A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, April 3, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Visible Evidence of Invisible Learning”
by RANDY BASS (Georgetown University)

Faculty and practitioners who work with digital pedagogies know, at
least intuitively, that student learning is significantly transformed
in new media environments. As all of higher education wades deeper
into the learning paradigm, it is increasingly important to move our
understanding of new media learning beyond generalizations about
engagement, interaction, and collaboration. The Visible Knowledge
Project was a six-year project engaging about 60 faculty from 21
institutions, in order to explore the impact of technology on
learning, especially in the humanities. This presentation will give an
overview of the broad findings from the project, and look specifically
at one strand of that faculty-driven research: Digital
stories/narrative. The scholarship of teaching and learning that was
produced by the project focuses us in part on the expansion of our
conceptions of “expertise” in student intellectual development, and
the roles that new media pedagogies play in that expansion. An
expanded conception of expertise might be critical to recognizing how
digital pedagogies often produce forms and symptoms of learning that
are elusive–if not invisible–in traditional assessments or frameworks
for understanding student development. This presentation will open up
some of the questions about what we recognize as learning, and
especially the ways that new media pedagogies and literacies invite us
to expand our recognition of learning.

RANDY BASS is Assistant Provost for Teaching and Learning Initiatives
at Georgetown University, and Executive Director of Georgetown’s
Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), a
campus-wide center supporting faculty work in new learning and
research environments. He has been working with a number of pedagogy
and technology projects since 1986, including serving as Director and
Principal Investigator of the Visible Knowledge Project, a five-year
scholarship of teaching and learning project involving 70 faculty on
21 university and college campuses. He is also a Consulting Scholar
for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancment of Teaching, where he
served, in 1998-99, as a Pew Scholar and Carnegie Fellow. In 1999, he
won the Educause Medal for outstanding achievement in technology and
undergraduate education. Bass is Associate Professor of English and a
member of the American Studies Committee at Georgetown University. He
is the author of Border Texts: Cultural Readings for Contemporary
Writers (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), and with Bret Eynon, co-editor of
Intentional Media: The Crossroads Conversations on Teaching and
Technology in the American Cultural History Classroom (double issue of
Works & Days). He is currently, also with Bret Eynon, co-editing a
volume of essays and findings from the Visible Knowledge Project,
entitled, The Difference that Inquiry Makes.

Coming up @MITH, April 10: Kate Murray (University Libraries),
“Developing Digital Curation Policies in a Local Context.”

View MITH’s complete Spring Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2007.pdf

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, April 3, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Visible Evidence of Invisible Learning”
by RANDY BASS (Georgetown University)

Faculty and practitioners who work with digital pedagogies know, at least intuitively, that student learning is significantly transformed in new media environments. As all of higher education wades deeper into the learning paradigm, it is increasingly important to move our understanding of new media learning beyond generalizations about engagement, interaction, and collaboration. The Visible Knowledge Project was a six-year project engaging about 60 faculty from 21 institutions, in order to explore the impact of technology on learning, especially in the humanities. This presentation will give an overview of the broad findings from the project, and look specifically at one strand of that faculty-driven research: Digital stories/narrative. The scholarship of teaching and learning that was produced by the project focuses us in part on the expansion of our conceptions of "expertise" in student intellectual development, and the roles that new media pedagogies play in that expansion. An expanded conception of expertise might be critical to recognizing how digital pedagogies often produce forms and symptoms of learning that are elusive–if not invisible–in traditional assessments or frameworks for understanding student development. This presentation will open up some of the questions about what we recognize as learning, and especially the ways that new media pedagogies and literacies invite us to expand our recognition of learning.

RANDY BASS is Assistant Provost for Teaching and Learning Initiatives at Georgetown University, and Executive Director of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), a campus-wide center supporting faculty work in new learning and research environments. He has been working with a number of pedagogy and technology projects since 1986, including serving as Director and Principal Investigator of the Visible Knowledge Project, a five-year scholarship of teaching and learning project involving 70 faculty on 21 university and college campuses. He is also a Consulting Scholar for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancment of Teaching, where he served, in 1998-99, as a Pew Scholar and Carnegie Fellow. In 1999, he won the Educause Medal for outstanding achievement in technology and undergraduate education. Bass is Associate Professor of English and a member of the American Studies Committee at Georgetown University. He is the author of Border Texts: Cultural Readings for Contemporary Writers (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), and with Bret Eynon, co-editor of Intentional Media: The Crossroads Conversations on Teaching and Technology in the American Cultural History Classroom (double issue of Works & Days). He is currently, also with Bret Eynon, co-editing a volume of essays and findings from the Visible Knowledge Project, entitled, The Difference that Inquiry Makes.

Coming up @MITH, April 10: Kate Murray (University Libraries), “Developing Digital Curation Policies in a Local Context.”

View MITH’s complete Spring Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2007.pdf

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

WASHINGTON (March 27, 2007)–The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland are pleased to announce a summit meeting to plan a national coalition of digital humanities centers.

