Keynote Addresses

Opening Keynote:

Hypertext as Argument: An Experiment in Form and Function

Edward L. Ayers

Executive Director, Virginia Center for Digital History
University of Virginia
      

William G. Thomas

Director, Virginia Center for Digital History
University of Virginia
    

A leading scholarly journal has commissioned us to write a "native digital" article. We attempt to make an argument of greater complexity than is possible in a traditional paper publication. We will also explore the professional ramifications of scholarship that makes an argument in a far more complex and comprehensive way than is possible on paper.

Edward Ayers is the Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He was educated at the University of Tennessee and Yale University, where he received his Ph.D. in American Studies. He has written and edited seven books. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (1992), a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, was named the best book on the history of American race relations and on the history of the American South. Ayers is the senior editor of the The Oxford Book of the American South (1997) and co-author of All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (1996) and American Passages: A History of the United States (2000).

Ayers's current work is a multidimensional effort called "The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War." The World Wide Web version of the project has attracted over 4 million visitors. The web and CD ROM version published by W. W. Norton and Company in 2000 won the first annual eLincoln Prize for best digital work on the era of the American Civil War. A narrative drawn from the digital archive will be published in 2003 by W. W. Norton.

Ayers has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavorial Sciences, Palo Alto (1999-2000) and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.




Closing Keynote:

Using Technology to Support Narrative

Polle Zellweger

University of Aarhus

Polle Zellweger earned a BA in mathematics from the University of Alaska, an MS in computer science from the University of New Mexico, and a PhD in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. She was a member of the research staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from 1984 to 2001, where she explored topics ranging from hypertext, multimedia, and electronic books to user interfaces and collaborative work. In 2000-2001, she was a visiting professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. She has been a long-term research contributor to the Hypertext Conference. She served as program co-chair of the European Conference on Hypertext in 1992 and as program chair of the ACM Multimedia Conference in 1995. She has also been a member of the editorial of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems. She is known for her work on hypertext paths, active multimedia documents, automatic temporal formatting, and Fluid Documents.




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