MITH is pleased to announce that we have begun regular Podcasting of our popular Digital Dialogues seminar series:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/digitaldialogue/podcasts.php

We have three Podcasts from recent Digital Dialogues already available, including talks by Rice University’s Chuck Henry on scholarly electronic publishing, Brown’s Vika Zafrin on collaboration in the digital humanities, and game studies from internationally renowned media theorist and author Stuart Moulthrop.

A “Podcast” is an MP3 audio recording. You can access and listen to them in a variety of ways. First, by going to the URL above and clicking on the session you want to hear, the MP3 audio file will open and play using your browser’s standard audio plugin. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of the Digital Dialgoues Podcast right from MITH’s front page (http://www.mith2.umd.edu/). Simply click on the buttons for the RSS options as they appear at the bottom of the right-hand column. (Firefox users can also click the orange radio wave icon that appears in their address bar.) Subscribing to the RSS feed means you will automatically receive new Podcasts as they become available through your RSS reader, and you can also synch them to your portable music player to hear Digital Dialogues on the go.

We plan to make this a regular feature of Digital Dialogues, pending the approval of individual speakers. Of course you’ll still have to come to MITH Tuesday’s at 12:30 to see any visuals associated with a talk, participate in the conversation, and share some of our coffee and cookies. Enjoy!

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, November 28, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135
Please join us to welcome the newest member of MITH’s full-time staff . . .

“Byte By Byte, Putting It Together: Electronic Editions of Musical Theatre Texts”
by DOUG RESIDE (MITH)

While many humanities scholars have explored how computers might assist them in their work, there have been very few attempts to use electronic tools to study the musical. Musical theatre seems particularly well-suited, though, to the multimedia capabilities of the modern PC. This presentation will explore the ways in which electronic editions of musicals would not only be of use to musical theatre scholars, but might also help to develop a wider audience for artistically-minded (as opposed to commercially-driven) musicals. This talk outlines the benefits offered by electronic editions and describes the steps taken by the author to develop an AJAX-based electronic edition of the 1998 musical Parade.

DOUG RESIDE earned his PhD from the University of Kentucky in 2006. His dissertation was a multimedia musical theatre edition; while at Kentucky he also worked on several other humanities computing projects, including Kevin Kiernan’s celebrated Electronic Boethius. He is now the Assistant Director of MITH.

Coming up @MITH, Dec. 5: Jimmy Lin (College of Information Studies), “Applying Automated Content Analysis Techniques to Legal Texts.” 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, November 14, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

Narrative, Fiction, and the Cultural Reception of Videogames”
by STUART MOULTHROP (University of Baltimore, School of Information
Arts and Technologies)

When even the most perceptive scholars based in traditional,
typographic forms of literacy turn their attention to videogames, the
results can be disconcerting. Two of the best in this line, Janet
Murray and James P. Gee, both falter notably when they ask when, if,
or how videogames can have cultural effects equivalent to literature.
These moments do not represent failure so much as catastrophe, a
collapse of interpretive method that may provide indications for more
viable approaches. I suggest the key to a new agenda lies in the
distinction of narrative, a main concern for my generation and our
elders, from the sort of fiction Jesper Juul embraces in his theory of
games: a form whose clearest illustration is not story or novel, but
rather tableau. As Murray herself says: “The more we see life in
terms of systems, the more we need a system-modeling medium to
represent it.” But systematic or procedural systems cannot simply be
interpreted or read as if they were conventionally inscribed texts.
As Espen Aarseth argues, they must be played; and I would argue
further that critics must also engage in the kind of fictive play from
which games emerge. I suggest it is no accident that many of the most
interesting new critics of the videogame, figures like Ian Bogost and
Mary Flanagan, are active game developers, and argue more generally
that videogames and other forms of cybertext require a more engaged,
creative commitment from their critics.

Internationally renowned as a media theorist and hypertext writer,
STUART MOULTHROP currently works on the design and application of
interactive software, including video games and simulations. He is the
author of numerous works of electronic literature, including such
landmark works as Victory Garden, Hegirascope, Reagan Library, and
Pax. He is Professor in the School of Information Arts and
Technologies at the University of Baltimore. Visit his homepage for
more information: http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/

Coming up @MITH Nov. 21: Brandon Morse (Department of Art). 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 Fellow Merle Collins (Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Maryland) will present aspects of her digital humanities work during a plenary address to a conference on “The African Presence and Influence on the Cultures of the Americas: Griots of the New World” at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York this week. Her lecture is entitled “From Africa to the Caribbean: Approaching an Understanding and Appreciation of the Grenada Saraka.”

