A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, February 9th, 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).

We are very pleased to announce another semester of Digital Dialogues. In the four year since we have made Digital Dialogues a weekly event at MITH we have hosted over 100 speakers from the College Park campus and beyond (often far beyond) to discuss their work and current issues in digital humanities and new media.

This semester we lead off with a presentation from MITH’s newest full time member of staff, Dave Lester who comes to us from George Mason’s Center for History and New Media as an Assistant Director. Dave is (literally) famous all over the world for the THATCamp phenomenon–something he will introduce to the MITH community on February 9th, when he addresses “Collaborative Approaches to Digital Humanities: Unconferences and Crowdsourcing.” Please join us at 12:30 in the MITH conference room.

View the complete spring 2010 Digital Dialogues schedule here.

The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is written up in today’s edition of The Guardian.

The Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (CASCI) and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) are pleased to co-sponsor a Digital Dialogue with Georgina Goodlander of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Tuesday, December 15, 12:30-1:45 pm MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

FREE and OPEN to the PUBLIC

“Ghosts of a Chance: A Museum-Based Alternate Reality Game” by GEORGINA GOODLANDER

The Smithsonian American Art Museum implemented the world’s first museum-based Alternate Reality game titled “Ghosts of a Chance” in 2008. The game ran for three months, both on-line and in the real world, and attracted over 6,000 players. Goodlander will present an overview of the game, from a tattooed bodybuilder to the display of fake artifacts, with a discussion of the successes and failures encountered along the way. The talk will also include a sneak peak at the museum’s plans for a future ARG.

GEORGINA BATH GOODLANDER is the Interpretive Programs Manager of the Luce Foundation Center for American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. She is responsible for all operations of the Center, including developing and overseeing a regular schedule of public programs, updating interpretative information, maintaining audiovisual installations, coordinating the selection and installation of collection objects in cases in the Center, and supervising staff. In 2008, she managed the creation of Ghosts of a Chance and developed a module version of the game, which is available to the public on a regular basis.

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is very pleased to announce the release of a new Web site showcasing the Deena Larsen Collection we house and maintain:

http://www.mith.umd.edu/larsen/

Deena Larsen, whose best-known works include the hypertexts Marble Springs and Samplers (both published by Eastgate Systems), has been active in the creative electronic writing community nearly since its inception in the early 1980s. She has also been a collector and de facto archivist for that community, amassing what she has described as electronic literature’s “Great Library of Alexandria.” In May 2007 she gave MITH the extraordinary gift of her personal collection of early-era computers, software, and digital files.

The collection includes not only Deena’s own extensive literary output, but original and sometimes unpublished material by nearly every author in her circle, effectively making it a cross-section of electronic writing during its key formative years (roughly 1985-1995). The hardware in the collection consists of five Mac Classics, two Mac SEs, and a Mac Plus, and associated accessories; the physical media includes some 800 diskettes, as well as nearly 100 CD-ROMs and Zip disks. The collection also contains manuscripts, newspaper clippings, books, comics, manuals, notebooks, syllabi, catalogs, brochures, posters, conference proceedings, and ephemera. According to Matthew Kirschenbaum, Associate Director of MITH and Associate Professor of English at Maryland, “The arrival of Deena’s collection at MITH furnishes us with invaluable source material which will further our in-house research in digital curation and preservation, as well as function as a unique resource for the growing number of researchers interested in early hypertext and electronic literature.”

The site, built with Omeka, was designed by Amanda Visconti of the University of Michigan under the auspicies of the IMLS-funded Digital Humanities Model Internship program, which places iSchool students in working digital humanities centers. Kari Kraus, director of the program and Assistant Professor in Maryland’s iSchool and English department, comments: “Amanda’s work is a great example of the kind of collaboration and mutual exchange we’re working to promote.”

With this announcement we are also opening the collection to scholars on a limited basis. Researchers interested in visiting Maryland to work with the Larsen materials on site should write to us at mith at umd dot edu.

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is very pleased to welcome Dave Lester to its leadership team as an Assistant Director.

Dave Lester has 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.

“I’m excited to be a part of the growth of Digital Humanities at the University of Maryland, and look forward to helping create and manage digital projects at MITH,” says Lester. Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH, adds, “Dave’s extraordinary range of skills, creativity, and energy make him a perfect addition to MITH’s management team. He has gained invaluable experience during his time at George Mason and will forge one more link between our two centers. We are delighted to welcome him to MITH!”

Dave will start with us in early January. Be sure to stop by and say hello!

MITH is pleased to report the launching of the Shakespeare Quartos Archive by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. Funded by a JISC/ NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grant, The Shakespeare Quartos Archive provides access to the early rare quarto editions of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a collection that in its physical form is distributed among six geographically distant institutions. In addition to providing unprecedented access, the archive promotes scholarship by enabling users to perform side-by-side text comparisons and full text searches as well as create and affix annotations and tags to content that can be stored for future reference and shared with other users. The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is the result of a cross-Atlantic collaboration between the Maryland Institute of Technology and the six institutions housing these rare holdings. Read the press release for more information.

