'Literary and Linguistic Computing' is a refereed journal, published by
Oxford University Press.

Dear Colleagues

As many of you know, during the last year Marilyn Deegan and Stuart Lee
took over the editorship of Literary and Linguistic Computing. The
journal had been ably steered for the previous 12 years by Gordon Dixon,
whose hard work and dedication we should like to acknowledge here.
Literary and Linguistic Computing is, of course, the journal of the
Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. In recent years there
has been a broadening of the concepts included in 'literary and linguistic
computing', and this has been reflected in the contributions to the annual
joint conference with the Association for Computing in the Humanities and,
to some extent, in papers offered to the journal. This broadening is a
result of both changes in the possibilities offered by the technology, and
also developments within literary and linguistic disciplines. The new
editors would like to further encourage this broadening of the discipline
bounds, and are therefore seeking contributions for the journal which are
commensurate with some of the new definitions. In the past, literary and
linguistic computing has been largely text-centric, text being the easiest
artefactual state to manipulate electronically. More recently, there has
been an extension of the definition of 'text' to include many artefacts
with meaning encoded on them which are not normally included in this
category. No longer to be defined only as a document written in alphabetic
characters, a text can be a film, a radio script, a dramatic performance,
a pictorial image from a manuscript, and many other things. Given this
ontological extension which goes hand in hand with a greater technological
expansiveness, the computational manipulations which can be performed are
also of a broader and more interesting scope. The environment in which we
experience text, in particular digital text, has also burst its boundaries
within recent years-from punch cards which could store 80 characters (one
line of text) each , to floppy disks capable of holding a book, CD-ROMs an
encyclopaedia, and now the Internet which may one day encompass all the
texts in the world. This extension brings with it a fuzziness on the
margins of texts, a dispersion and permeability which is creating new
interest in digital text among textual and literary theorists, as well as
cultural theorists and others interested in the post-modern analyses of
cultural forms. Computerized textuality is, in some ways, straddling the
different media: adventure games and simulations are, for instance, partly
texts and partly interactive films. Digital resources are becoming as
important for the humanities as resources in other media and they raise
many issues of access, discovery, copyright, etc which we should like to
see debated.
        It is within the context of the textual movements outlined above
that we wish to extend the range of contributions to the journal and
hopefully our readership. We seek articles on any aspects of the use of
computers in textual investigation, and dealing with any period. We would
be happy to publish materials on highly theoretic issues, as well as on
more practical approaches to textual analysis, encoding, or presentation.
We would also like to extend our panel of referees to take account of
these new areas, and so anyone who would like to comment on contributions
for us is encouraged to contact us.
        Suggestions for articles, special sections, project reports and
other forms of contribution should be sent to:

Dr Marilyn Deegan
Project Manager, RSP Digital Library Project
Editor, Literary and Linguistic Computing
Refugee Studies Programme
Queen Elizabeth House
University of Oxford
21 St Giles
Oxford OX1 3LA
E-mail: marilyn.deegan_at_qeh.ox.ac.uk
Tel: +44-1865-270435
Fax: +44-1865-270721

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Received on Tue Mar 10 1998 - 14:35:02 EST