On June 14, representatives of the emerging international network of digital humanities centers traveled to the “Googleplex” in Mountain View, CA to meet with members of the Google Book Search team.

Geoffrey Rockwell, John Unsworth, and Neil Fraistat on the Google campus. Taking the picture: Matt Kirschenbaum.

Google search queries on a big screen display in the lobby as they stream in from all over the world.

MITH is very pleased to welcome its newest graduate assistant, Greg Jablonski. Greg has a Bachelor’s degree in computer science, and is currently a Master’s student in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. At MITH he’ll be working primarily as a software developer. He is interested in digital libraries and the application of computing technologies to information processing and representation.

Glad to have you aboard, Greg!

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is privileged to announce it will be hosting Digital Humanities 2009, the joint annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO, encompassing three different international digital humanities organizations). The conference will be held June 20-25, 2009 on the campus of the University of Maryland, College Park. The local organizers are Neil Fraistat (Professor of English and Director, MITH), Matthew Kirschenbaum (Associate Professor of English and Associate Director, MITH), and Susan Schreibman (Assistant Dean and Head of Digital Collections and Research, University Libraries).

MITH will host the conference in cooperation with the University Libraries, the College of Arts and Humanities, the College of Information Studies, the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, and the Dotcom Archive at the Robert H. Smith School of Business. “Hosting DH 2009 will help MITH fulfill its mission of being an intellectual hub for the digital humanities both on campus and in the field at large,” Fraistat said. “It will also help to showcase the University of Maryland’s depth and strength in a field in which it has been a leader since the mid-1990s with early adopter projects, such as the Romantics Circles research Website and Dickinson Electronic Archives, then with the establishment of MITH through an NEH Challenge Grant in 1999, and subsequently with numerous projects from MITH’s faculty and graduate fellows, its own in-house research, and its ongoing collaborations with HCIL and CLIS.”

“This will be an opportunity to highlight the intersections between digital humanities and digital library projects that the University of Maryland Libraries has undertaken,” Schreibman added.

The peer-reviewed conference will include keynotes from major speakers in the field, seminars, master classes, and a poster slam, in addition to a robust program of papers and panels. The international program committee will be chaired by Claire Warwick (University College London). The CFP is typically available about a year before the conference.

Two of ADHO’s constituent organizations, the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, first began holding joint meetings in 1986. Previous venues for this international conference include Georgetown University, the University of Bergen (Norway), Queen’s College (Kingston, Ontario), the University of Virginia, New York University, University of Tubingen (Germany), the University of Georgia, the University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada), Goteborg University (Sweden), the Sorbonne (Paris, France), and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The 2008 conference will be held at the University of Oulu, in northern Finland.

This is a first announcement. Additional information, including an address for the conference Web site (from which further communications will issue), will be released as it is available.

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

The annual Digital Humanities 2007 conference, held this year at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has now concluded, and as usual MITH and the University of Maryland community were well-represented, with papers, posters, and/or sessions chaired by all of the following: Tanya Clement, Neil Fraistat, Matt Kirschenbaum, Angel David Nieves, Catherine Plaisant, Doug Reside, Jason Rhody, Susan Schreibman, and Martha Nell Smith. Former MITH fellows David Prager Branner and Nadja Masura were also in attendance.

Stay tuned for an exciting announcement from MITH about Digital Humanities 2009!