Do you work with languages
Do you work with printed text
Do you work with graphics, video, and other multimedia material
Do you work with the World Wide Web
?
The Humanities Computing Laboratory
may be the very place you are looking for.

I would like to introduce to you a few of the services offered to the academic community by the Humanities Computing Laboratory, formerly known as the Humanities Computing Facility of Duke University.

Our statement of purpose:

"The Humanities Computing Laboratory is a nonprofit education and research corporation, dedicated to promoting global standards in the encoding, exchange, and preservation of written and spoken language data. It seeks to provide tools which, in the context of those standards, systematically and collectively address the common needs of scholars in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences for capturing in electronic form, typing, and displaying complex language characters and scientific symbols."

We have primarily been developing Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) applications since our beginnings in 1979. During the early years of personal computing in the 1980s, when computers were being transformed from number crunchers into the logic engines with broad relevance for our lives which they are today, our predecessor, the Humanities Computing Facility of Duke University, under the direction of our founder, the late Prof. Frank Borchardt of the Dept. of Germanic Languages and Literature, pioneered many humanistic applications in language, literature, and the arts.

We created the language learning and authoring system CALIS ("Computer-Assisted Language Instruction System"), for DOS, and WinCALIS, for Microsoft Windows. WinCALIS and our Unicode-compliant multilingual editor UniEdit have user-friendly foreign language interfaces which permit the courseware developer and the learner alike to type easily in most of the world's languages. CALIS, WinCALIS, and UniEdit have been licensed for use in education around the world.

In the process of developing these products for DOS and Windows, the Humanities Computing Laboratory has accumulated a great deal of know-how in the PC/DOS/Windows environment. To this we have more recently added experience with the Mac and Linux/Unix platforms. We may sometimes turn out to be your best source for academic problem-solving, especially for "legacy" data and moving data from one platform to another or to the World Wide Web.

We are humanists first and can relate well to the computing needs of departments beyond those in science and engineering. But as our statement of purpose suggests, there are many technical issues which cut across disciplinary boundaries. Whether your field is chemistry, theology, or a world literature, you likely face comparable issues of comfortably typing and correctly displaying "difficult" information. And the relatively simple task of putting ink on paper is no longer adequate. In today's world and for posterity, your text must be accurately rendered in contexts over which you have little control.

The information here describes some of the services we can provide. For small academic-related jobs (less than one hour) there is usually no charge to Duke faculty and students. We can also do larger jobs at very reasonable rates, thanks to using appropriate technology. Please get in touch with us by telephone or e-mail, or stop by our office if we may be of service to you. We are happy to supply references or free estimates and samples, based on your specifications.

Best wishes,

Richard Kunst, Ph.D.
Director
Humanities Computing Laboratory
rkunst@humancomp.org

Who Are We?

HCL Services

WinCALIS Products and Training

WinCALIS, the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction System, is a multimedia, multilingual authoring system for Windows, which is designed for use by ordinary computer-literate teachers. While its special strength is in language learning, it can be used for any subject matter. We want WinCALIS to be used! You are invited to come try out the program here at our lab for use in your classes. We offer a yearly Summer Seminar for WinCALIS author training ($550 per week, per person), or we can arrange for a personal introduction to the program. Contact us to receive more information about the WinCALIS program.

Video Digitizing and Editing

Do you have video material that's not in the format you need? We can take your video and convert it quickly and inexpensively into the "digital" form you can use on your computer and the World Wide Web. We have the equipment and know-how to "capture" the analog video from VHS videotapes, laserdiscs, or your camcorder home movies, and convert it into either still images or digital full-motion video in any format (AVI, MPEG, Quicktime, etc.). Then we can store it in any form you desire. For example, we can transfer the video files by network directly to your site, put it on a one-off CD-ROM (see below), or copy it onto your mass storage device, such as a Jaz drive, Zip disk, Syquest or Bernoulli cartridge, etc. Most jobs, large or small, can be done in 1-3 hours at our standard full-service fee of $50/hr.

CD-ROM Production Services

"One-off" recordable CD-ROMs (CD-Rs) are a good way to store and distribute large quantities of data. CD-ROMs can hold up to 650 megabytes of any kind of bulky data, including large databases, hard disk backups, graphic images, and digital audio or video. We can "burn" one-off (single) CD-ROMs for you using your content (prices start at $25 for the first CD, $10 for each additional copy of the same CD; for larger quantities, ask for a free quote). If you then want to use that recordable CD as a master for bulk production, we can help arrange that too. We can assist with your design and packaging decisions and arrange for mass replication (typical cost: 500 copies for ca. $1500).

Conversion of Print Materials to Electronic Medium

Through the magic of document scanning and optical character recognition, we can take your print materials and reinvent them in electronic form. We helped a professor of music to scan musical scores from an 18th-century manuscript for incorporation in his book. Dust off that old out-of-print edition of your scholarly treatise and let us give it new life, so that you can edit it with your word processor and publish it anew. Perkins Library was able to scan a catalog of all Duke theses and dissertations up to 1972 concerning South Asia, using our equipment and resources. If you have a considerable amount of any printed material, save yourself the time and energy of retyping. And we can scan in most of the languages of the world.

Multilingual Desktop Publishing, Data Conversion, Translation

We can take disks and files encoded in just about any character set, language, and format and convert them into another format. We assisted a professor of English to transform 20th-century British Literature texts from an obsolete word processor format on 360K diskettes into World Wide Web documents for students to access easily. We can also arrange to have your text translated from or to English and most of the world's languages. For example, we have provided camera-ready copy of Duke officials' names and titles for printing name cards in Chinese and Japanese.

View PDF Version of our HCL Services Brochure (includes information and pricing)

HCL Project Ideas

On-line Dictionary Development

We compiled an on-line Korean-and-English dictionary under contract with the U.S. Government. We designed this dictionary with a Unicode-compliant flexible interface, which permits easy adaptation to other languages. We are interested in undertaking the compilation of new bilingual dictionaries and in adding audio and graphic illustration enhancements to the dictionary engine. For example, an Arabic-and-English dictionary which permits the user not only to look up a word, but also to hear it spoken in Classical Arabic and in any of the major modern dialects.

Courseware Development on CD-ROM

We have produced CD-ROM titles rich in multimedia content for increasing listening comprehension in languages like Persian Farsi, Russian, and Ukrainian. We have put a smorgasbord of WinCALIS exercises and bulky lexical tools in a variety of languages on CD-ROM. We have the linguistic and technical resources to create many more useful CD-ROMs, using either your content or content we develop according to your specifications. We can digitize your VHS video; convert virtually any graphic file format to any other; "burn" one-off (single) CD-ROMs; help with your design and packaging decisions and arrange for mass replication (approximate cost: 500 copies for ca. $1500). For information on what goes into developing a courseware package, please see Mohsen Mahdavi-Hezaveh's article, "Courseware Development on CD-ROM Using the WinCALIS System."

Authoring and Publishing for the World Wide Web

We recognize that the World Wide Web provides an exciting new paradigm for scholarship and learning. We assisted a professor of zoology in turning the printed Proceedings of an academic conference into both a Website and a CD-ROM, using a combination of HTML and PDF. We can help you with your Internet/WWW authoring and publishing. Please remember our website address: http://www.humancomp.org.

Anything else?

We invite you to propose any other projects and suggest any other ideas to the Humanities Computing Laboratory. Using our in-house expertise, or by calling on any of our local or international connections, we can help you. Our not-for-profit status reflects that our interest is not in big price tags; rather, our interest is the development and refinement of high-quality educational material.

Humanities Computing Laboratory
109 Lariat Ln. Suite B
Chapel Hill, NC 27517 USA
Tel: +1 (919) 656-5915
info@humancomp.org