This is quite a special meeting that I've been fortunate to attend a few times over the years, and I'm honored to be doing one of the keynotes this year. ECAI has a long history of groundbreaking, intellectually challenging and important work, and I'm sure a good deal of it will be featured here.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

CALL FOR PAPERS 2012 PNC Annual Conference and Joint Meetings University of California Berkeley, California, December 7-9, 2012 (Friday - Sunday)

Submission Deadline: July 31, 2012

Invitation to Participate It's our pleasure to announce that the 2012 PNC Annual Conference and Joint meetings will be held in Berkeley from December 7th to 9th. The conference is being hosted by ECAI (Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative) and the School of Information at UC Berkeley with the collaboration of the UC Berkeley East Asian Library.

Since ECAI is the primary host of the meeting this year we will be integrating ECAI participation into the entire conference. The conference theme is "New Horizons: Information Technology connecting Culture, Community, Time, and Place".

Looking to the future, supporting collaboration and shared knowledge, this year's conference will encourage participants to explore several streams of interest and discover relationships between them.

The proposed streams include: Collaboration - Building a Collaborative Research Universe - collaboration tools and knowledge integration Community - Digital humanities and social sciences in the interest of society Virtual Cultural Information Management - Visualization, Analysis, and Interaction - 3D data, multimedia, and virtual museums Digital Text - New horizons in text integration, analysis, and visualization Cultural Atlases - Integration, Visualization and Complexity - regions, themes, and change over time Open Knowledge - Sharing Cultural Heritage - Semantic Web, Linked Open Data, and related technologies

Further information on the program and proposed panels can be found on the ECAI website at: http://ecai.org/activities/PNC2012

Since its initiation in 1993, the annual PNC Conference has become a key meeting for access to digital research on the Pacific Rim. It is a forum for interaction between scholars, technicians, librarians, museum professionals, educators and anyone working with cultural materials and technology. Please join us at Berkeley in December to learn the latest development in this fascinating field.

General Contact and send submissions to: ecai@berkeley.eduECAI@berkeley.edu Hui Nie, ECAI, UC Berkeley/mailto:ecai@berkeley.edu