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HUMANIST: Lessons from a Global Electronic Seminar

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Abstract

The electronic seminar HUMANIST illustrates how e-mail may foster discussion of basic problems and exchange of information among humanists world-wide, thus aiding research and strengthening the community. With a certain amount of tailoring and editorial care, it has used existing software to support traditional humanistic dialogue - while also solving the problem of information overload, at least temporarily. Through their complaints of “too much mail” members have, however, usefully pointed to our immature understanding of the new medium. Its apparently mixed nature (part conversational, part textual) demands a new paradigm, towards which this essay makes an attempt. Recommendations for the successful management of other such seminars are also given.

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Willard McCarty holds a Ph.D. in English literature and is currently Assistant Director, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, Univ. of Toronto. Recently he has published both in humanities computing and in classics and has lectured widely in Europe. He is particularly interested in electronic communications, scholarly note-taking software, Milton, and Ovid.

This essay was originally delivered as a paper at the convention of the Modern Languages Association, Washington, DC, December 1989. A substantially different version was given as a plenary address at “The New Medium,” the second annual conference of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers and the Humanities, in Siegen, Germany, 10 June 1990.

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McCarty, W. HUMANIST: Lessons from a Global Electronic Seminar. Comput Hum 26, 205–222 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00058618

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