A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, April 6th, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Envisioning the Digital Humanities: Digital Facelifts and Turtle-necked Hairshirts.”
by Patrik Svenson

In this talk, Patrik will explore the multiple ways in which the digital humanities have been envisioned and how the digital humanities can often become a means for thinking about the state and future of the humanities at large. Patrik will also briefly introduce HUMlab at Umeå University as well as the four-part article series on the digital humanities he hopes to finish in 2010.

Patrik Svensson, Ph.D., is a docent in the humanities and information technology and the director of HUMlab at Umeå University. His research and practice span language learning and technology, the field of digital humanities, virtual environments, digital cultural heritage, cultural innovation and learning spaces. His publications include a textbook on Gothic, a recent monograph on language education and technology and a planned four-part article series on the field of digital humanities.

Coming up @ MITH April 13th: Sharon Leon (George Mason), “Doing History in Public: Digital History in the Digital Humanities.”

View MITH’s complete Fall Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2010.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

MITH’s own Matt Kirschenbaum was a studio guest on the Kojo Nnamdi Show yesterday on WAMU, discussing the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. You can listen to the broadcast here.

MITH is currently inviting applications from the University of Maryland’s College of Arts & Humanities and from the University Libraries for a MITH Resident Fellowship during the 2010-2011 academic year.

Resident Fellowships offer customized programming and technical support, as well as server space, consultation on project design, project management, software selection, and other crucial components of any digital humanities project. Ideally, faculty MITH fellows will be relieved of teaching responsibilities during the fellowship period (half-time for a year-long residence in MITH) and prospective fellows should apply to their unit, to their Dean, to one of the university’s research or instructional improvement support award programs (from RASA, Undergraduate Studies, the Diversity Initiative Faculty Relations Committee, for example), and to outside sources for funds to support course buyouts. Librarians will be relieved of the equivalent of half-time yearly teaching duties and should seek support from the Dean of Libraries and outside funding sources.

Fellowships will be offered to professors and/or librarians developing their research, teaching, and information studies work in ways that implement and productively exploit electronic resources, with preference given to those who have worked especially to integrate their scholarly discoveries and methods into their pedagogy, mentoring, and library practices. Besides working on their proposed project, fellows are expected to present their work in MITH’s Digital Dialogue series and to become active members in the MITH community.

Those interested in applying for a MITH fellowship should contact Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH (fraistat@umd.edu) in order to formulate a strategy (for course relief and other support) for a successful MITH residency. Further information about the MITH Resident Fellowship, as well as an application instructions, can be found at http://www.mith2.umd.edu/about/fellowsprogram.php.

Applications should be submitted to Neil Fraistat at MITH and are due by Monday, May 3; notifications will be made by Wednesday, May 12.

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, March 30th, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Prototyping a Dual-Display e-Reader in the Literature Classroom”
by NICK CHEN and KARI KRAUS

This semester, the Computer Science Department and the English Department at UMD teamed up to provide Honors students in Book 2.0: The History of the Book and the Future of Reading with a prototype electronic reading device. The deployment is part of a longitudinal study to understand how electronic reading devices are used in an academic setting. One of the goals this semester is also to determine how the introduction of a second device–wirelessly linked to the first–affects the reading experience. In this Digital Dialogues talk, Chen will describe the devices being used by Kraus and her students, their design rationale, and some of the more unique aspects of the study being conducted. Kraus will preview an upcoming assignment that has students reading a 20th-century avant-garde novel on the
dual-display e-readers, a novel originally published in unbound sheaves that the reader is encouraged to assemble in any order. The presenters will conclude with some of the more surprising results gathered so far, at the
halfway point of this study.

Nicholas Chen is a doctoral candidate in the department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland and is affiliated with the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at UMD. He is advised by Professor Francois Guimbretiere in the Cornell University Information Science Department. His research is on electronic reading devices, pen-based user interfaces, and interactions for supporting simultaneous use of multiple devices. Chen currently holds the Google Fellowship in Human Computer Interaction.
Previously, he performed the first-ever evaluation of a dual-display electronic reading device.

