Collaborations and Partnerships
Humanities Computing works closely with a number University and outside partners on research and administrative projects. The list below highlights the University groups with whom we have the most active collaborations, especially in support of Humanities faculty research projects.
The Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) is a cooperative enterprise of Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française (ATILF) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Division of the Humanities, the Division of the Social Sciences, and Electronic Text Services (ETS) of the University of Chicago. It was created in 1981 to provide access to FRANTEXT, a corpus of some 2,000 texts representing a broad range of written French from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. The ARTFL Project has since expanded to include numerous other databases in French and many other languages. ARTFL is also recognized for its open-source full-text retrieval and analysis search engine PhiloLogic. In addition to its main databases (the Encyclopédie, FRANTEXT, French Women Writers, etc). an ARTFL subscription also includes access to the full-text of its considerable French dictionary and reference collection—Dictionnaires d'autrefois—as well as collections of Provençal Poetry and Old French literary texts. Currently, over three hundred North American institutions subscribe to the ARTFL Project.
In response to a 2004 faculty committee report on language teaching and learning, the College and the Division of the Humanities took the initiative to create a University-wide center for the study of languages. The new language center will consolidate and significantly enhance the support for language learning across an array of academic disciplines, especially in the language, linguistics, literature, and civilization programs of the Division of Humanities and the growing number of Title VI area studies centers. The center has four goals: 1) to provide modern classroom facilities and multimedia resources in support of language teaching and learning for students, faculty, and instructors; 2) to provide a state-of-the-art research and development center with appropriate staffing and equipment for the development of teaching materials and in support of research in second-language acquisition, language pedagogy, and linguistics; 3) to provide professional development in language pedagogy and the use of technology in language instruction; and 4) to provide for the daily business center and office needs of language faculty, lecturers, and graduate student instructors.
The primary mission of the DMA is to maintain an archive of audio materials pertaining to language study and related fields. DMA staff work closely with other groups on campus to assist faculty and advanced graduate students in archiving their research material. The material may include audio recordings, digital photographs, digital video, 3D data, and other associated files. Our current collection holds over 7,000 hours of recorded audio in approximately 180 languages with a special emphasis on Meso-American languages. The audio recordings exist on a wide range of sound carriers - from wax cylinders, aluminum disks, wire recordings, reel-to-reel tapes and digital audio files. The DMA provides a recording studio for faculty and others to record original materials and lends out audio equipment to faculty and students for field work and research projects.
The Visual Resources Collection was established in 1902 along with the Department of Art History. The collection began with extensive lantern slide holdings and has now grown into a library of more than 350,000 35mm slides and over 47,000 digital images. The collection is developed in-house and through purchases from vendors. The VRC's coverage ranges from prehistoric to contemporary time periods with media in painting, sculpture, decorative arts, architecture, film stills, and didactic materials and more. The mission of the Visual Resources Collection is to provide expert support to the Department of Art History and the University of Chicago community through the provision and development of high quality, visual resources for teaching and research.
The University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory established the Computation Institute in 2000 to address the most challenging problems arising in the use of strategic computation and communications. Its establishment was motivated by the tremendous opportunities inherent in new approaches to research based on the large-scale application of computation, data, and communications, and the strategic importance to the University and Argonne of developing the capabilities required to exploit those opportunities.
Digital Library Development Center
The Digital Library Development Center collaborates with librarians, faculty, university departments, and other groups to develop and maintain networked information systems for use today and to ensure the long-term preservation of information resources delivered through these systems for continued availability in the future. Its core activities include designing, building, and maintaining Web sites, dynamic information resources, and digital collections; installing and supporting vended systems that provide access to information resources; administering the network of information server computers which underlie our digital library and which support related initiatives on campus; researching, evaluating, and implementing new technologies; participating in national and international digital library initiatives; and documenting and sharing procedures, policies, and discoveries.
NSIT Academic Technology Group
Academic Technologies is the Networking Services and Information Technology (NSIT) senior directorate responsible for supporting the teaching, research, and learning information technology needs of faculty, students, and researchers at the University of Chicago. Within the context of NSIT, the mission of Academic Technologies is to lead, coordinate, and inform NSIT's activities focused on research and education at the institution and does so through the activities of its family of units, broad range of facilities and services, and breadth of organizational relationships.
For a full list of collaborations and partnerships, please see the Humanities Computing wiki.