MITH is very pleased to welcome the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium to College Park next week for its 20th Anniversary Members’ Meeting. Registration is now closed, but the program is jam-packed with talks, poster sessions, meetings, and social occasions.

We are very pleased to co-sponsor this important and exciting event for the field.

This fall the Washington DC Area Forum on Technology and the Humanities is pleased to present:

Bob Stein on "The Evolution of Reading and Writing in the Networked Era"

For the past several hundred years intellectual discourse has been shaped by the rhythms and hierarchies inherent in the nature of print. As discourse shifts from page to screen, and more significantly to a networked environment, the old definitions and relations are undergoing substantial changes. The shift in our world view from individual to network holds the promise of a radical reconfiguration in culture. Notions of authority are being challenged. The roles of author and reader are morphing and blurring. Publishing, methods of distribution, peer review and copyright – every crucial aspect of the way we move ideas around – is up for grabs. The new digital technologies afford vastly different outcomes ranging from oppressive to liberating. How we make this shift has critical long term implications for human society.

Our speaker will be Robert Stein, director of the Institute for the Future of the Book. The institute has two principal activities. one is building high-end tools for making rich media electronic documents (part of the Mellon Foundation’s higher-ed digital infrastructure initiative) and the other is exploring and hopefully influencing the evolution of new forms of intellectual expression and discourse. Previously Stein was the founder of The Voyager Company where over a 13-year period he led the development of over 300 titles in The Criterion Collection, a series of definitive films on videodisc, and more than 75 CD ROM titles including the CD Companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Who Built America, and the Voyager edition of Macbeth.

We will meet on Wednesday November 7, 2007 from 4:30-7:00 PM on George Mason University’s Fairfax campus in Room 163 of the Research 1 Building. There will be an informal dinner after the forum, at a cost of $10 per person. You must RSVP to Meredith Mayo (
mmayo1[at]gmu[dot]edu) by October 30, 2007 if you would like to have dinner.

Co-sponsored by the Center for History & New Media (CHNM) at George Mason, the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the DC Area Technology and Humanities Forum explores important issues in humanities computing and provide an opportunity for DC area scholars interested the uses of new technology in the humanities to meet and get acquainted.

The Research 1 building is located on the main Fairfax campus of George Mason University. Parking is located directly across from the building in the Sandy Creek Parking Deck.

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

“Novel Tools for Digital Archiving and Preservation”
by JOSEPH JAJA

Since the mid-nineties, the problem of long-term archiving and preservation of digital information has received considerable attention by major archiving communities, library organizations, government agencies, scientific and private organizations. These studies have identified major challenges regarding technology infrastructure, institutional and business models, and social and legal frameworks, which need to be addressed to achieve long-term reliable access to digital information.

In this talk, we will give a brief overview of our approach, called ADAPT (Approach to Digital Archiving and Preservation Technology), to build a platform-independent infrastructure based on a set of reconfigurable tools that use open standards and Web technologies. Our approach can easily accommodate emerging standards and policies, and will evolve gracefully as the underlying technologies change. These tools have been coordinated with our collaborators at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

JOSEPH JAJA currently holds the position of Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and UMIACS at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. JaJa received his Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University and has since published extensively in a number of areas including parallel and distributed computing, combinatorial optimization, algebraic complexity, VLSI architectures, and data-intensive computing. His current research interests are in parallel algorithms, digital preservation, and scientific visualization of large scale data. Dr. JaJa has received numerous awards including the IEEE Fellow Award in 1996, the 1997 R&D Award for the development software for tuning parallel programs, and the ACM Fellow Award in 2000. He served on several editorial boards, and is currently serving as a subject area editor for the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing and as an editor for the International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science.

