Julia Flanders
Professor of the Practice in English, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University and Director of the Digital Scholarship Group, Northeastern University Library

Gender has been central to the history of digital humanities. But it has operated as a “core concept” in that history through many different structural roles. Practitioners and theorists in humanities computing and digital humanities have wrestled with the role gender plays in the structure of professional organizations and workplaces, in our research agendas and the content of our research collections, in our habits of discourse and our data models, in the architecture of our technical systems and in the politics of their development. How has this history shaped our current field, and how can it inform our ideas about the future of digital humanities? What needs to be changed and where do we look for sources of change?

Claus Huitfeldt
Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bergen

Nancy Ide
Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Vassar College, founding member and President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (1985-1995) and co-editor of the journal Computers and the Humanities (1995-2004)

Undoubtedly one of the greatest {if not the greatest|contribution of the field of humanities computing is the founding of the Text Encoding Initiative. When it was established in 1987, the TEI was overseen by three professional associations, including one devoted exclusively to the field of computational linguistics. Since then, the TEI has profoundly influenced not only humanities scholarship but also standards for representing language data in electronic form in general, and it also laid the groundwork for twenty subsequent years of effort to devise standards for representing data intended for use in the field of computational linguistics, within efforts such as the XML Corpus Encoding Standard (XCES) and, more recently, work within ISO TC37 SC4. These efforts were undertaken largely independently of the TEI and humanities computing in general; however, there has been recent interest in attempting to harmonize the TEI Guidelines and standards developed by groups such as ISO TC37 SC4, thus coming full circle to rejoin efforts within the two fields. This presentation will trace this history of standards development from the inception of the TEI through the present day, with special attention to the intellectual context that drove it, and consider more broadly the past, present, and potential relationship between the fields of computational linguistics and digital humanities.