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.