I'm delighted to announce two wonderful plenary speakers for the Spring 2020 CNI Member Meeting, to be held in San Diego March 30-31. As a reminder, registration for the meeting closes March 2.

Both speakers are well known leaders in the community, and both talks take a synthesizing, long-term view of developments over the past decades, the current landscape,  and how these developments can inform both our visions for the future and our strategies for achieving them.

Rob Sanderson, Semantic Architect at the Getty Trust, will open the conference.  He will focus on the quest to establish a connected and coherent ecosystem of research quality data on cultural heritage. Rob has a very broad and deep understanding of digital humanities, semantic web and linked data technologies, and the challenges of building cultural heritage resources that span multiple sectors and I think he can provide a particularly insightful perspective on what's working, what's likely to work, and where we collectively need to reconsider current strategies.

I welcome Tara McPherson, Professor and Chair at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California back to CNI; you may remember her 2008 plenary talk at CNI describing her work with Vectors, a pioneering multimedia journal for the digital humanities (or several other project briefings at CNI over the years). After launching Vectors, she developed -- very strategically, and in part I believe as both a complement to,  and in response to the limitations of, Vectors -- another platform called Scalar also targeted at the digital humanities with very different goals and parameters. Her talk, "Reflections on 20 Years of Designing Digital Scholarship" will consider these developments and much more, including key strategic issues of sustainability, scalability and preservation that can only be really understood in light of operational experience. Tara's unique combination of sustained engagement at the forefront of digital humanities and her very rich  body of
relevant scholarly work promise a fascinating look at past, present and future of scholarship and scholarly communications.

You can find more details on the speakers and their presentations at

https://www.cni.org/events/membership-meetings/upcoming-meeting/spring-2020/plenary-sessions-s20

I'm really looking forward to these presentations, and I hope to see many of you in San Diego.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI