Projects
The Dictionary of Old English
http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/
Lexicons of Early Modern English
http://link.library.utoronto.ca/leme
REFLEX
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~merrilee/2003/reflex.html
Researchers
Joan Cherry
Joan Cherry is Vice-Dean and Professor at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research interests are in the area of human computer interaction. Her work has included usability studies of online help systems (with So-Ryang Jackson), user satisfaction studies of online public access catalogues (with Marshall Clinton), evaluation of displays for web-based library catalogues (with Joe Cox), evaluation of screen design guidelines (with Paul Muter), and user studies of Early Canadiana Online (with Wendy Duff). She is currently involved in a project to develop instruments for user evaluation of collections and services of digital archives (with Wendy Duff) and another project to develop an instrument for user evaluation of virtual exhibits mounted by libraries, archives and museums (with Wendy Duff and Thiery Ruddell). She is also conducting a longitudinal study of students' perceptions of the quality of master's programs in information studies (with Wendy Duff and Nalini Singh). She has given workshops to information professionals on conducting user studies and the design of questionnaires.
Cherry received a doctorate in information science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1983. Prior to joining the Faculty of Information Studies in 1987, she was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at York University. Since 1999 she has held 50% administrative positions at the University of Toronto and taught the Advanced Seminar in Research Methods in the doctoral program at the Faculty of Information Studies. For 2004-05 and 2005-06 Cherry will divide her time between the position of Vice-Dean at FIS and a 50% research leave.
Wendy Duff
Wendy Duff is Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Information Studies. She received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. While doing her doctoral work she was the project co-ordinator for the University of Pittsburgh Electronic Recordkeeping Project. Her primary research interests are user studies, archival description, and electronic records. She has served as a member of the International Council on Archives' Adhoc Commission on Descriptive Standards, the Encoded Archival Description Working Group, and the EU(DELOS)/NSF Workgroup on Digital Archiving and Preservation.
Duff's current research includes: the development of generic user evaluation tools for archival services (with Beth Yakel, University of Michigan, and Helen Tibbo, University of North Carolina); the development of instruments for evaluating user perceptions of the collections and services of digital archives (with Joan Cherry) and another project to develop an instrument for user evaluation of virtual exhibits created by archives, libraries, and museums (with Joan Cherry and Thiery Ruddell). She is also conducting a longitudinal study of students' perceptions of the quality of master's programs in information studies (with Joan Cherry and Nalini Singh).
Antonette diPaolo Healey
Antonette diPaolo Healey is Editor of the Dictionary of Old English and the Angus Cameron Professor of Old English Studies at the University of Toronto. Previously, she taught in the Department of English, Yale University. Her publications include an edition of The Old English Vision of St. Paul and A Microfiche Concordance to Old English (with R.L. Venezky). With her Toronto team, her most recent publications include: The Dictionary of Old English: A to F on CD-ROM in 2003 (the first electronic version of the first seven letters of the Dictionary); The Dictionary of Old English Corpus on CD-ROM 2004 Release (a full-text database containing at least one copy of every surviving Old English text); and The Dictionary of Old English Corpus on the World Wide Web 2004 Release (a research tool enabling scholars to design powerful searches on the entire body of Old English). She has served as Chair of the Publications Committee of the Modern Language Association and as a specialist adviser to the Ministry of Research, Government of Denmark, and to the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin.
She currently serves on various advisory and editorial boards in her field in Canada, the US and England. For her work on the Dictionary of Old English, she has been the recipient of a number of research awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the British Academy, and the Salamander Foundation, among others. Her areas of research interest are: Old English language and literature; meaning and its complexities; the intersection of language and culture; and computing in the humanities.
