in various genres as they are submitted for review. The board would also develop editorial policies and procedures appropriate to the various genres of electronic publication that are discovered.

The board would be overseen by an editor who would work full-time managing the project; his or her salary would be paid by the grant monies, as would other appropriate and necessary support for this work. Other members of the board and the members of the specialized editorial groups would be volunteer faculty from institutions of higher education.

Part of the board's responsibility will be to evaluate the project and report on the practical and theoretical issues it raises about scholarly publication in the digital environment.

NINCH should enlist the support of appropriate scholarly societies and academic publishers in both the planning conference and the project itself.

2. Professional Development

Numerous technologically based environments and approaches currently exist that language and literature scholars could incorporate into their research and teaching. The problem is that humanists frequently lack the context and preparation to make effective use of these.

In order to acquaint members of the literature and language community with new and emerging technologies, and to help bridge the cultural and methodological gaps between the humanities community and the computer science community, we propose that NINCH and its associated agencies seek funding for professional development projects.

These projects will inspire collaboration between humanists and computer scientists, and will equip humanists to assume responsibility for influencing the evolution of new electronic environments. We envision two formats for these projects:

1. Residential summer institutes (based on the model of NEH Summer Seminars or the National Writing Project), designed to acquaint language and literature teachers and scholars with the tools and methodologies of digital environments so that they may approach electronic technology with increased confidence and understanding, and, as a result, create and implement technological projects at their home institutions. The staff of such institutes would include both technologists and humanists. Applications for such funding would be welcomed not only from existing institutes that require additional support to continue and expand their activities (e.g., to open their workshops to more faculty or to offer more of them), and also from scholars who wish to establish new institutes.

2. travel and residency for individual humanists at sites where they can experience focused technological immersion. Two categories of such funding would be:

a. attendance at technically oriented conferences (e. g., SIGGRAPH), which generally carry registration fees inaccessible to humanists, and;

b. site visits to leading technological research or computing environments (e.g., the Electornic Visualization Lab at UIC, or the MIT Media Lab).

3. Designing Language Learning Environments for a Multicultural Society

Methods for linguistic encoding that have served linguistic researchers in the past have included text-based tools such as dictionaries, grammars, thesauri, annotated text, and concordances. Modern information technology allows researchers to transcend the limitations of purely text-based material, including multimedia elements, semantic networks, parsers, and electronic means of textual mark up for web distribution. However, these current developments of textual analysis rely on adapting old models to new contexts.

For example, the text encoding initiative has provided guidance in the area of textual mark-up, which nonetheless, may have limitations for the development of data representation and interfaces for learners and authors relying on web technologies. New strategies and models may complement the accomplishments of the text encoding initiative, making it more usable for teachers of language and culture.

We propose to explore new means of encoding lexical conceptual structures, such as visualizing a semantic network using 3-D imaging, which may enable us to portray complex relations, including visual and sound attributes of linguistic and contextual data. We will thus be able to enhance the creation, dissemination, and archiving of these data for use by scholars, teachers, and students. Thus, culturally bound notions, such as honorifics in the case of Japanese, formalities in Spanish business interactions, body movements in French social interactions, etc. can be encoded and disambiguated for teaching and learning situations.

Terry Langendoen

James Noblitt

Rafael Salaberry

Mary Ann Lyman-Hager

4. Scholar Driven Evaluation of Digital Finding Aids

As the number of items in a digital collection in a particular field becomes vast, access must occur through indexing mechanisms. We suggest a project to bring scholars in a specific field to evaluate the interfaces, indices, and database structures of a digital collection in their area (e.g., the Rossetti archive) to determine in what ways these access mechanisms facilitate or hinder scholarly inquiry.

A major component of the project will be to create methods and procedures for evaluating access to scholarly materials in digital collections. We anticipate that the resulting evaluations and evaluation methods will influence the future design of access mechanisms to scholarly materials.