On Aug 4, 2004, at 9:49 PM, Jim Breen wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 04:01:49PM -0400, Nancy Ide wrote:
>>
>> We are pleased to announce that as of Volume 39 for 2005, Computers
>> and
>> the Humanities will be changing its name to Language Resources and
>> Evaluation.
>
> Does this mean that non-CL/NLP/etc. papers that used to appear in
> "Computers and the Humanities" will no longer be welcome?
>
I'm glad you asked this question publicly, as it gives me a chance to
clarify the new scope of the journal for everyone.
The new journal is concerned with language resources. A paper dealing
with the creation, annotation, use, or evaluation of language
resources in any domain is certainly welcome. However, there are some
topics that would have been acceptable in CHum that will not fit into
the new journal's scope. These would include papers describing use of
the computer in some established way--say, creating or using a web page
or basic database--and in which the interest is primarily in the
results in a given field (e.g., a literary analysis). These days, such
papers are more appropriately published in traditional journals dealing
with the relevant discipline. That said, I should point out that if you
examine the contents of recent issues of CHum (see
http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/0010-4817), the vast majority of
recently-published papers fall within the new journal's scope; and
these include papers dealing with Greek manuscripts, authorship
attribution in historical documents, and Turkish novels, as well as
several more "CL-oriented" papers. All of these papers use
methodologies that are novel and interesting, and can contribute to
methods for language analysis, regardless of the type of data or the
goal of the research.
I have long argued that until the CL world re-discovered statistical
methods 10 or 15 years ago, it was the field of humanities computing
that was primarily concerned with creating, encoding/annotating, and
using language resources such as corpora and lexicons. In the 1970's
and early 80's, statistical analysis of language data was almost
exclusively the domain of humanities computing; and it was the
humanities computing community that inspired the Text Encoding
Initiative in 1987, because of the need for a common format for the
language resources it had been creating for 20 years. The new journal
carries on CHum's 30+ year tradition of publishing papers dealing with
these themes.
If you are still unsure, please drop me a note indicating the topic of
your submission, and I will be happy to let you know if it fits LRE.
Nancy Ide, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Computers and the Humanities
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