Coming up @MITH: there have been some changes to the fall Digital Dialogues schedule. There will be no talk on 11/6. LINDA FRUEH’s talk, originally scheduled for 11/6, will move to 11/27. JONATHAN AUERBACH’s talk, originally scheduled for 11/27, will be rescheduled next semester. Digital Dialogues will resume on 11/13 with STEPHAN GREENE and PHILIP RESNIK, “The Linguistics of Spin.” On Wednesday, 11/7, the Washington DC Area Forum on Technology and the Humanities, in which MITH participates, will host BOB STEIN (Institute for the Future of the Book), on “The Evolution of Reading and Writing in the Networked Era.” This talk will be 4:30-7:00 PM on George Mason University’s Fairfax campus in Room 163 of the Research 1 Building. The talk is FREE but there will be an informal dinner after the forum, at a cost of $10 per person. You must RSVP to Meredith Mayo (mmayo1@gmu.edu) by October 30, 2007 if you would like to have dinner. More information and directions are available here: http://chnm.gmu.edu/dcforum/

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, October 23, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Agora.Techno.Phobia.Philia: Gender (and other messy matters), Knowledge Building, and Digital Media”
by MARTHA NELL SMITH

"The degree to which American society has embraced and absorbed computer technologies is astonishing. The degree to which the changes provoked by computers leave prevailing inequalities is troubling." –Special Issue, "From Hard Drive to Software: Gender, Computers, and Difference," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (August 1990–yes, you read the date correctly).

In the wake of the sixties, the humanities in general and their standings in particular had suffered, according to some, from being feminized by the messy considerations of gender, race, sexuality, class. For some, humanities computing and digital humanities seemed to offer a space free from all this messiness and a return to "objective" questions of representation. In 2007, asking some obvious, basic questions seems more than in order: Are digital humanities and new media important for feminist cultural, social, and intellectual work? Concomitantly, can feminism enhance and improve the world and work of computer science, of humanities computing, of digital humanities? Questions basic to feminist critical inquiry are certainly worth asking of our digital work: How do items of knowledge, organizations, working groups come into being? Who made them? For what purposes? Whose work is visible, what is happening when only certain actors and associated achievements come into public view? What happens when social order is assumed to be an objective feature of social life (i.e., uninformed by ethnomethodology)? What counts as innovation: why are tools valorized and whose work in their development and in their application is recognized? These and other questions posed by the group will be examined in this collaborative exchange. If so moved, you are more than welcome to pose them ahead of time via email: mnsmith@umd.edu.

MARTHA NELL SMITH is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, http://www.mith.umd.edu) at the University of Maryland. Her numerous print publications include three award-winning books–Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Dickinson, coauthored with Ellen Louise Hart (1998), Comic Power in Emily Dickinson, coauthored with Cristanne Miller and Suzanne Juhasz (1993), Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (1992)–and more than 40 articles and essays in American Literature, Studies in the Literary Imagination, South Atlantic Quarterly, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Profils Americains, San Jose Studies, The Emily Dickinson Journal, and A Companion to Digital Humanities. With Mary Loeffelholz, she edited the Companion to Emily Dickinson (Dec 2007), and she has also written Dickinson, A User’s Guide (May 2008) for Blackwell. The recipient of numerous awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Mellon Foundation, and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) for her work on Dickinson and in new media, Smith is also Coordinator and Executive Editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives projects at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dickinson or http://emilydickinson.org. With Lara Vetter, Smith is general editor of Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence: A Born-Digital Inquiry, forthcoming (December 2007) from the Mellon-sponsored University of Virginia Press Electronic Imprint. With teams at the University of Illinois, University of Virginia, University of Nebraska, University of Alberta, and Northwestern University, Smith is working on two interrelated Mellon-sponsored data mining and visualization initiative, NORA http://www.noraproject.org and MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) http://www.monkproject.org/. Smith also serves on the editorial board and steering committee of NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship; http://www.nines.org/) and is on numerous advisory boards of digital literary projects such as The Poetess Archive http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/womenpoets/poetess/ and Digital Dickens. A leader in innovations in academic publishing, Smith co-chairs the Modern Language Association (MLA)’s Committee on Scholarly Editions (CSE).

Coming up @MITH 10/30, Joseph JaJa “Novel Tools for Digital Archiving and Preservation”

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).

It is with great sadness that MITH notes the passing of Roy Rosenzweig, founding director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University (chnm.gmu.edu), as well as professor of history at GMU.