Ian Lancashire
Professor of English,
University of Toronto Senior Principal Investigator,
TAPoR Toronto Office: Lexical Analysis Laboratory,
Room 7001, Robarts Library
Telephone: 416-946-0473
E-mail: ian.lancashire@utoronto.ca
Ian Lancashire founded the Centre for Computing in the Humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto in 1986 and directed it until 1996. From 1982 to 1996, he co-developed two text-analysis programs, Microcomputer Text Analysis System (with programmer Lidio Presutti) and Text Analysis Computing Tools (TACT, created by John Bradley with the help of Lidio Presutti, Michael Stairs, T. R. Wooldridge, and Willard McCarty), the manual for which was published by the Modern Language Association of America in 1996. For two years he compiled The Humanities Computing Yearbook, the first time with Willard McCarty. He hosted the first joint International Conference of the Association for Computing in the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing in June 1989. He has since 1994 created free scholarly editions for the World Wide Web:
Representative Poetry Online (1994-),
the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database (1996-99),
Canadian Poetry (1996-),
Renaissance Electronic Texts (1996-),
and the Lexicons of Early Modern English (2004-).
As President (English) of the Consortium for Computers and the Humanities (COCH/COSH) from 1992 to 2003, he worked with colleagues across Canada who ultimately came together in TApoR. Now he serves as Senior Principal Investigator for TAPoR Toronto. His research fields are the history of English, cybertextuality, poetry, and computer-assisted text analysis. Presently a Killam Research Fellow, he is writing a book on the Early Modern English lexicon.
Brian Merrilees
Brian Merrilees is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Toronto and Fellow of the Royal Society Society of Canada. His early work was in Anglo-Norman and he is the editor of several insular French texts, including the Voyage de saint Brendan (with Ian Short, Manchester, 1979 and Paris, 1984). Work in Anglo-Norman led to an interest in the teaching of French in the Middle Ages, and of Latin in French, and from there to medieval French lexicography. He currently directs a research program (REFLEX – Research in Early French LEXicography)on the bilingual dictionary in France before 1500. To date the program has produced three significant edited dictionary volumes. The largest and most important is the Dictionarius of Firmin Le Ver (1440), edited by Brian Merrilees and Willliam.Edwards in the Corpus Christianorum : Continuatio Medievalis series (Brepols Publishers, Belgium) in 1994. The second volume, the Glossarium gallico‑latinum (c. 1430-50), edited by Brian Merrilees and the late Professor Jacques Monfrin, membre de l = Institut de France, was published in the same series in 1998. In 2003 William Edwards and Brian Merrilees brought out a third text of the same family, Guillaume Le Talleur’s Vocabularius familiaris et compendiosus, printed in Rouen c. 1490. All three texts have been the subject of numerous separate studies and analyses, particularly concerning their structure and French vocabulary innovations. All three dictionaries and some dozen others have been entered, in whole or in part, into a WordCruncher database that is continually evolving a a research tool for the program.
His TAPoR project concerns developing a database of various versions of the Latin-French Aalma, a glossary used principally it would seem for the teaching of Latin.The main known version, Paris BnF lat. 13032, is already prepared for on-line publication and this will be followed by versions from Metz, B.M. 510, Salins, B.M. 44, Lille, B.M., 147, Exeter, Dean and Chapter Library, 3517 and St Omer, B.M., 644. These last two are particularly interesting as they are longer than the other versions and form a distinct group opposed to Paris 13032 and related texts. All versions have individual characteristics and the online base is intended to allow comparison of similarities and differences, as well as provide a useful study of their controbution to the history of French.
Another major editing project concerns a large Latin-French dictionary in Montpellier, Faculté de Médecine, H110 (c. 1380) with a secondary copy in Stockholm, Royal Library, N78 (c. 1450). This text will likely appear as a printed edition before being added to a Database of Latin Dictionaries being prepared for Brepols Publishers by the Centre “Traditio litterarum occidentalium” (see www.digento.de/titel/101742.html) directed by Professor Paul Tombeur of the Université de Louvain-la-Neuve.
Brian Cantwell Smith
Brian Cantwell Smith is Dean and Professor at the Faculty of Information, Professor of Philosophy and Computer Science, and Canada Research Chair in the Foundations of Information at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the philosophical foundations of computing and information (including the use of computational/informational concepts in such fields as psychology, cognitive science, physics, logic, and art), philosophy of mind, consciousness, and metaphysics and epistemology. His writings emphasize the inadequacy of our current understanding of computation, and recommend viewing it instead as an unrestricted site in which to explore fundamental questions about the relation between meaning and mechanism. He is the author of On the Origin of Objects, a metaphysical proposal for a co-constitutive account of epistemology and ontology (MIT Press, 1996). He is also publishing, online and on paper, a 7-volume in-depth study of the conceptual foundations of computing and information.
