In contrast to the first decade of literary production in the electronic media, when most critical attention was focused on link and node hypertext fiction and its relationship to postmodern theory, in recent years the field of new media studies has embraced a wider definition of Nelsonian “hypertext” to include a variety of forms of literary expression that branch or perform on request. A field once dominated by Storyspace fiction now includes in its purview a wide variety of approaches to literary expression made for the computer and the network, including kinetic poetry, interactive fiction, combinatory writing, story and poetry generation, and network-mediated memoir. During the talk I will present examples of recent work in electronic literature submitted to the forthcoming Electronic Literature Collection [of which MITH is a co-sponsor] in the context of genre.

Scott Rettberg is an Assistant Professor of New Media Studies in the Literature Program at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. He is a co-founder and past president of the Electronic Literature Organization and a contributing blogger at GrandTextAuto: http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/ . A writer and practicioner as well as critic and scholar of new media, Scott is the author or co-author of the classic hypertext novel The Unknown, the email novel Kind of Blue, and the sticker novel Implementation.
12:30 in the MITH Conference Room.

Coming up @MITH (March 14): Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann, Professors of English and Media Studies at the University of Virginia. This talk will be held in Susquehanna Hall, room 3105 at our usual 12:30 time.

View MITH’s complete Spring Speakers Schedule here:

http://mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2006.pdf

She built her own fleet.

Captured the fortress of Nafplion.

Saved hundreds of harem women.

And started a revolution.

Not bad for a fifty year old grandmother in the 1820s . . .

Born in a prison in Constantinople, Bouboulina defied the prescribed roles for women in the 19th century by becoming one of the most powerful figures of the Greek War of Independence. Drawing on documents housed at the General Archives in Athens, the Spetses museum, and interviews with specialists in the areas of Greek and Turkish history and culture, including Bouboulina’s own fifth-generation grandson, this hour-long documentary film presents a vivid portrait of one of Greece’s most extraordinary heroines. (In English with Greek subtitles.)

April Householder has taught film studies courses at the University of Maryland since 1996 and completed a Master’s thesis on blaxploitation films and the politics of performance, entitled, "Race Camp." Under the tutelage of Dr. John Fuegi and his "Women of Power" documentary film series, she is completing a multi-media Ph.D. dissertation, and will receive her doctoral degree in 2006. Her dissertation film, The Brave Stepped Back: The Life and Times of Laskarina Bouboulina, premiered at the Armata Festival in Spetses, Greece on September 8, 2005, at the request of the island’s Mayor, Mr. Evangelos Kontaxakis.

At our usual 12:30 start time in the MITH Conference Room.

View MITH’s complete Spring Speakers Schedule here:

http://mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2006.pdf

On Tuesday of next week, MITH Acting Associate Director Matthew Kirschenbaum will speak at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. The talk, based on his current book manuscript on new media textuality, is entitled “The Textual Forensics of Mystery_House.dsk.”

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, February 21, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

Ben Shneiderman (Dept. of Computer Science), “Creativity and Computing”

[see bottom for lunch details!]

Creativity Support Tools is a research topic with high risk but potentially very high payoff. The goal is to develop improved software and user interfaces that empower diverse users in the sciences and arts to be more productive, and more innovative. Potential users include a combination of software and other engineers, diverse scientists, product and graphic designers, and architects, as well as writers, poets, musicians, new media artists, and many others.

Enhanced interfaces could enable more effective searching of intellectual resources, improved collaboration among teams, and more rapid discovery processes. These advanced interfaces should also provide potent support in goal setting, speedier exploration of alternatives, improved understanding through visualization, and better dissemination of results. For creative endeavors that require composition of novel artifacts (computer programs, engineering diagrams, symphonies, animations, artwork), enhanced interfaces could facilitate rapid exploration of alternatives, prevent unproductive choices, and enable easy backtracking.

This NSF-sponsored workshop (June 2005, http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CST/) brought together 25 research leaders and graduate students to share experiences, identify opportunities, and formulate research challenges. Two key outcomes emerged:

1) Formulation of guidelines for design of creativity support tools.

2) Novel research methods to assess creativity support tools.

The next step is planning for the June 2007 Conference on Creativity and Cognition in Washington, DC. The talk is also meant to invite participation in organizing this event.

BEN SHNEIDERMAN (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/), and Member of the Institutes for Advanced Computer Studies & for Systems Research, all at the University of Maryland at College Park. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM ) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

Ben is the author of Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (1980) and Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (4th ed. 2004) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/ . He pioneered the highlighted textual link in 1983, and it became part of Hyperties, a precursor to the web. His move into information visualization helped spawn the successful company Spotfire http://www.spotfire.com/ . He is a technical advisor for the HiveGroup and ILOG. With S Card and J. Mackinlay, he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999). His recent books include Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (MIT Press) and with B. Bederson, The Craft of Information Visualization (Morgan Kaufmann).

A light lunch of Japanese rice rolls will be provided starting at noon. MITH is located on the basement level of McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland. All welcome.

View MITH’s complete Spring Speakers Schedule here:

http://mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2006.pdf

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Acting Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-5896).

The Center for History and New Media’s Echo project (http://echo.gmu.edu) invites scholars of the history of science, technology, and industry to our second workshop on the theory and practice of digital history. Participants will explore the ways that digital technologies can facilitate the research, teaching, writing and presentation of history; genres of online history; website infrastructure and design; document digitization; the process of identifying and building online history audiences; and issues of copyright and preservation. The workshop, which is co-sponsored by the American Historical Association and the National History Center, will be held at George Mason University’s Arlington campus, conveniently located in metropolitan Washington, DC. Thanks to support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, there will be no registration fee, and a limited number of fellowships are available to defray the costs of travel and lodging for graduate students and young scholars. As spaces are limited, please submit an application form by March 10, 2006 (available at http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/surveys/1358/).