The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is pleased to announce a special *THURSDAY* Digital Dialogue on November 17th, at 12:30 in the MITH Conference Room:

"A Box, Darkly: Obfuscation, Weird Languages, and Code Aesthetics"

NICK MONTFORT, University of Pennsylvania

The standard idea of code aesthetics, when such an idea manifests itself at all, allows for programmers to have elegance and clarity as their standards. This talk explores programming practices in which other values are at work, showing that the aesthetics of code must be enlarged to accommodate them. The two practices considered are obfuscated programming and the creation of "weird languages" for coding. Connections between these two practices, and between these and other mechanical and literary aesthetic traditions, are discussed. (This is a presentation of joint work with Michael Mateas.)

Nick Montfort is a doctoral candidate in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT 2003) and co-editor of the New Media Reader (MIT 2003). He is an prolific writer and producer of new media and Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. His Web site may be found here: http://nickm.com

MITH’s first Digital Dialogue of the spring 2006 semester will be a discussion of William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition (2003), on Tuesday, Feb. 7th at our usual 12:30 time in the MITH seminar room. Anyone with an interest in the book is welcome to attend.

Pattern Recognition has been widely received as Gibson’s most significant and prescient work since he coined the term “cyberspace” in 1984. “We have no future because the present is too volatile,” observes one character. “We have only risk management. The spinning of a given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.” But how do we tell the difference between pattern and coincidence? Is pattern recognition enabling or constraining? What kind of patterns emerge in a novel about digital art, Web memes, global capital, viral marketing, a postmodern advertising agency, cool hunters, and collectors of antiquarian computing equipment in settings from London to Tokyo to Moscow to post-9/11 New York? Our discussion will be the basis for three additional Digital Dialogues, to be held at intervals throughout the semester, each of which will explore the general theme of “pattern recognition”–a heuristic for much of MITH’s current research–in varied contexts. We look forward to seeing you at any or all of these.

In addition to the pattern recognition sessions, we have speakers and events planned for Digital Dialogues for just about every Tuesday in the spring semester–always at 12:30. Plan to make Digital Dialogues a part of your intellectual week and watch for the full schedule very soon.

MITH is delighted to announce the award winners of our Winnemore Scholarship and Travel Grants for 2005-2006, who were recently selected by a committee on which Katie King, Jo Paoletti, and Martha Nell Smith joined me and MITH’s Acting Associate Directors, Matt Kirschenbaum and Carl Stahmer.

The winner of MITH’s Winnemore Dissertation Scholarship is Michele Mason, from the Department of Communication. Michele will be producing this Spring a scholarly electronic edition of several key texts by Civil Rights leader Nannie Helen Burroughs, highlighting her influence as a leader of African-American women, a political organizer, and a columnist in the African-American press.

The winners of MITH’s $1,000 graduate student travel grants for conference presentations concerning New Media or the Digital Humanities are Asim Ali (American Studies), Sylvia Mejia (Comparative Literature), Marc Ruppel (English), and co-presenters, Kimberlee Staking and Nikki Ayana Stewart( Women Studies).

I hope you’ll join me in congratulating these outstanding graduate students.

The nora project has new content online. Of greatest interest perhaps is the ability to experiment with a demo based on our work here at Maryland; there’s also significant new material under Screenshots, and new content in Publications/Reports. (All of these are available under the Work In Progress section.)

Nora is a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary Mellon-funded project to apply text mining and visualization techniques to large humanities-oriented digital library collections (starting with a 10,000-text corpus of 18th and 19th century British and American literature). MITH, in collaboration with HCIL, is one of several institutional partners in the grant. Matthew Kirschenbaum, MITH’s Acting Associate Director, serves at the Maryland PI. Martha Nell Smith, MITH’s founding Director, is co-PI.

Matthew Kirschenbaum also recently participated on behalf of nora in The Valve’’s recent book event for Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees. His contribution is entitled Poetry, Patterns, and Provocation.