Welcome

Welcome to the first issue of the Proceedings of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (JDHCS), an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal of papers and posters presented at the annual Chicago DHCS Colloquium. The goal of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) is to bring together researchers and scholars in the humanities and computer science to examine the current state of digital humanities as a field of intellectual inquiry and to identify and explore new directions and perspectives for future research. The first DHCS Colloquium in 2006 (at the University of Chicago) examined the challenges and opportunities posed by the “million books” digitization projects. The second DHCS Colloquium in 2007 (at Northwestern University) focused on searching and querying as both tools and methodologies. The theme of the third Chicago DHCS Colloquium in 2008 at the University of Chicago was “Making Sense” – an exploration of how meaning is created and apprehended at the transition of the digital to the analog. The peer-reviewed papers and posters collected in this issue of the Proceedings are drawn from presentations at the 2008 DHCS. Future issues of the Proceedings will continue in this tradition, publishing papers and posters presented at the previous year's colloquium. As a first time editor and publisher, I need to extend special thanks to my authors who, with patience and with good grace, put up with the unusually long period between their submission deadline and the appearance of our first issue. Your good will would have been stretched even further had I not been able to draw on the professional assistance of my able copyeditor, Theodore Nielsen. Since this publication is of course only one outcome of the colloquium which preceded it, it is also only appropriate for me to thank the DHCS 2008 Program Committee for their work in reviewing the original colloquium submissions. I'd also like to thank the staff at ARTFL, in particular Tim Allen, and the staff in the Humanities Division's Computing and Communications offices, as well as our sponsors, for making last year's colloquium a success. With that, please enjoy the first issue of the Proceedings! I look forward to your comments and I hope to see you at the next Chicago DHCS Colloquium, Nov. 14-16th, 2009, at the Illinois Institute of Technology. sincerely, Arno Bosse