Chad Gaffield to Receive the 2011 Antonio Zampolli Prize
The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations is pleased to announce that its inaugural award of the Antonio Zampolli Prize will be made to Dr Chad Gaffield at its Digital Humanities 2011 conference in June 2011 at Stanford University.
Gaffield is Professor of History at the University of Ottawa and currently on leave while he serves as President of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Founding Director of the Institute of Canadian Studies, Gaffield has been since the 1970s at the forefront of computer-based analyses of long-term social change. He has played a leading role in, and produced award-winning publications from, database projects such as the Canadian Social History Project, the Vancouver Island Project, the Lower Manhattan Project, and the Canadian Families Project; as President of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, he also championed the Data Liberation Initiative.
Among his many notable accomplishments, the prize is awarded to Gaffield for his role as Principal Investigator for the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure project (CCRI; www.ccri.uottawa.ca). CCRI has created a foundation for the study of social, economic, cultural, and political change at a national level, beginning with digital reconstruction of censuses that sit at the core of a pan-national research database consisting of pertinent contextual data drawn from newspapers, parliamentary proceedings, legislative records and beyond.
About the Antonio Zampolli Prize
The Antonio Zampolli Prize is an award of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO). It is named in honour of the late Professor Antonio Zampolli (1937-2003), who was one of the founding members of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) in 1973, and ALLC President 1983-2003. He was a major figure in the development of literary and linguistic computing from the 1960s, and an enthusiastic supporter of the joint international conferences of ALLC and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), which were initiated in 1989. He was also a prime mover in the Text Encoding Initiative, both in the initial 11-year project, and in the establishment of the TEI Consortium.
The Zampolli award is given to recognise a single outstanding output in the digital humanities by any scholar or scholars at any stage in their career. The output must involve the innovative use of information and communications technologies and may take the form of published research and/or the development of research-related tools or resources. The award is made on the basis of the output’s importance as a contribution to the digital humanities, taking into account the significance both of its use of information and communication technologies and of its actual or potential contribution to the advancement of humanities research.
The award is made every three years, alternating with other ADHO triennial awards, such as the Busa award. For the Zampolli award the output recognized in the award will normally have been published or otherwise made publicly available in the 7 years preceding the year of the award.
About the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO)
The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (digitalhumanities.org) is an umbrella organisation whose goals are to promote and support digitally-based research and teaching across the arts and humanities disciplines. It embraces and coordinates activity across three ‘constituent organisations’: the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC; founded in 1978), the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH; founded in 1973) and the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs (SDH-SEMI; founded in 1986 as the Consortium for Computers in the Humanities / Consortium pour ordinateurs en sciences humaines).
