MITH enjoyed hosting a group of undergraduate interns from the National Endowment for the Humanities, led by Program Officer Fred Winter. In a wide ranging conversation that went from preserving cultural heritage to electronic literature and digital gaming to classroom technology, we talked through what it means to do digital humanities today.

Thanks for coming!

MITH is very pleased to pass along word of a series of new programs and initiatives from NEH designed to support research and scholarship in the digital humanities:

NEH has launched a new digital humanities initiative aimed at supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology. Digital technologies offer humanists new methods of conducting research, conceptualizing relationships, and presenting scholarship. NEH is interested in fostering the growth of digital humanities and lending support to a wide variety of projects, including those that deploy digital technologies and methods to enhance our understanding of a topic or issue; those that study the impact of digital technology on the humanities–exploring the ways in which it changes how we read, write, think, and learn; and those that digitize important materials thereby increasing the public’s ability to search and access humanities information.

Details here.

The MITH community and University of Maryland were well represented at the important Digital Humanities 2006 conference which just concluded in Paris, at the Sorbonne.

MITH Director Neil Fraistat organized and chaired a roundtable discussion on “The Fate and Function of Digital Humanities Centers,” which included MITH’s Founding Director Martha Nell Smith among its speakers. Fraistat also attended the Association for Computers and the Humanities Executive Council Meeting.

Associate Director Matthew Kirschenbaum organized a session on the ongoing Nora Project, and with HCIL’s Catherine Plaisant presented a multi-authored paper, “‘Undiscoverd Public Knowledge’: Mining for Patterns of Erotic Language in Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence with Susan Huntington (Gilbert) Dickinson,” which also included Smith and Maryland English graduate student Tanya Clement as co-authors. MITH Web designer Greg Lord was co-author on another paper presented as part of the same session.

Maryland English graduate students Jennifer Rowe and Marc Ruppel presented papers on their current work on new media poetry and cross-sited narrative, respectively. Ruppel was one of four student winners of an ACH travel bursary.

Finally, former MITH Assistant Director Susan Schreibman (and currently the Maryland Libraries’ Head of Digital Collections and Research) presented a paper co-authored with the Libraries’ Gretchen Gueguen and Jennifer Roper on “Cross-Collection Searching: A Pandora’s Box or Holy Grail?”

Below we find Fraistat and Kirschenbaum hobnobbing in a salon at the Sorbonne.