Kari Kraus is an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies and the Department of English at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching interests focus on new media and the digital humanities, textual scholarship and print culture, digital preservation, and game studies. Kraus is a local Co-PI on a Library of Congress NDIIPP grant for preserving virtual worlds; a Co-PI on an IMLS Digital Humanities Internship grant; and, with Derek Hansen (iSchool), the Co-Principal Investigator of an NSF grant to study Alternate Reality Games in the service of education and design.

Coming up @MITH April 6th: Patrik Svenson (HUMlab, Umea. Sweden), “Envisioning the Digital Humantities”

View MITH’s complete Fall Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2010.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, March 23rd, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“The Design and Use of StoryKit: An Intergenerational Mobile Storytelling App”
by BETH BONSIGNORE

Today’s mobile devices are natively equipped with multimedia means for families to capture and share their daily experiences. However, designing authoring tools that effectively integrate the discrete media-capture components of mobile devices to enable rich expression remains a challenge. This presentation will provide a brief overview of collaborative technologies that support children’s storytelling, with a focus on mobile applications. It will detail a 4-month study on the observed use of StoryKit, a mobile interface that integrates multimodal media-capture tools to support the creation of multimedia stories on an iPhone/iPod Touch. The primary objectives of the study were to explore the ways in which applications like StoryKit enable families to create and share stories; and to investigate how the created stories themselves might inform the design of, and learning potential for mobile storytelling applications. Its results suggest that StoryKit’s relatively simple but well-integrated interface enables the creation of vibrant, varied narratives. Further, its portability supported the complementary co-construction and spontaneous, playful capture of stories by children and their trusted adults.

BETH BONSIGNORE is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland’s iSchool and a graduate research assistant at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (CASCI), and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). At MITH, she has enjoyed being a member of the talented Developers’ Cohort guided by MITH Associate Director, Doug Reside, and has been involved in database design for Shakespeare’s Quartos and TheatreFinder, a collaborative interface for scholars and aficionados of historic theatres. Supported by an NSF EAGER grant under the direction of Kari Kraus (iSchool/ARHU) and Derek Hansen (iSchool/CASCI), she is exploring the potential of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) to support the design of collaborative technologies for education. Participatory design work with Allison Druin and the HCIL KidsTeam, a group of children aged 7-12 working to develop new technologies, is an integral part of her research, which lies at the intersection of New Media Literacies studies, technology development for collaborative sensemaking and storytelling, and social analytics for communities of learning.

Coming up @MITH March 30th: Nick Chen and Kari Kraus, “Prototyping a Dual-Display e-Reader in the Literature Classroom”

View MITH’s complete Fall Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2010.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is proud to announce the launch of the prototype of Music Theatre Online (MTO), a freely accessible web-based archive of musical and music theatre. Funded by a Digital Humanities Startup grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, MTO provides a model for online scholarly archives of the exceptionally multimodal art form of music theatre. “Under the inspired leadership of Doug Reside,” comments MITH Director Neil Fraistat, “MTO promises to revolutionize the study of musical theatre, and adds to an increasing number of MITH projects involving the performing arts.”

The MTO prototype makes available, with the generous permission of creators James Gardiner and Nick Blaemire, audio and video files, photographs, and seventeen TEI encoded drafts of the 2008 Broadway musical, Glory Days charting the development of the show from early sketches through regional productions to opening night. For several versions of the show, the lyrics have been linked to audio transcriptions of related performances, allowing a reader to closely study both text and music simultaneously.

Glory Days is the first in what we hope will be a continuing series of musicals added to the collection in the coming years. Upcoming titles under development include the 1866 melodrama The Black Crook and the 1920 Jerome Kern musical, Sally. The prototype is available at http://mith.umd.edu/mto.

Dear all,

It is my great pleasure to share with you the news that Doug Reside has just been promoted from Assistant to Associate Director of MITH in recognition of the superb work he has done since arriving here in 2006.

