Keynote Speakers

The keynote speakers for the DH2010 Conference will be Professor Charles J. 
Henry and Dr Melissa Terras.

Charles J. Henry

Charles J. Henry is President of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).  CLIR describes itself as 'an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the management of information for research, teaching, and learning. CLIR works to expand access to information, however recorded and preserved, as a public good.' (From the CLIR website: www.clir.org.) During Henry's presidency, CLIR has been extremely active in a wide range of activities related to the digital revolution as it impacts on scholars, libraries, and publishers, and has taken an active interest in the digital humanities. This includes the commissioning of 'A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States', written by Diane M Zorich and published in November 2008.

Prior to his appointment to the CLIR presidency in 2006, Henry was Vice-Provost and University Librarian at Rice University (from 1996). There he was responsible for for the Digital Library Initiative and the Digital Media Center, and for resurrecting Rice University Press, as the USA's first all-digital university press.

He was a trustee of the Digital Library Federation, which was folded into CLIR in 2009 and now reports to him. He serves on the advisory board of Stanford University Libraries. He was very active in the ACLS Commission on Cyber-infrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He received a Fulbright senior scholar grant to survey library sciences in New Zealand and a Fulbright award for the study of medieval literature in Vienna, Austria. He has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia University and has published widely across the field of technology and higher education.

The title of this keynote presentation will be: To Hold Up a Mirror:  Preservation and Interpretation of Performance in a Digital Age.

Melissa Terras

Melissa Terras is the Senior Lecturer in Electronic Communication in the Department of Information Studies, University College London, and the Deputy Director of the new UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. With a background in Classical Art History and English Literature, and Computing Science, her doctorate (University of Oxford) examined how to use advanced information engineering technologies to interpret and read the Vindolanda texts.

Publications include Image to Interpretation: Intelligent Systems to Aid Historians in the Reading of the Vindolanda Texts (2006, Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents. Oxford University Press) and Digital Images for the Information Professional (2008, Ashgate). She is a general editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly (digitalhumanities.org/dhq) and Secretary of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. Her research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the arts and humanities that would otherwise be impossible.

The title of this keynote presentation will be: Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon.