Anne Balsamo is Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and Professor of Interactive Media and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Her research investigates the relationship between culture and technology. Her first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body (Duke UP) examined the gendered implications of emergent bio-technologies. Her more recent research focuses on the development of new media genres and the reproductive qualities of new media technologies. Anne was the director of a graduate program in information design and technology at Georgia Tech. She then went on to join the Research in Experimental Design group at Xerox PARC. She is currently working on a new book called Designing Culture that discusses aspects of the technological imagination at work. She holds a doctoral degree in mass communications and cultural studies from the University of Illinois. She is a founder of Onomy Labs.
Ian Lancashire led the first centre of its kind in Canada, as founding director of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), University of Toronto (1986-1996). Ian was president of a new Canadian learned society, the Consortium for Computers in the Humanities (COCH/COSH) in its formative years, and led the development of the concordancer TACT, which continues to be a very valuable research tool; in 1989 he hosted the first joint conference of ACH-ALLC at Toronto, where he continues to play an influential role as Professor of (Early Modern) English literature and in leading-edge computer-based research. He is senior principal investigator of the University of Toronto node of the Canadian TAPoR consortium. His major research, the Lexicons of Early Modern English, is to create a database of English-language bilingual and monolingual dictionaries ca. 1480-1700, to assemble a background corpus of Early Modern English texts, and to analyse the growth of English vocabulary during this period.