See you all next week! (Can you spot the swag?)

Registration for the premier international conference in the field, which MITH hosts June 22-25, closes in just three days on June 14.

UMD’s research newsletter Between the Columns covers MITH the university’s rising profile in digital humanities.

The white paper (12,000 words) from this Level 1 NEH Start Up project is now available.

MITH is very pleased to welcome Amanda Visconti as an intern working on MITH’s Deena Larsen Collection. A graduate student at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, she specializes in human-computer interaction. She holds an undergraduate degree in English; her interests combine web design, programming, and literature. She recently spent a term beginning an online digital text of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Amanda’s internship is sponsored by the IMLS-funded Model Internship program, directed by Dr. Kari Kraus in Maryland’s iSchool. She’ll be with is through the DH09 conference in June.

The detailed conference program for Digital Humanities 2009, with the schedule of papers and authors, is now available!

Call for Participation
Advanced Seminars in TEI Encoding

Applications are invited for participation in a new series of advanced text encoding seminars, sponsored by the Brown University Women Writers Project with generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

These seminars assume a basic familiarity with TEI, and provide an opportunity to explore specific encoding topics in more detail, in a collaborative workshop setting. Each seminar will focus on one of two topics:

1. Manuscript encoding: focusing on the detailed challenges of encoding manuscript materials, including editorial, transcriptional, and interpretive issues and the methods of representing these in TEI markup.

2. Contextual information: focusing on TEI methods for formalizing and representing information about context: named entities such as people and places, thematic analysis and keywords, text classification, glossaries and annotations.

These seminars are intended to provide a more in-depth look at specific encoding problems and topics for people who are already involved in a text encoding project or are in the process of planning one. Each event will include a mix of presentations, discussion, case studies using participants’ projects, hands-on practice, and individual consultation. The seminars will be strongly project-based: participants will present their projects to the group, discuss specific challenges and encoding strategies, develop encoding specifications and documentation, and create encoded sample documents and templates. We encourage project teams and collaborative groups to apply, although individuals are also welcome. A basic knowledge of the TEI Guidelines and some prior experience with text encoding (e.g. an introductory workshop, job experience, etc.) will be assumed.

Travel funding is available of up to $500 per participant.

Application deadlines are below. For information on how to apply, and for more detailed information on each workshop, please visit http://www.wwp.brown.edu/encoding/seminars.

The workshop schedule is as follows:

University of California, Santa Barbara
Hosted by the English Broadside Ballad Archive and the Transliteracies Project
September 14-16, 2009
This workshop will focus on the encoding of contextual information.
Application deadline: June 15, 2009
Applicants will be notified by June 30.

University of Maryland, College Park
Hosted by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
January 20-22, 2010
This workshop will focus on the encoding of manuscript materials.
Application deadline: August 1, 2009
Applicants will be notified by September 1.

Brown University
Hosted by the Center for Digital Scholarship
April 8-10, 2010
This workshop will focus on the encoding of contextual information.
Application deadline: November 1, 2009
Applicants will be notified by December 1.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Hosted by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities
July 2010 (precise date and deadlines TBA)
This workshop will focus on the encoding of manuscript materials.

University at Buffalo
Hosted by the Digital Humanities Initiative at Buffalo
October 2010 (precise date and deadlines TBA)
This workshop will focus on the encoding of manuscript materials.

University of Maryland
January 2011 (precise date and deadlines TBA)
This workshop will focus on the encoding of contextual information.

With Assistant Professor Kari Kraus in the iSchool and the campus Mobility Initiative, MITH ran a mobile scavenger hunt that used iPhones and Web 2.0 technology to educate visitors about a dramatic moment in campus history, the Great Fire of 1912. Maryland Day attendees were able to use GPS systems and online services to locate the original buildings, as well as a replica of the “Cornerstone Box,” a campus artifact, in a practice known as geocaching.

A MITH Digital Dialogue

Tuesday, May 5, 12:30-1:45

MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Networked Reenactments: how television, museums, and universities tried to find audiences in the nineties”

By KATIE KING

Some knowledge engineers claim that the 20 disciplines that came into being in 1900 fractured into 8000 specialized topics in science alone ninety years later. Reenactments were among the experiments in communication across knowledge worlds that began to take particular form in the nineties. Science-styled television documentary forms, internet repurposings, museum exhibitions, and academic historiographies worked hard to shape an array of cognitive sensations accessed, skilled and displayed by new technologies. These experiments became epistemological melodramas of identity, national interests, and global restructuring that tried to solve the tricky mapping problems of addressing many audiences simultaneously.

KATIE KING is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Fellow of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). She received her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her interdisciplinary scholarship is located at the intersection of feminist technoscience studies, cyberculture and media studies, and LGBT Studies. Her first book was “Theory in its Feminist Travels: conversations in U.S. women’s movements.” She has two others in progress now, “Speaking with Things,” an introduction to writing technologies, and the other, “Networked Reenactments,” flexible knowledges under globalization.

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2009.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, April 28, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Preserving Virtual Worlds: A MITH Research Update”
By NEIL FRAISTAT, MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM, KARI KRAUS, and DOUG RESIDE

Interactive media are highly complex and at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is actively exploring methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. Major activities include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games, electronic literature and Second Life, an interactive multiplayer game. Project partners are the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (lead), the University of Maryland, Stanford University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Linden Lab. Second Life content participants include Life to the Second Power, Democracy Island and the International Spaceflight Museum. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is funded by the Preserving Creative America initiative under the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) administered by the Library of Congress. In this MITH Research Update, we will discuss the current state of the project eighteen months into the grant cycle, and suggest directions for future research.

NEIL FRAISTAT, Director of MITH & Professor of English
MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM, Associate Director of MITH & Associate Professor of English
KARI KRAUS, Assistant Professor in the iSchool and English
DOUG RESIDE, Assistant Director of MITH & Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater

Coming up @MITH 5/5: Katie King (Women’s Studies), “Networked Reenactments”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2009.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

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