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)

MITH is pleased to announce CHAIN, a major new international cyberinfrastructure initiative, which involves centerNet, Bamboo, DARIAH, and others. Press release below:

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)

This fall’s Digital Dialogues are now available with brief descriptions on our MITH Podcasting page. Topics covered this fall include videogame preservation, teaching in Second Life, data mining for metaphors in eighteenth century literature, data sets and an “abundant humanities library”, how programming is taught, open source teaching and scholarship, and a close look at Ebook devices.

We have a couple more episodes before wrapping up this season’s series on November 17th. If you are unable to attend the live event, the podcast file will be available within a day after the talk. Download the Fall 2009 Speakers Schedule to view a complete list of speakers and topics.

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Wednesday, November 11, 3:30-4:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“From the First Year Through Tenure: New Pathways for Humanities in a Digital Age” by GREG CRANE

Classical studies offers one particular, but potentially powerful, window onto possibilities for the humanities. A growing, international body of classicists are dedicated not simply to creating digital tools but to reimagining the field against the opportunities and challenges of the digital world in which we already live. On the one hand, we are beginning to see new possibilities for research that were not feasible with the tools of print culture. At the same time, and perhaps even more importantly, we are seeing a reorganization of who can participate and what they can contribute. We can see the possibility of a truly global field emerging, with implications far beyond the traditional bounds of
classical studies.

GREG CRANE is currently a Professor of Classics, as well as Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Project at Tufts University. He has written two books on Thucydides; The Blinded Eye & The Ancient Simplicity, and is currently conducting preliminary research for a planned book on Cicero. He is particularly interested in the extent to which broadcast media such as the World Wide Web not only enhance the work of professional researchers and students in formal degree programs but create new audiences outside academia for cultural materials. His current research focuses on “computational humanities” and how this new field can help to democratize information without compromising intellectual rigor.

Coming up @ MITH 11/17: Jennifer Fleeger (Catholic), “Archiving America: The Vitaphone, the DVD, and Warner Bros. (re)store Jazz History”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogue schedule here:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2009.pdf

All talks are free and open to the public!

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

Applications for MITH’s Spring 2010 Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellowship are now being accepted.

Intended for students whose dissertations engage the intersections between new media and the traditional concerns of the Arts and Humanities, the Winnemore Fellowship will provide a stipend of $9,570, plus full benefits and tuition remission up to five credits.

Nominees will be evaluated on three main criteria: (1) The potential contribution of the dissertation to the Digital Humanities; (2) The quality of the student’s work; (3) The likelihood of the student successfully completing the dissertation.

Applicants will be asked to submit an application form; a 500-1000 word abstract written for a general audience; a statement of work completed to date, work remaining, and expected completion date; a curriculum vitae; and two letters of recommendation, one of which must be from the student’s dissertation director. The application form can be found here: http://mith.umd.edu/research/WinnemoreApp2010.pdf

Students who wish to apply for the fellowship should submit a copy of the application form and the required attachments to Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH, McKeldin Library B0131, Campus.

Students who have funding that is related to their dissertation research or another substantial fellowship should not apply.

Applications for Spring 2009 are due at MITH by noon, Monday, December 7, 2009. The recipient will be announced in mid-December 2009.

Please address any questions to Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH (fraistat at umd dot edu).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, November 3, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, Mckeldin Library B0135

“The Great Ebook Throwdown” with Ben Bederson, Nick Chen, and Matt Kirschenbaum

Ebooks are suddenly everywhere again. Kindle, Nook, iPhone . . . after 2000 years, the codex is getting an upgrade. But what kind of electronic books and electronic reading devices do we really want? Are we trying to improve on the book, or create something new? Something different? Are there some universal design principles we can agree on? And what about the bigger picture: can electronic gadgetry reverse the national decline in reading dramatically documented by agencies such as the NEA? This roundtable discussion led by Ben Bederson, Nick Chen, and Matt Kirschenbaum will feature as many electronic reading and electronic book devices as we can lay our hands on, including some prototypes being developed here at the University of Maryland. We’ll hold them up, pass them around, turn them on, talk some trash, and, in the process, maybe gain just a little bit of insight into what we all want from our electronic book readers. Attendees are encouraged to bring along electronic book devices of their own.

Benjamin B. Bederson is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and the previous director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and iSchool at the University of Maryland. His research is on mobile device interfaces, information visualization, interaction strategies, digital libraries, and accessibility issues such as voting system usability. He is also co-founder and Chief Scientist of Zumobi, a startup offering a mobile content platform based on that research.

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. Previously, he performed the first-ever evaluation of a dual-display electronic reading device.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), and Director of Digital Cultures and Creativity, a new “living/learning” program in the Honors College.

Comint up @ MITH 11/11: Greg Crane, “From the First Year Through Tenure: New Pathways for Humanities in a Digital Age”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2009.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

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

MITH is very pleased and excited to welcome the launch of a new living/learning program, Digital Cultures and Creativity (DCC), to be housed within the University Honors College, sponsored by the College of Arts and Humanities and co-sponsorsed by the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences (the Computer Science Department) and the College of Information Studies.

Designed for the 21st century student who was born into the world of windows and the web, Digital Cultures and Creativity (DCC) provides an innovative living and learning community that combines art, imagination and global citizenship with new media and new technologies. Depending on individual interest, students will pursue activities including digital music and video production, digital art, creative electronic writing, virtual worlds and the development of software and online communities. Associate Professor of English and MITH Associate Director Matthew Kirschenbaum has been named first Director of the program: “There’s a new generation of young people today–we sometimes call them ‘digital natives’–who have grown up creating and expressing themselves online,” Kirschenbaum says. “Up till now they didn’t have a home here on campus. Now they will.”

Kirschenbaum is joined by Associate Director Tanya Clement, who recently earned her Ph.D. from Maryland and is herself a rising star in the international digital humanities community. “I’m looking forward to continuing the tradition of making the University of Maryland an innovator in digital humanities teaching and learning,” says Clement. Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH, adds: “MITH is delighted to be partnering with the Department of Computer Science and the iSchool to bring this program into being. DCC will make palpable to first- and second-year honors students the intellectual excitement and energy characterizing the emergent field of digital humanities.”

DCC will welcome its first cohort of students next fall. Watch http://dcc.umd.edu for further news and developments, or follow us on Twitter as @umd_dcc.