Individual statements (in the order of presentation)

Individual statements (in the order of presentation)
Lou Burnard
Computing support for the arts and humanities at Oxford is provided centrally by the Humanities Computing Unit (HCU) within Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS), whose facilities it complements. The HCU embraces several types of activity and forms of support. It includes a Centre for Humanities Computing (CHC); a nationally-funded CTI Centre for Textual Studies; the Oxford Text Archive, and a number of externally funded research projects, including the British National Corpus (BNC). The objective of the HCU is to serve the students, post-graduates, and staff of the humanities disciplines by providing expertise, training, and consultancy in the uses of information technology; by facilitating and promoting their access to a variety of high-quality scholarly electronic resources for use in research and teaching; and by carrying out research and development in computing as it is applied to the humanities disciplines.

The CHC, as the primary centre of local expertise, encourages visits from post-graduates and staff; it also sends its staff to the humanities faculties. It provides these faculties with a range of training, from general introductory sessions to special purpose colloquia and workshops and one-day topical overviews that can be integrated into existing or new lecture series and courses. The national activities, such as the CTI Centre, contribute to the overall strength of the CHC by bringing in wide-ranging knowledge and experience.

For the future, the HCU needs to secure funding to establish new and currently temporary posts in IT support, research support, and publications, and to put the infrastructural services on a firm basis. Especially promising is the new position shared between the CHC and the English Faculty.