SPECIAL SESSION ON ECAI: NETWORKED DIGITAL RESEARCH RESOURCES
The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (www.ecai.org) is creating an infrastructure for data discovery by time and location. The paradigm of the historical atlas, showing spatial and temporal relationships among cultural data, and the digital library model of networked distributed resources, together define within ECAI a new approach to collaborative scholarly research. Using time-enabled Geographic Information Systems, ECAI-affiliated research projects are creating interoperable data layers that can be retrieved from globally distributed servers for display on a map-based interface. Data layers can be further linked to text, images, audio, video, or other resources. The ECAI Special Session will foreground speakers on key issues concerning potential for GIS resources in the humanities, such as Virtual Reality and Internet GIS. Presentations by major ECAI-affiliated projects demonstrate the breadth and suppleness of the ECAI infrastructure. Project walk-through sessions, as well as demo sessions by ECAI members, demonstrate the basic ECAI IT architecture and the wide range of technological approaches that individual projects have adapted to the varied demands of humanities research.

The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (www.ecai.org) is a partnership of scholars and information technology specialists turning new technologies to the discovery, exchange, and analysis of scholarly data. Using the paradigm of the historical atlas and a distributed digital library model, data is indexed by time and location for retrieval over the Internet from globally distributed servers. By creating a searchable index of networked, refereed projects with a GIS (geographic information systems) map-based interface, ECAI provides a means of organizing, searching and displaying information, allowing scholars to discover new causal relationships by creating customized maps. Inquiries concerning ECAI may be addressed to: ecai@socrates.berkeley.edu.

This year a meeting will be held at UC-Berkeley on October 27-28 to discuss proposed revisions to the Text Encoding Initiative's Guidelines on how to handle characters and character sets, particularly in multilingual digital documents. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a markup standard used widely in humanities-related computer projects by museums, libraries, publishers, and individual scholars. It is currently under revision and the new version will include recommendations on how to implement the international character encoding standard, Unicode.

The purpose of this meeting is to bring together Unicode officers with those who have worked with TEI multilingual projects to discuss specific revisions to the TEI Guidelines, resulting in well-formed set of recommendations. Because of time constraints, the meeting will follow a very tight agenda. Seating will be extremely limited; at this time very few spaces are available. For further information, please contact the local organizer, Deborah Anderson (dwanders@socrates.berkeley.edu).

For further information on TEI, please see http://www.tei-c.org/.
Additional information on Unicode is available at http://www.unicode.org.