Registration for the MITH/ELO Symposium on the Future of Electronic Literature is now closed, but the Electronic Literature Open Mic and Mouse Wednesday evening (6:15, 2203 Art/Soc) is free and open to all with no registration required and no seating limit (we’re in a massive lecture hall). Come out and get a glimpse of an avant garde in action.

Respond to centernet-owner@lists.digitalhumanities.org
[please share widely]

If you represent something that you would consider a digital humanities center, anywhere in the world, we are interested in including you in a developing network of such centers. The purpose of this network is cooperative and collaborative action that will benefit digital humanities and allied fields in general, and centers as humanities cyberinfrastructure in particular. It comes out of a meeting hosted by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Maryland, College Park, April 12-13, 2007 in Washington, D.C., responding in part to the report of the American Council of Learned Societies report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, published in 2006.

We leave the definition of “digital humanities” up to you, but we intend to be inclusive, and we know that there will be cross-over into the social sciences, media studies, digital arts, and other related areas. If you think your center is a digital humanities center, in whole or in part, then we’d be glad to have you as part of the network. This might include humanities centers with a strong interest in or focus on digital platforms. The definition of “center” is only slightly more prescriptive: a center should be larger than a single project, and it should have some history or promise of persistence.

Some early initiatives are likely to include

• workshops and training opportunities for faculty, staff, and students
• developing collaborative teams that are, in effect, pre-positioned to apply for predictable multi-investigator, multi-disciplinary, multi-national funding opportunities, beginning with an upcoming RFP that invites applications for supercomputing in the humanities
• exchanging information about tools development, best practices, organizational strategies, standards efforts, and new digital collections, through a digital humanities portal

There is no membership fee, and the network is not a constituent of any other organization, but members should consider contributing some time or resource to the network.

You may respond to this invitation by sending email to centernet-owner@lists.digitalhumanities.org and if you do respond, please indicate

• the name of your center, your title with respect to it, and the center’s home institution or organization
• the areas or disciplines in which your center works or has worked
• the number of staff employed by your center

We would also appreciate it if you would answer two other questions:

• what might your center be willing and able to contribute to the network of centers?
• would you be willing to serve in an organizing role with respect to the network.

Finally, you might want to have a look at the different types of centers represented at

http://digitalhumanities.pbwiki.com/Centers%20by%20type

and if yours is not there, tell us in what category to list it, and we’ll add it, or if the right category doesn’t exist, suggest one.

Thanks very much,

Julia Flanders
Neil Fraistat
Matt Kirschenbaum
Mark Kornbluh
John Unsworth

On Tuesday, April 24 at 12:30 (MITH’s usual Digital Dialogues slot) Stan Ruecker (Humanities Computing, Alberta) will present “The Research Potential of Transferability” as part of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab’s Seminar Series, in A.V. Williams 2460.

Stan is a gifted designer, and a colleague on MITH and HCIL’s Mellon-funded MONK project. An abstract and additional information is available.

On April 12th and 13th, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the University of Maryland’s Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) hosted a successful summit meeting to plan a national and international network of digital humanities centers.

Attendees included representatives from 17 different digital humanities centers across the nation, and 14 major funding agencies. This was the first gathering of its kind. In addition to a series of breakout and plenary discussions, the event included keynotes and remarks from NEH Chairman Bruce Cole, Maryland’s James Harris (Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities), John Unsworth (Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Illinois), Vint Cerf (Chief Internet Evangelist for Google), and Ray Orbach (Director of the Office of Science for the US Department of Energy). The meeting was chaired by MITH’s Neil Fraistat and Brett Bobley, director of NEH’s Digital Humanities Initiative.

Notable press coverage with further details of the meeting includes articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, as well as the University of Maryland Newsdesk (where MITH also made the University’s main homepage!).

At the close of the summit, five of the attendees were elected and charged with establishing a steering committee to guide an emerging network of centers, responding in part to the report of the American Council of Learned Societies report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, published in 2006: Julia Flanders (Brown), Neil Fraistat (Maryland), Matt Kirschenbaum (Maryland), Mark Kornbluh (Michigan State), and John Unsworth (UIUC). This group has already drafted a call for participation whose distribution is imminent. Follow-up meetings are also being planned. Some early initiatives are likely to include:

• workshops and training opportunities for faculty, staff, and students

• developing collaborative teams that are, in effect, pre-positioned to apply for predictable multi-investigator, multi-disciplinary, multi-national funding opportunities, beginning with an upcoming RFP that invites applications for supercomputing in the humanities

• exchanging information about tools development, best practices, organizational strategies, standards efforts, and new digital collections, through a digital humanities portal

Finally, we have also opened a Wiki site (thanks Dan Cohen!) to serve as a clearing house for information on national and international digital humanities centers. Please consider contributing:

http://digitalhumanities.pbwiki.com/

Please watch this space for further information.

Congratulations to MITH Program Associate Bini Tecle, who received Honorable Mention (one of only two) in the Outstanding Undergraduate Student Employee of the Year Award.

At MITH, Bini specializes in multimedia and video editing, and has been closely involved in several of our recent Fellows projects. The recognition only underscores what we at MITH already know: that Bini is a tremendously talented and valued member of the team.