Smith received a doctorate in computer science and artificial intelligence from MIT in 1982. Before moving to the University of Toronto, he was University Professor at Duke University, after teaching cognitive science, computer science, and philosophy at Indiana University. From 1981-1996 he was Principal Scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and adjunct professor of philosophy at Stanford University. He was a founder of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University (CSLI), a founder and first President of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), and President (1998-99) of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP).
Research Philosophy
Text Analysis
Text analysis, beginning in the late nineteenth century, applied statistics on the frequency and distribution of words and phrases in literary works to such questions as the authorship of a text, its date, and indebtedness to sources. The publication of the Brown Corpus of American English in the 1960s created corpus linguistics, the study of a language from statistical samples of its living discourse, as a field for the application of text-analysis tools. Eventually, computer programs other than statistical systems were added to the technologies used by literary and linguistic text analysis. Such tools now include interactive concordancers, XML browsers, and usability software. Because these tools have more functionality, text analysis has grown with them. It now encompasses non-statistical forms of textual study, such as editorial encoding, stemmatic analysis, database creation, and free text-exploration. The availability of huge libraries of electronic texts has also encouraged students of language and literature who do not understand statistics to use ready-made, often simple computer programs as a method that assists in manual critical reading.
In the TAPoR Toronto laboratory, we approach text analysis lexically by applying database and textbase technologies to create both new dictionaries and editions or databases of old dictionaries. Initially, word- and phrase-concordances help us determine the properties of semantically-dense glossaries and lexicons. We then build encoding languages for these works that enable us to import them into databases.
These two technologies, database and textbase, are converging. SQL databases enable us to predict and control complex researcher queries and to integrate search tools with scholarly works such as critical editions and bibliographies. Textbases prepared by software like XTeXT allow for less editorial control but not only make possible highly sophisticated information retrieval through algorithms and techniques developed in computer science, but also enable lexical databases to draw from massive collections of e-texts.
Our lexical projects use computer technologies to make possible the creation of scholarly resources that would have been impossible with manual methods. Dictionaries, as general-purpose tools for all disciplines, truly belong on the Web, where anyone from a high-school student in Whitehorse to a corpus linguist in Oslo can use them simultaneously. Lexical research infrastructure such as our projects provide, for English and French (the two principal languages of Canada), contribute to the semantic Web.
Ian Lancashire
University of Toronto
August 19, 2005
Usability
We view "usability" broadly, as meaning the effective and efficient use of systems in real-world settings, based on a complex interplay of technical, human, and social factors. We are therefore interested in usability research that focuses on the discovery, understanding, articulation, and making available to both users and designers those characteristics, dimensions, and aspects that make systems maximally "usable" in this sense. This focus on situated, real-world settings leads us to include "in vivo" studies of actual systems in use by real-world users in authentic settings, as well as more traditional "in vitro" studies of people in restricted laboratory settings.
Burgeoning communications networks, internet-enabled video-conferencing, and systems for remote collaboration are affecting such usability research in two major ways. First, it is increasingly urgent to study patterns of use that involve remote collaboration or electronically-mediated interaction. Second, these same networks are allowing usability researchers to be in different locations from those they are studying -- even when the research involves real-time interaction with or observation of the user(s).
FIS usability projects seek to study, both locally and remotely, users who in turn are interacting both locally and remotely with complex systems. More specifically, it is based on the principle that the following four distinctions should be treated, as far as possible, as
independent: (i) between what is local and what is remote; (ii) between and among users, designers, engineers, and usability researchers; (iii) between work that is solitary and work that is collaborative; and (iv) "in vivo" and "in vitro" studies of systems in use. This framework generates an almost unlimited number of configurations of usability research -- from the traditional situation of a usability researcher studying a single user in a laboratory setting, to a participatory-design project where users, researchers, and engineers come together to talk about important design principles, to a situation where several usability researchers, at various different sites, connected via network and videoconferencing links, collaboratively study a different networked and/or video-conferenced group of collaborating end users. It is envisaged that all of these and numerous other configurations will be important, as the TAPOR project develops over the years.
Faculty of Information Studies
University of Toronto
August 19, 2004
