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.

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).

A 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).

MITH 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.

MITH’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.

MITH has a double-header of Digital Dialogue offerings next week, at
our regular Tuesday 12:30 slot AND a special session on Wednesday at
3:00. Read on for all the details.
Wednesday, October 25, 3:00-4:15
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Rice University Press: Non Fac Simile”
by CHUCK HENRY

Chuck Henry will discuss Rice University Press, recently reborn as the
nation’s first all-digital university press. MICAHEL LONEGRO,
Humanities editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, will also join
the discussion.

Charles Henry is Vice Provost and University Librarian at Rice
University, a position he has held since 1996. He is responsible for
library services and programs, including the Digital Library
Initiative and the Digital media Center, and works with many centers
and institutes on campus. He is a trustee of the Digital Library
Federation, and chair of the Advisory Committee, International
University Bremen, for its Information Resource Center. He received a
Fulbright award for the study of medieval literature in Vienna,
Austria, and a Fulbright senior scholar grant for library sciences in
New Zealand. Recently he was awarded a two year research grant from
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the study of emerging academic
disciplines.

Coming up @MITH, Oct. 31: Jason Nelson’s appearance has been
CANCELLED. Instead, in keeping with some current research projects,
MITH will be hosting an open roundtable on Massively Multiplayer
Online Role Playing Games (MMRPGs). We would especially like to hear
from currently active players of such games (Second Life, World of
Warcraft, etc.) 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).

The first episode of MITH’s Digital Dialogues PodCast is now available: Chuck Henry on Rice University Press’s born-digital publishing program (10/24/06). Get it here!

We look forward to PodCasting more Digital Dialogues in the future.

MITH has a double-header of Digital Dialogue offerings next week, at
our regular Tuesday 12:30 slot AND a special session on Wednesday at
3:00.

Tuesday, October 24, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Lessons from the MALACH Project: Applying new technologies to improve
intellectual access to large oral history collections”
by DOUGLAS W. OARD, College of Information Studies and UMIACS,
University of Maryland

In this talk I will describe the goals of the MALACH project
(Multilingual Access to Large Spoken Archives) and some of our
research results. I’ll begin by describing the unique characteristics
of the oral history collection that we are using, in which Holocaust
survivors, witnesses and rescuers were interviewed in several
languages. Each interview has been digitized and extensively
catalogued by subject matter experts, thus producing a remarkably rich
collection for the application of machine learning techniques.
Automatic speech recognition techniques originally developed for the
domain of conversational telephone speech were adapted to process with
word error rates that are adequate to support interactive search and
automated clustering, detection of topic shifts, and topic
classification. In this talk, I will describe the studies that we
conducted to learn about what needs our systems should be designed to
meet and I’ll summarize key results from our system development
activities. I’ll conclude with some remarks about possible future
directions for research applying new technologies to improve
intellectual access to oral history and other spoken word collections.

Douglas Oard is Associate Dean for Research in the College of
Information Studies at the University of Maryland. An Associate
Professor in the College, he holds a joint appointment in the
Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and affiliate
appointments in the Computer Science Department and the Applied
Mathematics and Scientific Computation Program. Dr. Oard earned his
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, and
his research interests center around the use of emerging technologies
to support information seeking by end users. Recent work has focused
on interactive techniques for cross-language information retrieval,
searching conversational media, and leveraging observable behavior to
improve user modeling. Additional information is available at
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~oard.

–

Coming up @MITH, Oct. 31: Jason Nelson’s appearance has been
CANCELLED. Instead, in keeping with some current research projects,
MITH will be hosting an open roundtable on Massively Multiplayer
Online Role Playing Games (MMRPGs). We would especially like to hear
from currently active players of such games (Second Life, World of
Warcraft, etc.) 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).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, October 17, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Beautiful Untrue Things: The Digital Dilemma”
by SUSAN SCHREIBMAN

Art has never been a mere mirror up to nature, yet as in no other medium has it been so easy to create a simulacra of reality as with digital technology: a ‘heterocosm’, both simulating the familiar while deconstructing it. This talk will explore how mimesis might be used as a paradigm from which to explore the relationship between digital surrogates and their analogue counterparts; how familiar terms like object, imitation, copy, original function in the digital realm; and the notion that a digital representation may be more appropriately termed a simulacral identity, reflecting, not the object itself, but our beliefs and conventions about it. This talk will also briefly touch upon mimesis from the viewpoint of digital representations as conscious fashionings of hyper-reality or in Wildean terms, employing the unreal and non-existent to recreate the material world in unexpected, fresh, or subversive ways.

Susan Schreibman is Assistant Dean and Head of Digital Collections and Research at University of Maryland Libraries. She received her PhD in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama from University College Dublin (1997). She is the founding editor of The Thomas MacGreevy Archive, Irish Resources in the Humanities, and principle developer of The Versioning Machine. She is the author of Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy: An Annotated Edition (1991), co-editor of A Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell, 2004); and co-series editor of Topics in the Digital Humanities (University of Illinois Press). She is currently co-editing A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (forthcoming, Blackwell).

Coming up @MITH Oct. 24: DOUG OARD (College of Information Studies), “The MALACH Project: Multilingual Access to Large Spoken Archives”; and, on Wednesday, Oct. 25, CHUCK HENRY (Rice University), “Rice University Press: Non Fac Simile” (at 3:00). 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).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, October 10, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Social Software, or Why Would I Want to Consult an Encyclopedia that
Would Have Me as a Contributor?”
by DANIEL PITTI

In the last four years, broad, collaborative authoring (for example, Wikipedia), collection building (for example, September 11 Digital Archive and Hurricane Digital Memory Bank) and organization of information (for example, folksonomies) have emerged as forms of social computing. Advocates champion the democratic nature of the collaboration. Critics decry the lack of provenance and thus trustworthiness of the information gathered in this way. Clearly, though, the technology and techniques can support both democratic collaboration and the collaboration of experts. Such technology and techniques offer an opportunity to advance the application of computing to teaching and research beyond the margins.

Daniel Pitti is Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. Before coming to IATH in 1997, Pitti was Librarian for Advanced Technologies Projects at the University of California at Berkeley Library. Since 1993, Pitti has been the chief technical architect of Encoded Archival Description (EAD), an international standard for encoding library and archival finding based on XML. Pitti has a BA in religious studies from UC Davis, MA and C.Phil. in history of religions from UCLA, and an MLIS from UC Berkeley.

Coming up @MITH Oct. 17: SUSAN SCHREIBMAN (University Libraries), “Beautiful Untrue Things: The Digital Dilemma.” View the complete Fall 2006 schedule for Digital Dialogues here: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2006.pdfFree and open to the public.

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