Early Cyrillic Electronic Text Conference and Workshop

[David J Birnbaum]

Early Cyrillic Electronic Text Conference and Workshop

                    Call for Papers

The Institute of Literature of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences is
pleased to announce that a conference on Computer-Supported Processing
of Medieval Slavic Manuscripts will be held in Sofia in the first week
of August, 1995.

Slavists have long been hindered by the absence of standardized methods
for dealing with the orthographic and textual complexity of medieval
Cyrillic manuscripts. Recent work that has appeared under the auspices
of the International Organization for Standardization, the Text Encoding
Initiative, the Unicode Consortium, and similar bodies has not yet been
fully coordinated with the needs of Slavic medievalists. As a result,
Slavists have often been forced to develop and implement ad hoc and
mutually incompatible strategies, a situation that impedes the very type
of textual collaboration that electronic processing should facilitate.
Not only must Slavic philologists agree on a common method of encoding
medieval manuscript material, but, if they hope to be able to use
standard software tools, they must integrate their methods with those
used elsewhere in humanities computing.

The present Conference is designed to serve as a forum for Slavic
philologists (linguists, literature scholars, textologists,
archeographers, paleographers, and others) and computer science
professionals (software engineers, programmers, standards developers,
and others) to combine their efforts and develop practical solutions
that answer the requirements of Slavic researchers without deviating
from established or emerging international character set and text
architecture standards.

The Conference will combine the presentation of papers and reports
(20-30 minutes each), roundtable discussions (up to 90 minutes each),
and a comprehensive workshop intended to introduce Slavic medievalists
to the guidelines developed by the Text Encoding Initiative and
sponsored by the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the
Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Association
for Computational Linguistics.

Abstracts of proposals for papers, reports, and roundtables dealing with
relevant issues should be sent by electronic mail by 1 January 1995 to
either of the following:

[hidden email] (David J. Birnbaum)
[hidden email] (Milena Dobreva)

Colleagues without access to electronic mail may send their submissions
by regular post to either of the following:

Professor Anisava Miltenova
Institute of Literature, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
52 Shipchenski Proxod, Bl. 17
BG-1113 Sofia Bulgaria

Professor David J. Birnbaum
Department of Slavic Languages
1421 Cathedral of Learning
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA

All submissions will be refereed anonymously by Slavic philologists and
computer specialists, and abstracts of papers accepted for the
conference will be distributed to all participants before the first
sessions. Notices of acceptance will be sent out by 1 March 1995.

Organizing committee: David J. Birnbaum (Pittsburgh) Andrej Bojadzhiev
(Sofia), Milena Dobreva (Sofia), Harry Gaylord (Groningen), Anisava
Miltenova (Sofia).