The Digital Medievalist Community of Practice (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/) is sponsoring two sessions at the Forty-Fifth International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 7-10, 2009. See below for session names and descriptions.

Please send inquiries and abstracts for 20-minute presentations to Peter Robinson at p.m.robinson@bham.ac.uk. Abstracts must be attached to a Participant Information Form, available in both MS Word and PDF formats from the Congress website: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF.

Proposals must be submitted by September 15, 2009.

Paper session: The state of the art in handwriting recognition and analysis for medieval documents

Much work has been done towards automated analysis of handwritten documents, with a focus on handwriting recognition, in the last years, and some of the developments seen in OCR and layout recognition systems may be applicable to medieval studies. Further, the increasing interest in sophisticated linkages of text and image might be enhanced by developments in handwriting recognition and analysis. We welcome papers which report on work done or ongoing in these areas, or which seek to establish methodologies.

Paper session: Collaborative tools and environments for medieval scholarship

Many groups around the world are working to develop a new generation of collaborative tools and research environments, with potential wide applicability to medieval studies. This leads to questions about the nature of collaboration itself, and about useful models of collaboration. Reports form the coal face on collaborations which have, or have not, worked are welcome, as are demonstrations of tools and ruminations on the many faces of collaboration.

Again, please send inquiries and abstracts for 20-minute presentations to Peter Robinson at p.m.robinson@bham.ac.uk. Abstracts must be attached to a Participant Information Form, available in both MS Word and PDF formats from the Congress website: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF.

Peter Robinson Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing Elmfield House, Selly Oak Campus University of Birmingham Edgbaston B29 6LG P.M.Robinson@bham.ac.uk p. +44 (0)121 4158441, f. +44 (0) 121 415 8376 www.itsee.bham.ac.uk