Fall 2002 Task Force Meeting
Plenary Sessions
OPENING SESSION
Thursday, December 5 at 1:00 p.m.
CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch has reserved the opening plenary session to address:
- key developments in networked information
- progress on the Coalition’s agenda, and
- highlights from the 2002-2003 Program Plan.
The Program Plan will be be distributed at the meeting and through the Coalition’s Web site. The opening plenary will include time for questions and discussion, and Clifford Lynch is eager to hear your comments.
CLOSING SESSION
Friday, December 6 at 2:30 p.m.
The closing plenary session features a talk on “Prospects for Reading in a Digital Age” by Cathy Marshall, one of the world’s leading authorities on hypertext. Marshall will examine “work practice” and “technology-in-action” approaches to reading, annotating, and collaborating on digital materials, asking:
How will we read in a digital age? The answer to this question is far from straightforward; rather, it has proven to be a matter that has polarized today’s readers, writers, publishers, librarians, and educators as people receive and retrieve more of the things that they read in digital form. Will we print digital materials as we need them, or will we be lured to new computer-based reading technologies like e-books? And if we are to read on a computer, what then? What might make it worthwhile to move away from a medium as convenient and malleable as paper? At a time of increasing anxiety over information volume, how are people coping?
Marshall has long been fascinated by analytical work practices and processes of collaboration, developing research and personal projects around these themes. In 1997, she and Judy Malloy published Forward Anywhere, a collaborative hypertext work of linked email messages described by one critic as a piece in which “hypertext becomes something more like an organism, an environment, or a life, ripe with possibilities and governed by patterns and tendencies, but bound by no simple or reductive scheme.”
Marshall is a Senior Researcher at the Microsoft Corporation and was a long-time member of the research staff at Xerox PARC. She works in an eclectic mix of communities on the frontiers of computer science, social science, and the arts. Her research interests include hypertext, annotation, e-books, and digital libraries. Marshall has delivered keynote addresses at the WWW and Hypertext Conferences, as well as at other library and information science venues and is currently serving as Program Chair for the 2003 IEEE/ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
Cathy Marshall’s own home page: http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall/ offers a rich collection of her academic publications, photos, and writings on topics ranging from gas station barbecue to strip mall politics.