As many of you know, Doug is one of those rare humanities scholars who also has a degree in computer science. During the past three and a half years as assistant director of MITH, he has supervised all of our technical work while also serving as our lead programmer. At the same time, he has written a series of successful and important grants, helping us to establish an international profile in digital tool building and in the nexus of the digital humanities and the performing arts. His multimedia XML markup tool AXE has already been at the center of three recent grants; two from NEH and one from Mellon, and he was responsible for the technical design and management of the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, a project supported by an NEH/JISC grant, with the Folger Shakespeare Library, the British Library, and the Bodleian Library as our partners.

Doug is currently in the midst of both a grant project and a book on the digital curation and preservation of musical theatre. In joining Matt Kirschenbaum as an associate director of MITH, Doug will oversee all of MITH’s operations and supervise MITH’s new assistant director Dave Lester.

Neil

[Rescheduled from last week.]

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, February 16th, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Collaborative Approaches to Digital Humanities: Unconferences and Crowdsourcing”
by DAVE LESTER

As MITH’s newly-minted Assistant Director and a serial collaborator, Dave Lester will discuss the unconference (barcamp) model and his experience helping organize The Humanities and Technology Camp (THATCamp) while previously employed at George Mason University’s Center for History & New Media. THATCamp has become an annual unconference hosted by GMU, and inspired regional digital humanities unconferences in France, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, and California. Lester will also draw from his experience engaging existing communities of interest through social networking sites to discuss the changing landscape of crowdsourcing and suggest ways that digital humanists can engage the public to answer research questions.

DAVE LESTER, Assistant Director of MITH, has previously been employed by George Mason University’s Center for History & New Media where he coordinated software development outreach for the Omeka Web publishing system used by libraries, museums, and archives. He was responsible for prototyping mobile applications for museums, fostering a collaborative open source community, and co-organizing THATCamp, an annual Digital Humanities “unconference” bringing together practitioners to collaborate and share their work. Prior to Mason, Dave was a Crossroads Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship, and helped redevelop the American Studies Crossroads Project Web site. He is also a HASTAC scholar, and his ongoing research focuses on place-based computing and the engagement of the public in crowdsourcing local history.

Coming up @MITH: There are no further talks scheduled until after Spring Break as we anticipate presentations from candidates visiting campus for the College of Arts and Humanities cluster search in Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture.

View MITH’s complete Fall Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2010.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

“Negotiating the Cultural Turn(s): Subjectivity, Sustainability, and Authority in the Digital Humanities”
— a conversation with Tim Powell and Bethany Nowviskie

Wednesday, February 17, 2010 from 4:30 to 6:30pm
Murray Room, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University

Tim Powell directs digital archive projects for the Ojibwe Indian bands of northern Minnesota, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Tim will speak about a project entitled Gibagadinamaagoom (Ojibwe: “To Bring to Life, to Sanction, to Give Authority”) and how the focus on Ojibwe culture affects issues of intellectual property, open access, and the design of the interface, metadata, and database.

Bethany Nowviskie directs the University of Virginia Library’s efforts in digital research and scholarship, and is also associate director of the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communication Institute. She will discuss a number of projects from UVA’s SpecLab, Scholars’ Lab, and NINES research groups related to the expression of subjectivity and perspective in interpretive digital environments.

Together (and as digital humanities scholars practicing outside of the typical tenure-track path), Tim and Bethany will address and open a conversation about issues of cultural authority, intellectual property, innovation vs. sustainability, objectivity, and the need to think outside the academy’s walls.

Sponsored and hosted by the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS).

The Rosenzweig Forum for the Digital Humanities is named in honor of Roy Rosenzweig and is a collaboration of the Center for History & New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland.

Map and directions here.

For any of you who are snowed in or otherwise looking for interesting reading, The Atlantic has a brief piece about the Preserving Virtual Project, featuring Matt Kirschenbaum and Kari Kraus. The second link is from an online New York Times debate about whether school libraries still need books, featuring Matt Kirschenbaum as one of five respondents.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/archiving-video-games

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/do-school-libraries-need-books/