Roy’s achievements and accomplishments were many. In 2003, he was the second of only five recipients of the prestigious Lyman award, conferred by the National Humanities Center for outstanding achievement in the field of digital humanities. All agree that he was
one of our earliest and most significant pioneers.

Roy was a collaborator and tremendous supporter of MITH, and we will miss his presence across town terribly.

The Washington Post obituary is here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/12/AR2007101202489.html

Testimonials and remembrances have already started to appear around the Web.

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, October 16, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“A Candid Chat About the NEH’s Digital Humanities Initiative”
by BRETT BOBLEY

Digital technology has changed the way scholars research, preserve, and present humanities materials. The NEH, through its Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI), has taken a leadership position in bringing these new technologies to bear. In 2006, the American Council of Learned Societies released Our Cultural Commonwealth, which is their now-famous report on cyberinfrastructure for the humanities. This report states that: “The emergence of the Internet has transformed the practice of the humanities and social sciences–more slowly than some may have hoped, but more profoundly than others may have expected. Digital cultural heritage resources are a fundamental dataset for the humanities: these resources, combined with computer networks and software tools, now shape the way that scholars discover and make sense of the human record, while also shaping the way their findings are communicated to students, colleagues, and the general public.”
[http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/OurCulturalCommonwealth.pdf, from Executive Summary]

The NEH is encouraging the field to build the basic infrastructure–what we call "cyberinfrastructure"–needed for humanities scholarship. This includes funding the creation of tools, databases, and other technology products used for humanities research, education, public programming, and preservation. It also includes "human infrastructure"–that is, funding digital humanities centers and other organizations which bring together humanities scholars with computer scientists, engineers, librarians, and others towards the goal of excellent scholarship.

BRETT BOBLEY will provide an overview of the NEH’s DHI program including information about our future directions. Bobley serves as the Chief Information Officer for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and is also the Director of the agency’s Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI). Under DHI, he has put in place new grant programs aimed at supporting innovative humanities projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology. Bobley has a master’s degree in computer science from the Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago.

Coming up @MITH 10/23, Martha Nell Smith (English): “Agora.Techno.Phobia.Philia: Gender (and other messy matters), Knowledge Building, and Digital Media”

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).

Rice University’s Fondren Library and Humanities Research Center, in partnership with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland, was awarded a 2007 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for $979,578.

Rice University, in partnership with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland has received a three-year National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in the amount of $979,578 for the Our Americas Archive Project (OAAP), with an additional $980,613 provided in cost share by the institutions. The project will develop an innovative approach to helping users search, browse, analyze, and share content from distributed online collections. OAAP will incorporate recent Web 2.0 technologies to help users discover and use relevant source materials in languages other than English and will improve users’ ability to find relevant materials using domain-specific vocabulary searches. Two online collections of materials in English and Spanish, The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA), and a new digital archive of materials to be developed at Rice, will provide an initial corpus for testing the tools. Rice principle investigators, Geneva Henry (Executive Director, Digital Library Initiative) and Caroline Levander (HRC Director), along with MITH co-PI Neil Fraistat are undertaking this innovative digital humanities project with a view to supporting scholarly inquiry into the Americas from a hemispheric perspective. As Geneva Henry says, "our goal is to develop new ways of doing research as well as new objects of study–to create a new, interactive community of scholarly inquiry."

Two significant online collections of materials in English and Spanish supporting the interdisciplinary field of hemispheric American Studies–Maryland’s Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) [http://www.mith2.umd.edu/eada/] and a new digital archive of multilingual materials being developed at Rice [http://rudr.rice.edu/handle/1911/9219]–provide an initial corpus for developing and testing these new digital tools. The two multilingual archives illustrate the complex politics and histories that characterize the American hemisphere, but they also provide unique opportunities to further digital research in the humanities. Geographic visualization as well as new social tagging and tag cloud cluster models are just some of the new interface techniques that the Our Americas Archive Partnership will develop with the goal of creating innovative research pathways. As Caroline Levander comments, "we see this as a first step in furthering scholarly dialogue and research across borders by making hemispheric material available open access worldwide. "Our goal is to further develop innovative research tools that will help generate a collaborative, transnational research community." Ralph Bauer, MITH Fellow, general editor of the Early Americas Digital Archive, and collaborator on the project adds, "the added digital materials and tools to navigate seamlessly through these two collections is enabling new forms of scholarship. Because the OAAP makes available materials that are dispersed in different geographic locations, it facilitates collaboration and intellectual exchange among an international audience. The digital medium offers rich opportunities for multicultural exchanges and is therefore uniquely suited for a hemispheric approach to history."

