Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University, has just opened what looks to be a fabulous new digital humanities blog, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Recommended.

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, December 4, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Save As: Receiving the Larsen Collection”
by MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM and JOHN MURRAY

In May of 2007, MITH received the extraordinary gift of Deena Larsen’s personal collection of early-era personal computers and software. Deena is an author and new media visionary who has been active in the creative electronic writing community nearly since its inception in the 1980s. In addition to being a writer and thinker, Deena has also been a collector and an amateur archivist (or, as we say of amateurs, a hoarder). Collecting and hoarding, it turns out, are very important activities, since too few of our cultural institutions and repositories are yet engaged with acquiring and saving the rich and various creative legacy we have inherited from the first generation of personal computing. The arrival of Deena’s collection at MITH furnishes us with invaluable source material which will further both our in-house research in digital curation and preservation, as well as function as a primary resource for researchers interested in early hypertext and electronic literature.

This talk will introduce the collection to the MITH community, and discuss future research agendas. We intend a wide-ranging conversation, from the practicalities and ethics of preservation to the implications of born-digital material for textual and editorial theory.

MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM is Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of MITH, as well as a Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. He has been lecturing widely this semester on “The Remaking of Reading,” a version of which just appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. His book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination will be published in January by the MIT Press.

JOHN MURRAY is currently pursuing a self-designed undergraduate major in digital narratives at the University of Maryland, having studied Digital Art and creative writing for two years at Towson University before transferring to College Park and studying computer science for a year. He is most interested in the authorial process, interactions and relationships between characters and readers and authors and the possibilities of digital fiction and narratives.

Coming up @MITH: This is the last Digital Dialogue of the semester. We’ll have another full schedule next semester: speakers already confirmed include musician and poet ONI BUCHANAN, KEN PRICE (Nebraska), BERNIE FRISCHER (Virginia), and Maryland’S MARILEE LINDEMANN and JONATHAN AUERBACH.

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).

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Doug Reside, Assistant Director of MITH, the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities, will be offering a 3-credit spring course through the English department on the basic applied elements of the programming for the digital humanities.

Participants will learn the basics of HTML/CSS, JavaScript, PHP, XML, TEI, and MySQL. The goal is to provide attendees with the skills necessary to construct a simple online electronic edition. The course will run from 3:30-6:00 on Tuesdays in the MITH conference room. This is a 400-level course worth 3.0 credits, with GRADUATE STUDENTS as the target audience. You will not find it listed on Testudo. Those interested should send an email to Doug Reside (dreside -at- umd -dot- edu). There are limited seats available, so early registration is advisable.

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

“The Internet Archive and the Digital Humanities”
by LINDA FRUEH

The Internet Archive was founded eleven years ago by Brewster Kahle to build the world’s first ‘Internet Library.’ Since 1996, the Archive has been collecting bi-monthly snapshots of the World Wide Web–the entire Web–resulting in a cumulative collection of approximately 100 billion Web pages. This cumulative historical record can be browsed and viewed using the Wayback Machine, an access interface developed by the Internet Archive (www.archive.org.) The Archive has since expanded its activities to include book scanning, audio collections, video and still image collections and Open Education Resources (videotaped lectures for entire college-level courses and the supporting materials.) These collections comprise over two petabytes of data, stored in the Archive’s Digital Repository in San Francisco. The Internet Archive is active in the open-source software community and has developed several widely used tools for web harvesting, search, and management of clustered storage environments. The Archive is dedicated to open source principles; accordingly all software used and developed by the Internet Archive is open source and open access. As an active technology partner in the academic, library and research communities, the Archive has become both a storage partner and content source for educators and researchers. Its role as a unifier of open access content sources is growing through collaborative projects in book scanning and access, large collections of imagery and other content formats, as well as its roles as administrator of the Open Content Alliance (www.opencontentalliance.org) and as a co-founder of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (www.iipc.org.)

The Archive is engaging in several projects that can directly serve educators and researchers in the Digital Humanities community. In this talk, LINDA FRUEH will describe the collections, projects and capabilities of the Internet Archive, and hopes to generate lively discussion in how the Archive can work to better support the conduct of Digital Humanities studies.

Ms. FRUEH is a Director at the Internet Archive, one of the world’s largest online digital libraries. At the Archive she manages the development of large partnerships and collaborative projects, coordinates activities of the Open Content Alliance, and manages grant writing for large projects. Ms. FRUEH joined the Archive after a sixteen-year career with technology companies in Silicon Valley. Her previous positions included Vice President for Corporate Business Development at Lexar Media, Inc., Vice President for Strategic Planning at Network General, Inc., and Corporate Planning Director at the Raychem Corporation. In these roles she led strategic planning activity, investments, mergers and acquisitions. She started her career on Wall Street with the First Boston Corporation. Ms. FRUEH holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business (1987) and a BS in physics from MIT.

Coming up @MITH: December, MATTHEW KIRSHCENBAUM and JOHN MURRAY, “Save As: Receiving the Larsen Collection.”

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, November 13, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“The Linguistics of Spin”
by STEPHAN GREENE and PHILIP RESNIK

There has been a great deal of recent research on the computational analysis of texts in order to identify sentiment; that is, to determine automatically whether a text expresses a positive or negative perspective or opinion on a topic. Most such work focuses on explicitly expressed opinions, e.g. automatically labeling movie reviews as favorable or unfavorable. In this talk, we will focus on a less studied problem: the computational analysis of implicit sentiment, or spin, in text. We identify underlying semantic properties of statements that predict perceptions of sentiment, and we show how observable syntactic reflexes of those properties can be used, fully automatically, to accurately label a text as expressing a positive or negative attitude toward its topic, even in the absence of overtly opinionated language.

Dr. STEPHAN GREENE is a recent Ph.D. graduate of the UMD Department of Linguistics, and works at ATG, a leading provider of Web marketing and e-commerce software.

Dr. PHILIP RESNIK is an associate professor at UMD with joint appointments in the Department of Linguistics and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.

Coming up @MITH: November 27, LINDA FRUEH (The Internet Archive), “The Internet Archive and the Digital Humanities.” [Jonathan Auerbach’s talk, originally scheduled for that day, has been postponed until next semester.]

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).

MITH is delighted to announce that we will be able to offer a Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellowship next year.
Intended for students whose dissertations engage the intersections between new media and the traditional concerns of the Humanities, the Winnemore Fellowship is designed to provide full support for a semester, including benefits. In addition, recipients will receive $1,000 for travel to conferences where work from the dissertation can be presented.Nominees will be evaluated on three main criteria:
1. The potential contribution of the dissertation to the Digital Humanities.2. The quality of the student’s work.3. The likelihood of the student successfully completing the dissertation.

Applicants will be asked to submit an application form; a 500-1000 word abstract written for a general audience; a statement of work completed to date, work remaining, and expected completion date; a curriculum vitae; and two letters of recommendation, one of which must be from the student’s dissertation director. The application form can be found here: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/research/WinnemoreApp07.pdf
Students who wish to apply for the fellowship should submit a copy of the application form and the required attachments to Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH, McKeldin Library B0131, Campus.

Students who have funding that is related to their dissertation research or another substantial fellowship should not apply.

Applications for Spring 2008 are due at MITH by noon, Monday, December 3, 2007. The recipient will be announced in mid-December 2007.

Please address any questions to Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH.

There have been some adjustments 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.”