Professor, Department of English and Director, Canadian Institute for Research Computing in Arts,
5-21D Humanities Centre, University of Alberta, Edmonton
Alberta T6G 2E5, Canada
Phone: 780 492 7346; Fax: 780 492 7441
Email: Susan.Hockey@UAlberta.ca

Web pages for Workshop on The Use of Computer Corpora in Linguistics, North American Symposium on Corpora in Linguistics and Language Teaching, University of Michigan, 20 May 1999.
Allen Renear (Brown University)and Jerome McGann (University of Virginia) face off in What is Text? A Debate on the philosophical and epistemological nature of text in the light of humanities computing research, organized by Susan Hockey, Thursday 10 June 1999 at ACHALLC99.

Susan Hockey is a Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Director of the Canadian Institute for Research Computing in Arts (CIRCA) at the University of Alberta, where she also teaches humanities computing in the Department of English. Her interests are in the development of better computing tools and techniques to meet the needs of text-based scholarship in the humanities.

From 1991 to 1997 Susan Hockey was the first Director of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH), sponsored by Rutgers and Princeton Universities and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to act as a focus for electronic texts in the humanities within the United States. At CETH she founded and co-directed (with Dr Willard McCarty) an annual International Summer Seminar on Methods and Tools for Electronic Texts in the Humanities. She also directed a programme of research on the use of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) for the Humanities including an interface to OpenText's Pat search engine, a pilot project linking the Text Encoding Initiative and the Encoded Archival Description SGML Document Type Definitions, and the Electronic Theophrastus.

At Oxford University Computing Services from 1975 to 1991, Susan Hockey undertook various projects and roles. She was Project Director for the Oxford Concordance Program (OCP) for which she also wrote the user manual, and Project Director for the first version of the manuscript collation program Collate. She taught courses on Text Analysis and the Computer, and SNOBOL Programming for the Humanities. She was also the First Director of the Computers in Teaching Initiative Centre for Textual Studies and also directed the Office for Humanities Communication from 1989-91. She was elected to a Fellowship by Special Election of St Cross College in 1979 and an Emeritus Fellowship of the College in 1991.

Susan Hockey was Chair of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing from 1984-97. During that time she founded the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing with Oxford University Press and also co-edited five volumes of the series Research in Humanities Computing for Oxford. She has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Text Encoding Initiative since 1987 and has twice served as chair of that committee.

Her current research activities include serving as Co-Chair (with Bernard Taylor) of the Society of Biblical Literature Seminar on Electronic Standards for Biblical Language Texts, as co-coordinator (with David Chesnutt and C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen) and Chair of the Steering Committee of the Model Editions Partnership, and as co-investigator responsible for the technical direction of the Orlando Project.

Susan Hockey is the author of A Guide to Computer Applications in the Humanities, Duckworth and Johns Hopkins, 1980 and Snobol Programming for the Humanities, Oxford University Press, 1986, as well as numerous articles on text encoding, text analysis, and computing in the humanities.

Since 1985 Susan Hockey has served on various Expert Groups, Advisory Boards and Task Forces including:

• Project Muse
• Thomas A. Edison Papers
• Internet Shakespeare Editions
• ALA ALCTS Task Force to Define Bibliographic Access in the Electronic Environment
• European Science Foundation Expert Group on Humanities and the Computer
• Humanities Information Review Panel sponsored by the British Academy and the British Library
• Resources Working Group of the National Initiative for Humanities and Arts on the Information Highways sponsored by the Getty Information Institute.

Her other interests include travel and hiking - she and her husband Martin have trekked in Nepal and hiked the Grand Canyon from rim to rim - also dressmaking, knitting and needlecraft.

Last updated on 22 September 1999