The meeting will take place at NEH headquarters in Washington, D.C., on April 12-13, 2007. The meeting is part of NEH’s Digital Humanities Initiative, which supports projects that use or study the impact of digital technology on the humanities. Digital technology offers humanists new ways to conduct research, conceptualize relationships, and present scholarship to a wider audience.

At digital humanities centers around the country, historians, archaeologists, and other humanities scholars have been working with computer scientists and engineers to develop innovative ways of applying emerging digital technologies to the humanities. These collaborations have created new methods of conducting research, interpreting archival data, and teaching the humanities.

In order to take the digital humanities, and humanities scholarship, to the next level, national collaboration needs to be encouraged between digital humanities centers and funding organizations.

“Digital humanities centers serve as the technological backbone for the future of humanities scholarship,” said Dr. Bruce Cole, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. “Encouraging collaboration among the centers will serve to speed innovation and replicate success throughout the nation.”

Collaborative work done by the nation’s network of science labs has produced major breakthroughs, such as the human genome project and the creation of the Internet. As with the science labs, this new network of digital humanities centers will promote the national exchange of ideas and research necessary to generate revolutionary innovations in the humanities.

The centerpiece of the conference is a day-long discussion of key issues involved in fostering collaboration, developing funding resources, and creating blueprints for future projects. The discussion will be chaired by Neil Fraistat, Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“We hope that by the end of the meeting, a framework will be in place for a national coalition of digital humanities centers that can start functioning immediately,” says Fraistat.

Along with the directors of major digital humanities centers, representatives from government, industry, and the private sector will be in attendance, including those from the Mellon Foundation, Google, Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Science Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, the J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Internet2, and Library of Congress.

The conference begins at 4:00 p.m. on April 12, with a welcome address by NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. John Unsworth will then deliver a plenary address on “Digital Humanities Centers as Cyberinfrastructure.” Unsworth is the director of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Vint Cerf, the Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, will also provide some remarks. A reception follows hosted by the University of Maryland’s Dean of Arts and Humanities James Harris, and Dean of the Libraries Charles Lowry.

On April 13, the conference attendees will spend the day discussing how to create a framework for a permanent coalition of digital humanities centers.

NEH media contact: Elissa Pruett at (202) 606-8446
MITH media contact: Neil Fraistat at (301) 405-8596

*** BRAD PALEY at MARYLAND ***

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland are jointly sponsoring two events by BRAD PALEY, the innovative information designer probably best known for the amazing and beautiful TextArc (www.textarc.org). PALEY will offer a formal talk and a less formal workshop. Both events are free and open to the public.

The short schedule is as follows:

Wednesday, March 28, “Interaction Design as a Branch of the Humanities: A Healthier Fit than Technology or Computer Science?” 4:00, 3258 A.V. Williams Bldg.

Thursday, March 29, (Workshop) “Domain- and Task-Specific Tools for the Humanities: We’ll explore what’s needed now, what’s attainable.” 10:00-12:30, MITH (B0131 McKeldin).

Abstracts and biography of BRAD PALEY are below:

*** Talk

“Interaction Design as a Branch of the Humanities: A Healthier Fit than Technology or Computer Science?”
Wednesday, March 28, 4:00, 3258 A.V. Williams Bldg.

Interaction design centers on the ability for a person to absorb, react to, and act upon information inside computers. It is clear that the manipulation of bits is well served by the strategies and techniques of computer science and electrical engineering, but close scrutiny of the human side of that gap might help us fit minds as well as we optimize algorithms. The last good decade has seen much more focus on “human I/O” in the form of perception, but we can take even better advantage of the eye if we know how it feeds “upstream” sense-making processes. Red may be a visually salient danger warning–but not if it’s a tulip in a field in Haarlem, or red type and ornaments in a centuries-old codex. We understand objects in context and reinterpret our perceptions in radically different ways depending on that context.

The center of my research and practice for the last five years has been the exploration of higher and higher mental processes–beyond sensation and perception to object recognition and cognition. Necessity has lately driven me even farther: all the way past semiotics to psycholinguistics, and finally the humanities. It has become an axiom for me that many interfaces are best driven to be consistent not with other interfaces, but the way people think about a specific task. And the best doors into that realm have been explorations in the plastic arts (how people use visual richness to differentiate among categories of information), poetry (using metaphor to tame abstract information), and perhaps even storytelling (to understand process and aid long-term retention). These human endeavors may have more to offer us on the level of technique than we realize.

This talk will structure these observations, support them with references from source materials outside computer domains (such as psycholinguistics and hermeneutics), and show examples of antique information visualization techniques which in many ways are much more sophisticated that what we do today. I will deconstruct as an example recently-completed work for the 2006-7 transition of the New York Stock Exchange to a half-human, half-electronic “Hybrid Market;” a design that has sped up brokers in their most fundamental task from 7 seconds to less than a second–a 15:1 speedup directly resulting from an application of these principles.

