Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf talks to NEH Chairman Bruce Cole about digital technology and the future of the humanities in the current issue of NEH’s Humanities Magazine. (Via Jason Rhody.)

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, April 4, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

MITH is pleased to offer two of its current or recent faculty Fellows the opportunity to discuss their ongoing work in digital humanities. Please join us for these two presentations.

Early Americas Digital Archive
RALPH BAUER, Associate Professor of English

The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. It is open to the public for research and teaching purposes. It is intended as a long-term and inter-disciplinary project in progress committed to exploring the intersections between traditional humanities research and digital technologies and invites scholars from all disciplines to submit their editions of early American texts for publication.

Occupied Japan, 1945-1952: Gender, Class, Race
MARLENE MAYO, Associate Professor of History

The site contains thirty-two themes, biographies of eighteen leading and lesser known women, numerous images, and a wide range of texts ranging from fiction and poetry to oral histories and official documents. The site is intended for use not only in Japanese and East Asian History courses but also for American History, American Studies, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Government and Politics.

Coming up @MITH, April 11: Patti Cossard (Subject Librarian, University Library): “The Multilingual Thesaurus for Medieval Studies”; Michele Mason (Doctoral Candidate, Communication, MITH Winnemore Dissertation Fellow): “Creating Digital Versions of Early 20th Century African-American Texts: Nannie Burroughs’ 1928 ‘What the Negro Wants Politically.’”

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 College of Arts and Humanities has mounted an internal search for a new Director for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. The MITH Search Committee invites you to attend a presentation by:

Professor Neil Fraistat
Monday April 3, 2006
9:30 a.m.
Room 1117 Francis Scott Key Hall

Please join the committee for this presentation. A short question-and-answer period will follow. An on-line survey will also be available for those who wish to use it. For further information, please contact Jennifer Zachmann at jenzach@umd.edu.

On Wednesday, March 29, 3:30-4:45, MITH will inaugurate its occasional Coffeehouse Conversations series with a roundtable on Scholarly Electronic Publishing. The discussion will be facilitated by Katie King (Associate Professor of Women’s Studies), Matthew Kirschenbaum (Assistant Professor of English and Articles Editor for the online journal Digital Humanities Quarterly), and Claire Moses (Professor of Women’s Studies and Editorial Director of the journal Feminist Studies).

The format will be open and freewheeling, with plenty of opportunity for asking questions and exchanging ideas. Topics that might be expected to come up include: what it means to “publish” online; peer review, credit, and perceptions of prestige for online publishing; editorial standards in electronic journals; copyright and the economics of scholarly publishing in the present climate; whether the journal format itself is viable online, or whether blogs, bulletin boards, and other forums are more appropriate; libraries and electronic journals; how new media will alter the materiality and substance of scholarship; and the longevity of the scholarly record as it sheds its traditional embodiment in paper.

MITH (the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) is located in the basement of McKeldin Library, B0131. The discussion is open to all. Graduate students are especially encouraged to attend.

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).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, March 28, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

On Tuesday, March 28, 12:30-1:45 at MITH is pleased to sponsor the first of several Digital Dialogues this semester which will spotlight current research by faculty Fellows and Graduate Student award recipients. In this first installment, doctoral candidates ASIM ALI (American Studies) and MARC RUPPEL (English) share recent work presented at national conferences in their field for which they received MITH Travel Grants. Join us this time for a heady brew of Buffy, Batman, readers, fans, new media, narrative, and religion.

“Religion, Internet Fandom, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
Asim Ali

In this presentation, I will discuss the mediated interaction of popular culture and religion. I will focus in particular on fans of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer; this presentation will be based on my ethnographic analysis of that particular group of fans who frequented the official Buffy internet fan site known as The Bronze. There are several ways in which Buffy and religion interact. First, the show is replete with religious references and imagery, and reflects the critical perspective of creator Joss Whedon, an avowed atheist who apparently had few qualms about criticizing religion via Buffy. However, fan interpretations of the religious symbolism in Buffy are often contradictory and contested. Second, not only is there religion in Buffy, but Buffy itself can be seen as a religion. Whedon is the creator of a founding mythology, which he and his production staff–similar to a hierarchically organized clergy–canonized via Buffy. Furthermore, there are several institutions–analogous to a hierarchical laity, of which The Bronze, being officially sanctioned, is at the top–through which the text is interpreted and modified. Third, even though The Bronze is now defunct, the community lives on through several internet sites. Although The Bronze is fragmented and the community no longer has a central location or unifying concept, it maintains its cohesion through a matrix of connections based on the common bond of having been a Bronzer. In this sense, it functions much like a global religious community.

ASIM ALI is a doctoral candidate in American Studies. His research interests include; race and slavery; religion; and new media. He is currently director of the Project on Religion, Culture, and Globalization.

“Idealized Stories, Idealized Readers and Idealized Consumers: Batman Begins and the New Narrative Model”
Marc Ruppel

In her recent article "Narrative and Digitality" (2005), Marie-Laure Ryan describes what she calls texts that think with their medium. These texts possess properties of interactivity/ reactivity, variability, multi-sensorality and networking capabilities. Unique to these sorts of texts is the "ability to create an original experience which cannot be duplicated by any other medium, an experience which makes the medium seem truly necessary" (516). Keeping this distinction in mind, this talk will argue that convergent corporate organizations are enabling a new kind of story structure, a cross-sited narrative, that not only implicates the reader/user/viewer in the active construction of an ideal narrative (one that exists as the product of a blending of several variant stories), but also forces an assimilation of the medial "thoughts" of a particular channel. Using the film and video game adaptations of Batman Begins as prototypical examples of cross-siting, I will discuss the ways that the structure of the Time Warner Corporation directly influences the form(s) of the dispersed narrative, and posit that the synergy so often sought within this sort of venture ends up vastly complicating issues of authorship, framing and continuity, leading to a shift from a Barthesian idealized reader to something more akin to an idealized consumer. Consequently, instead of narrative being contingent upon a single medium with an isolated set of "thoughts", we need to begin talking about an idealized narrative with multiple medialities, one that exists in both local material and non-material "in-between" states of meaning.

MARC RUPPEL is a doctoral candidate in English, working on a dissertation on cross-sited narrative. His research interests include digital studies, popular culture, and Native American literature.

Coming up @MITH: Workshop on Scholarly Electronic Publishing (March 29) and on April 4, Ralph Bauer (Associate Professor, English): “The Early Americas Digital Archive; and “Marlene Mayo (Associate Professor, History): “Gender, Class, and Race in Occupied Japan.”

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).