A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, October 2, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Simulating Liveness: From Virtual Vaudeville to Second Life”
by DAVID SALTZ

Manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, buildings and recordings can be preserved and archived for future generations. Live theatre, however, is ephemeral. This simple fact creates a tremendous challenge for theatre scholarship and pedagogy. In an effort to compensate for theatre’s evanescence, scholars and theatre artists have exploring a variety of techniques to simulate historical theatre events. The key challenge is to reproduce the viewer’s immersion in the world of the theatre, and the crucial role that the community of spectators plays in constituting a performance event.

I will examine two approaches to simulating live performance using 3D computer animation over the internet. The first is use pre-rendered animations to simulate the experience of watching a performance. The Virtual Vaudeville project exemplifies this approach, letting the viewer switch at will among multiple perspectives on a single nineteenth-century performance. The project also provides a series of hypermedia notes and a real-time flythrough of the theatre. The second approach is to create fully-interactive real-time performances online. I will offer a brief historical overview of such efforts, showing how advances in technology are rapidly making online performance feasible. In particular, I will focus on the tremendous potential — and serious limitations — of Second Life as a venue for virtual performance. Moreover, I will argue that the phenomenon of live performance in Second Life raises fundamental questions about very notion of liveness.

DAVID Z. SALTZ (PhD, Stanford) is head of the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia, He currently serves as editor of Theatre Journal. His primary research focus is the interaction between live performance and digital media. He is Principal Investigator of Virtual Vaudeville, a large-scale research project that was funded by the National Science Foundation to simulate a nineteenth century vaudeville performance on the computer. He has also explored the use of computer technology extensively in his work as a director and teacher. Along those lines he established the Interactive Performance Laboratory at UGA, has directed a series of productions incorporating real-time interactive digital media, and has created interactive sculptural installations that have been exhibited nationally. He has published 20 articles in scholarly journals and books, and is coeditor (with David Krasner) of the book Staging Philosophy: Intersections between Theatre, Performance and Philosophy (University of Michigan Press, 2006).

Coming up @MITH 10/9, Paul E. Ceruzzi (Smithsonian Institution): “From ARPANET to the Internet: How a Military Project Became a World-Wide Cultural Phenomenon, 1970-1995″

View MITH’s complete Fall Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2007.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

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

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, September 25, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Architecting Cultural Spaces: Case Studies of Virtual Representation in the Humanities”
by JOHN TOLVA [Download Podcast]

This presentation addresses the evolution of the technologies of virtual representation in the cultural milieu. Using project case studies from a decade of experience in this field, the presentation brings to the fore the ways in which these technologies both enforce and challenge traditional ideas of what a museum is or should be. The paper examines the evolution of simple virtual representation to modeled reconstruction and deconstruction and thence to virtual replacement of artifacts in situ at their point of creation or discovery. The presentation concludes with a look forward to the concept of massively multi-user virtual community spaces that permit a participatory experience of virtual cultural heritage.

JOHN TOLVA is Senior Program Manager for Cultural Strategy and Programs for IBM. His work spans the fields of web design, user-centric solution design, cultural heritage, and new media. Since his work on the award-winning Hermitage Museum project in 1999 Mr. Tolva has primarily been involved in cultural applications of technology, particularly digitization, content management, and multimedia design. Recently he led the team that launched the Eternal Egypt Project, a partnership between IBM and the Egyptian Government. Mr. Tolva holds a Masters in Information Design and Technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in English Literature from Washington University. John is on the editorial board of the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage. He maintains a blog at www.ascentstage.com.

Coming up @MITH 10/2, David Saltz (University of Georgia): “Simulating Liveness: From Virtual Vaudeville to Second Life”

View MITH’s complete Fall Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2007.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

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

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, September 18, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Digital Poetry as Scrabble: Making from Given Materials”
by CHRIS FUNKHOUSER

In the various realms of digital poetry, chance and intention blend within a given structure. Authors create patterns, use collage, make links, sample media during the creative process, and readers are faced with the task of responding to a set of textual circumstances. While illustrating and introducing the basic mechanics of digital poetry, this presentation engages with works as if moves in a game of Scrabble, suggesting how expression can be further propelled using digital and analog media. Beyond the role of influence and inspiration, the output and data presented in digital poems can often be seen and used as a basis for myriad sorts of projective, progenerative language, image, or sound, which can be combined and recombined in so many variations. If literature is to be interactive, we must cultivate ways to respond to what is given, and in the process may find ourselves able to remediate materials in order to build something original.

Poet and scholar CHRIS FUNKHOUSER is an Associate Professor in the Humanities Department at New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 2006 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to lecture and conduct research in Malaysia, where his CD-ROM eBook Selections 2.0 was produced at Multimedia University in Cyberjaya. Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995, a history of pre-WWW computerized poetry, has just been published in the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series at University of Alabama Press. In 2008, a bi-lingual collection of his technology writings, Technopoetry Rising: Essays and Works, will be published in São Paulo (Musa Editora). He was on the Summer Writing Program Faculty at Naropa University earlier this year, where he co-edited a volume of We Magazine focused on Creative Cannibalism (http://www.wepress.org/19). For more info see http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous

Coming up @MITH 9/25, John Tolva (IBM): “Architecting Cultural Spaces: Case Studies of Virtual Representation in the Humanities”

View MITH’s complete Fall Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2007.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

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

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, September 11, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Using Digital Tools to Not-Read Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans”
by TANYA CLEMENT

The difficulties engendered by the complicated patterns of repetition in Gertrude Stein’s 900-page novel _The Making of Americans_ make it is almost impossible to read this modernist tome in a traditional, linear manner as any page (most are startlingly similar) will show. However, by visualizing certain of its patterns–by looking at the text "from a distance"–through textual analytics and visualizations, one can read the novel in ways formerly impossible and re-evaluate whether there is or is not “a there there.” This talk will focus on how various analytic methods (such as text mining and frequent pattern recognition) and visualization tools (such as FeatureLens and Spotfire) under research in the MONK project (http://www.monkproject.org/) have been used to achieve a new *non*-reading of the text which Stein called her “masterpiece” and critiques called “linguistic murder.”

TANYA CLEMENT is an English PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her focus of study is textual and digital studies as it pertains to applied humanities computing and modernist American literature. She has an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was also trained in humanities computing at the Electronic Text Center and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. At the University of Maryland, she has been a Program Associate at the Maryland Institute for Technologies in the Humanities and project manager for the Dickinson Electronic Archives (www.emilydickinson.org). Presently, she is a graduate assistant in the Office of Digital Collections and Research and a research associate for MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge at www.monkproject.org), a Mellon-funded project which seeks to integrate existing digital library collections and large-scale, cross-collection text mining and text analysis with rich visualization and social software capabilities.

Coming up @MITH 9/18, Chris Funkhouser (Dept. of Humanities, New Jersey Institute of Technology): “Digital Poetry as Scrabble: Making From Given Materials”

View MITH’s complete Fall Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2007.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

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