"Incorporating Web 2.0 techniques to enhance work with valuable scholarly content that’s held in distributed repositories allows users to both discover and create new knowledge that would otherwise remain untapped," notes Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH. Currently, researchers have difficulty finding and organizing relevant electronic resources, given the multiple systems in which they reside and the heterogeneous vocabularies used to describe them. Further complexities arise when issues such as finding relevant materials in a different language and searching with domain-specific vocabularies are considered. By conforming to best practices in library and information science while incorporating recent Web 2.0 technologies, OAAP will address these important issues.

“Cultural institutions energize their communities by not just preserving culture, heritage, and knowledge, but by supporting life-long learning and engagement. National Leadership Grants harness the work of the best of these institutions. By promoting innovation and partnerships, they allow these institutions to create national models that address the challenges of the broader library and museum communities, and help strengthen their impact," stated Anne-Imelda M. Radice, PhD, Director of IMLS.

National Leadership Grants help libraries and museums collaborate, build digital resources, and conduct research and demonstration projects. The selected projects are national models that will help foster individual achievement, community responsibility, and life-long learning. This year the program had 213 applicants requesting more than $78 million. 43 awards were made, totaling $18,661,716 with an additional $24 million provided in matching funds.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Its mission is to grow and sustain a "Nation of Learners" because life-long learning is essential to a democratic society and individual success. Through its grant making, convenings, research and publications, the Institute empowers museums and libraries nationwide to provide leadership and services to enhance learning in families and communities, sustain cultural heritage, build twenty-first-century skills, and increase civic participation. To learn more about the Institute, please visit: http://www.imls.gov.

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, October 9, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“From ARPANET to the Internet: How a Military Project became a World-Wide Cultural Phenomenon, 1970-1995″
by PAUL E. CERUZZI

The emergence of a commercialized Internet is a very recent phenomenon. Historians and other scholars have examined its early history, especially its origins in the military-sponsored project ARPANET, named after the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. At the other end of the scale, scholars, business journalists, and others have examined the rise and fall of the "dot.com" phenomenon, with studies of companies including Amazon, AOL, and Google. What is missing is a study of the transition between the two: how a network funded by taxpayers, and intended for a restricted set of users for restricted purposes, evolved into a worldwide cultural phenomenon, open to all, with almost no restrictions on its use for commercial purposes.

This paper is based on two forthcoming books by the author: one an analysis of the commercialization of the Internet, and the other on the role of northern Virginia as a locus of Internet management and governance.

PAUL E. CERUZZI is Curator of Aerospace Electronics and Computing at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. His work there includes research, writing, planning exhibits, collecting artifacts, and lecturing on the subjects of microelectronics, computing, and control as they apply to the practice of air and space flight. Dr. Ceruzzi attended Yale University and the University of Kansas, from which received a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1981.
He is the author or co-author of several books on the history of computing and related topics: Reckoners: The Prehistory of The Digital Computer (1983); Smithsonian Landmarks in the History of Digital Computing (1994, with Peggy Kidwell); A History of Modern Computing (1998); and Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age (1989). The latter book was published in connection with an exhibition of the same name at the National Air and Space Museum. He recently co-edited, with James Trefil and Harold Morowitz, the Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (Routledge, 2001), and he is currently working on a history of Systems Integration firms located in the Washington, D.C. region.

Coming up @MITH 10/16, Brett Bobley (National Endowment for the Humanities): “A Candid Chat About the NEH’s Digital Humanities Initiative”

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).