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, November 7, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“The Virtual Humanities Lab and the Evolution of Remote Collaboration”
by VIKA ZAFRIN (Brown University)

The Virtual Humanities Lab was a two-year project, generously
supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2004-06.
VHL was housed in Italian Studies at Brown University; we have
collaborated with scholars at Brown, and throughout North America and
Europe. First, we employed humanities scholars previously unfamiliar
with semantic text encoding. The scholars were tasked with studying
two information-rich primary sources — by encoding them using
idiosyncratic encoding structures. This required training and various
types of support, and was complicated by the scholars’ disparate
geographical locations. We also made contact with a group in Mexico
that is studying one of our texts, Giovanni Boccaccio’s _Expositions
on the Divine Comedy_. We’ve set up a discussion forum for them to do
their work using our encoded text. Finally, we collaborated amongst
ourselves across three continents on writing papers, designing the VHL
interface, and further textual analysis.

At MITH, I will talk about the results of these different types of
collaboration. I will relate what worked well (a strategic blend of
facetime and online communication) and what could have worked better
(training humanists in the fundamentals of humanities computing). I
will stress and illustrate the importance that collaboration has begun
to play in the humanities, and propose to introduce collaboration more
substantively into humanities research, arguing for its benefits over
our usual solitary work.

VIKA ZAFRIN is a PhD candidate in Special Studies (Humanities
Computing) at Brown University, expecting graduation next spring. She
was Project Director for NEH-funded Virtual Humanities Lab in 2004-06,
and actively participated in the development of the Decameron Web at
Brown. Besides collaboration, Zafrin’s interests include
intercultural transmission through art, idiosyncratic XML encoding of
cultural artifacts, web delivery technologies for semantically encoded
materials, the usage of internet resources for teaching, and science
fiction as a source of inspiration for humanities work.

Coming up @MITH Nov. 14: Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan (School of
Information Arts, University of Baltimore), title TBA. 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).

Dear all,

MITH is once again able to offer four travel grants of up to $1,000 for graduate students whose work substantially focuses on some aspect of the Digital Humanities or New Media.

Travel must be for a conference presentation related to the Digital Humanities or New Media and must take place between November 1, 2006-June 30, 2007. These grants are offered on a competitive basis. Applications for funding must be submitted electronically and must be received no later than December 4, 2006. Please note that funding is contingent upon your presentation being accepted by the Conference organizers.

Applications should include the following:

Applicant’s name

Applicant’s graduate program & degree being sought

Applicant’s year in program

Amount of funding provided by program or other entity

Projected total expense for your trip

Purpose of trip, and its relevance to the field of digital humanities

Title & brief description of presentation

Statement of willingness to present research at a MITH Digital Dialogues session

Please submit applications directly to:

Professor Neil Fraistat

Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)

fraistat@umd.edu

Best,

Neil

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 is delighted to announce that we will be able to offer two Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellowships this year.

Intended for students whose dissertations engage the intersections between new media and the traditional concerns of the Humanities, the Winnemore Fellowship is designed to provide full support for a semester, including benefits. In addition, recipients will receive $1,000 for travel to conferences where work from the dissertation can be presented.

Nominees will be evaluated on three main criteria:

1. The potential contribution of the dissertation to the Digital Humanities.

2. The quality of the student’s work.

3. The likelihood of the student successfully completing the dissertation.

Applicants will be asked to submit an application form; a 500-1000 word abstract written for a general audience; a statement of work completed to date, work remaining, and expected completion date; a curriculum vitae; and two letters of recommendation, one of which must be from the student’s dissertation director. The application form can be found here: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/research/WinnemoreApp06.pdf

Students who wish to apply for the fellowship should submit a copy of the application form and the required attachments to Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH, McKeldin Library B0131, Campus.

Students who have funding that is related to their dissertation research or another substantial fellowship should not apply.

Applications for Spring 2007 are due at MITH by noon, Monday, December 4, 2006. The recipient will be announced in mid-December 2006.

Please address any questions to Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH.