News Server Article 30: 'The Face of Text' Conference

"The Face of Text" will be a three day conference, held from November 19th to November 21st, 2004, hosted by McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario). This conference will be the third CaSTA (Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis) conference organized and sponsored by the TAPoR project (Text Analysis Portal for Research).

"The Face of Text" conference will bring together researchers and students from across Canada and abroad to further the development of computer-based research and study tools. This conference will provide researchers in Canada a unique and focused occasion to share research in this area. This will be an opportunity for Canadian researchers from both the anglophone and the francophone communities to learn about advances elsewhere and to demonstrate innovative Canadian computing research. This conference will also be of interest to any who work with electronic texts on the Web. It will involve researchers new to computer assisted research in literature and linguistics that have overlapping interests with computing humanists.

"The Face of Text" as a theme will focus on how electronic texts are made accessible to others, including non-specialists, students, and researchers in textual disciplines. How do text tools and electronic texts present themselves to users? What alternatives are there to search interfaces like Google or Web pages where you read the text in a linear fashion from page to page? Different approaches to the design of interfaces to text analysis systems will be presented at the conference from stand-alone personal computer software to an electronic text portal. Some of the areas of research that will be covered are: Interface designs for text systems, Advances in text analysis systems, Best practices in tutorials and documentation online, New software tools for the study of electronic texts, Multilingual systems, Automatic abstracting, Text systems in applied fields like law and medicine, Multimedia rich text systems, Research methods and computer-assisted text analysis, and Theory of text analysis.

At "The Face of Text" conference, 15 years after the release of TACT, a widely used text analysis tool from the University of Toronto, TAPoR will present a new Canadian developed portal for text analysis that will provide a common entry point for students and researchers interested in this field.