*** Workshop

“Domain- and Task-Specific Tools for the Humanities: We’ll explore what’s needed now, what’s attainable.”
Thursday, March 29, 10:00-12:30 MITH (B0131 McKeldin)

This workshop is an initial exploration of how KWIRQI design principles (Knowledge Work Interfaces: Reality-Quoting Interfaces) might be applied to the domain of research and criticism in literature. The heart of a KWIRQI design is the way it adopts jargon and metaphors from a very limited community of practice, “quoting the reality” of that community. Here, we will be trying to isolate and understand what ideas are common in this domain, and what tasks might best be supported by the development of new computer-based tools for literature.

I will lead the group in an enumeration of bits of jargon and discovery of common concept spatializations. For example, in the financial domain a “high price” is a large number; there is no a-priori reason to assume that a large number is “up.” But that pairing of a concrete adjective with an abstract noun tells us that traders have mapped numbers into space: specifically a vertical dimension in their minds. Remarkably, this mapping seems to happen in all knowledge work domains I have studied. We will search for these domain-specific implicit metaphors shared by critics and text analysts; for this reason it will be extremely valuable to have “pre-digital” researchers who have been practicing for many years: they carry the wealth of this local culture in their minds.

We hope to justify their time by developing a listing of tasks that manipulate these concepts and metaphors then doing an economics-style tradeoff; ranking which tasks will help support the field the most, yet be easiest to implement and take best advantage of local university resources and expertise. We want to take the most tedious work they do and offload it to a computer, then present the results in exactly the way they would sketch them on a napkin to relate them to a student. The overall goal will be the creation of scope definitions and perhaps initial design sketches for tools that can be designed, built, and put into use in the immediate future.

*** Biography

W. BRADFORD PALEY uses computers to create visual displays with the goal of making readable, clear, and engaging expressions of complex data. His visual representations are inspired by the calm, richly layered information in natural scenes. His process applies three perspectives: [1] rendering methods used by fine artists and graphic artists are [2] informed by their possible underpinnings in human perception, then [3] applied to creating narrowly-scoped, almost idiosyncratic representations whose visual semantics are often driven by the real-world metaphors of the experts who know the domains best.

Brad did his first computer graphics in 1973, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley in 1981, founded Digital Image Design Incorporated (didi.com/brad) in 1982, and started doing financial & statistical data visualization in 1986. He has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art; he created TextArc.org; he is in the ARTPORT collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art; has received multiple grants and awards for both art and design, and his designs are at work every day in the hands of brokers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He is an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University, and is director of Information Esthetics: a fledgling interdisciplinary group exploring the creation and interpretation of data representations that are both readable and esthetically satisfying.

Contact: Matthew Kirschenbuam, Associate Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8505) or Catherine Plaisant, Research Scientist, HCIL (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil, plaisant@cs.umd.edu, 5-2786).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, March 27, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Identifying Web 2.0: Remixing Institutional Identities”
by BYRON HAWK

Established e-portfolio and CMS systems such as Blackboard and WebCT are based on storing, commenting on, and chatting about documents. They are closed to integration with other administrative, scholarly, and social networking systems on the web. These systems lack the ability to develop identities in relation to various systems, texts, and institutions. As new systems such as Zotero (GMU) and Digital Notebook (Georgetown) are being developed to take advantage of Web 2.0 capabilities such as citing, tagging, and cross referencing content across systems, the issue of identity is still in flux. On the one hand, Gregory Ulmer’s work provides the theoretical grounds and pedagogical model for seeing identity formation as the basis of research. On the other hand, Hardt and Negri recognize that the modernist institutions that produce identities are breaking down. The newer CMS systems are centered on the production of a university or scholarly identity. This paper will examine the possibility of accepting the personal and subcultural identities that will inevitably emerge with the development of Web 2.0 research tools.

BYRON HAWK is an Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University and editor of the electronic journal *Enculturation*. His primary research interests are histories and theories of composition and rhetoric and technology, specifically the intersection of invention, pedagogy, complexity theory, and new media. He has published articles in the edited volume *The Terministic Screen* and the journals *Pedagogy*, *Technical Communications Quarterly*, and *JAC*. He is currently working on a book series for Parlor Press titled New Media Theory, and on a single-authored book for the University of Pittsburgh Press titled *A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity*. His edited collection *Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools* will be coming out in Fall 2007 with the University of Minnesota Press.

Coming up @MITH, ***this week***: BRAD PALEY, Wednesday, March 28, “Interaction Design as a Branch of the Humanities: A Healthier Fit than Technology or Computer Science?” 4:00, 3258 A.V. Williams Bldg. and Thursday, March 29, (Workshop) “Domain- and Task-Specific Tools for the Humanities: We’ll explore what’s needed now, what’s attainable.” 10:00-12:30, MITH (B0131 McKeldin).

View MITH’s complete Spring Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2007.pdf

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

[Podcast now available.]