Ray was invited to present at the 2006 SDH/SEMI conference, held at Congress, and spoke on “Modelling the <Textual> Activity of the Humanist.” The Computer: The Once and Future Medium for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS, CCHC, SDH/SEMI).
Abstract: A currently-accepted foundation for work in humanities computing is knowledge representation, which draws on the field of artificial intelligence and seeks to produce models of human understanding that are tractable to computation. More specifically, in activities of the computing humanist, knowledge representation manifests itself in issues related to archival representation and textual editing, high-level interpretive theory and criticism, and protocols of knowledge transfer — all as modeled with computational techniques. My paper traces a model of humanistic activity provided by humanities computing, noting that the results of modeling the activities of the humanist, and the output of humanistic achievement, with the assistance of the computer are found in what are often considered to be the exemplary tasks associated with humanities computing: the representation of archival materials, the analysis or critical inquiry originating in those materials, and the communication of the results of these tasks (i.e. the dissemination of primary and secondary materials via electronic means).