Current MITH Fellow Angel David Nieves presented a paper at the Third Biennial Urban History Association Conference on ASU’s Tempe/Phoenix campus. The paper entitled, "The Struggle" Over Urban Cultural Heritage and Human Rights: Post-Apartheid Museums and Restorative Social Justice in the "New" South Africa, introduced some of the broader issues I’ve been addressing on my work in South Africa. Nieves took advantage of the opportunity to highlight work in progress on his digital project at MITH–Soweto ‘76.
MITH News & Events
MITH Fellow Angel David Nieves Presents Work
October 30th, 2006Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 Released
October 30th, 2006
College Park, Maryland, October 26, 2006 — The Electronic Literature Organization today released the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One. The Collection, edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland, is an anthology of 60 eclectic works of electronic literature, published simultaneously on CD-ROM and on the web at collection.eliterature.org. Another compelling aspect of the project is that it is being published by the Electronic Literature Organization under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5), so readers are free to copy and share any of the works included, or for instance to install the collection on every computer in a school’s computer lab, without paying any licensing fees. The Collection will be free for individuals.
The 60 works included in the Electronic Literature Collection present a broad overview of the field of electronic literature, including selected works in new media forms such as hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry, generative and combinatory forms, network writing, codework, 3D, and narrative animations. Contributors include authors and artists from the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Australia. Each work is framed with brief editorial and author descriptions, and tagged with descriptive keywords. The CD-ROM of the Collection runs on both Macintosh and Windows platforms and is published in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. Free copies of the CD-ROM can be requested from The Electronic Literature Organization.
The Collection will also be included with N. Katherine Hayles’ forthcoming book, Electronic Literature: Teaching, Interpreting, Playing (Notre Dame University Press, 2007).The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature. Since its formation, the Electronic Literature Organization has worked to assist writers and publishers in bringing their literary works to a wider, global readership and to provide them with the infrastructure necessary to reach each other. The Electronic Literature Organization is a national organization based at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH).
October 31st Digital Dialogue: “Calling All Gamers!”
October 26th, 2006A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, October 31, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135
CALLING ALL GAMERS!
MITH currently has several research initiatives pending in the area of
online gaming, especially Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games
(MMRPGS). MMRPGs such as Second Life and World of Warcraft create
complex social, narrative, and imaginative spaces that have been the
subject of important recent books by Edward Castronova and Henry
Jenkins, among others. Far from merely idle pastimes, these virtual
worlds, or simulations, manifest increasingly vexed relations to our
own daily realities. Castronova has calculated that one of the most
popular and longest running games, EverQuest, has a real world economy
whose GNP places it somewhere between that of Bulgaria and Russia;
Reuters, meanwhile, has just opened a news bureau within Second Life,
where it might be expected to cover events such as a Suzanne Vega
concert that unfolded entirely within that world’s virtual setting.
On Tuesday we are interested in talking with persons/players active in
one or more of these game worlds. We want *you* to come and educate
*us* about your experiences, we want to get feedback on our current
proposed work, and we want to discuss the possibility of creating an
interest group for those interested in discussing MMRPGs at some kind
of regular interval.
Note: Jason Nelson’s appearance, originally scheduled for 10/31, has
been CANCELLED.
Coming up @MITH Nov. 7: VIKA ZAFRIN (Brown University), “The Virtual
Humanities Lab and the Evolution of Remote Collaboration.” View the
complete Fall 2006 schedule for Digital Dialogues here:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2006.pdf
Free and open to the public.
Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-5896).
Byte by Byte
October 25th, 2006MITH Assistant Director Doug Reside’s article “Byte by Byte, Putting it Together: Electronic Editions and the Study of Musical Theatre” will be published in the premiere issue of Studies in Musical Theatre in early 2007. The article describes his electronic edition of the 1998 musical Parade by Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry.
Watch for Doug’s Digital Dialogue later this semester.
Kirschenbaum at Texas A&M and Dartmouth
October 24th, 2006MITH’s Associate Director Matthew Kirschenbaum is presenting his digital humanities research at two symposia this month, Digital Textual Studies at Texas A&M and the Mediacy of New Media at Dartmouth. At A&M he also presented posters on both MITH and the nora project. MITH’s Founding Director (1999-2005) Martha Nell Smith presented at A&M as well. Clearly there are thriving constituencies in digital humanities and new media at more and more campuses.