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, November 17, 12:30 – 1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Archiving America: The Vitaphone, the DVD, and Warner Bros. (re)store Jazz History” by JENNIFER FLEEGER

In 2007 Warner Bros. released the 80th anniversary DVD edition of The Jazz Singer, a boxed set that includes 34 conversion-era sound shorts and a 90-minute documentary about the Vitaphone and the birth of sound cinema. This collection is a tempered version of Warner’s prior histories of the conversion that situate the studio squarely at the lead in what its executives unflinchingly labeled a “revolution” of the motion picture industry. While Warner Bros. explicitly appeals for a revision of its former hubris, the jazz shorts included in this volume not only support the studio’s prior nomination of Al Jolson as the leader of American jazz, they characterize American music history as a hodgepodge of white performances lacking a dominant trend and calling for a star. In this collection as in many of its other DVD releases, Warner Bros. recreates the film experience by including contemporary shorts that might plausibly (and in some cases would certainly) have been screened alongside the feature for which the disc was conceived. An attempt at historical accuracy, this practice instead constructs a spectator capable only of browsing the past for clues to what both he and the studio already know to be true. This presentation considers the practice of archiving American jazz for both the period of conversion and the present reconstruction of the era and argues that the potential for innovation enabled by digital remastering is complicated by Warner’s continued efforts to shape the reception of its historiography.

Jennifer Fleeger received her Ph.D. from the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa in 2009. Her dissertation, “Opera, Jazz, and Hollywood’s Conversion to Sound,” concentrates largely on sound shorts released between 1926 and1932 and analyzes competing film sound technologies with respect to the genres of music employed to catalogue cultural experience. She has published articles in Music, Sound and the Moving Image and an anthology on media marketing and her piece on Al Jolson and the Vitaphone is scheduled to appear this fall in The Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

All talks are free and open to the public!

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

If you missed the live version of Greg Crane’s Digital Dialogue, “From the First Year Through Tenure: New Pathways for Humanities in a Digital Age,” the podcast, along with the other recorded fall Digital Dialogues, are available on the MITH Podcast page. To learn more about Greg Crane and his topic click here .

Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks – CHAIN

A meeting was held at King’s College, London, on 26th and 27th October 2009, between representatives of the following networks, infrastructure projects, and planning initiatives working with digital technologies in the Arts and Humanities:

* arts-humanities.net (http://www.arts-humanities.net/)
* ADHO – Association of Digital Humanities Organisations (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/)
* CLARIN (http://www.clarin.eu/)
* centerNet (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/centernet/)
* DARIAH (http://www.dariah.eu/)
* NoC – Network of Expert Centres in Great Britain and Ireland (http://www.arts-humanities.net/noc/)
* Project Bamboo (http://projectbamboo.org/)
* TextGrid (http://www.textgrid.de/)

We identified the current fragmented environment where researchers operate in separate areas with often mutually incompatible technologies as a barrier to fully exploiting the transformative role that these technologies can potentially play. We resolved that our present, proposed, and future activities are interdependent and complementary and should be oriented towards working together to overcome barriers, and to create a shared environment where technology services can interoperate and be sustained, thus enabling new forms of research in the Humanities.

In order to achieve these goals we agreed to form the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks – CHAIN. CHAIN will act as a forum for areas of shared interest to its participants, including:

- advocacy for an improved digital research infrastructure for the Humanities;
- development of sustainable business models;
- promotion of technical interoperability of resources, tools and services;
- promotion of good practice and relevant technical standards;
- development of a shared service infrastructure;
- coordinating approaches to legal and ethical issues;
- interactions with other relevant computing infrastructure initiatives;
- widening the geographical scope of our coalition.

CHAIN will promote an open culture where experiences, including successes and failures, can be shared and discussed, in order to support and promote the use of digital technologies in research in the Humanities.

Sheila Anderson, King’s College, London (DARIAH)
Andreas Aschenbrenner, State and University Library Göttingen (TextGrid, DARIAH)
David Greenbaum, University of California, Berkeley (Project Bamboo)
Seth Denbo, King’s College, London (DARIAH)
Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland (centerNet)
Chad Kainz, University of Chicago (Project Bamboo)
Steven Krauwer, Utrecht University (CLARIN)
Lorna Hughes, King’s College, London (ADHO, NoC)
Tobias Blanke, King’s College, London (DARIAH)
Torsten Reimer, King’s College, London (arts-humanities.net)
David Robey, University of Oxford (NoC)
Harold Short, King’s College, London (ADHO)
Katherine Walter, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (centerNet)
Peter Wittenburg, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (CLARIN)
Martin Wynne, University of Oxford (CLARIN, DARIAH)