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

“Making Culture Virtual: Recent 3D Modeling Projects at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities”
by BERNARD FRISCHER

Podcast available!

This talk will discuss methodologies and technologies used to digitize 3D cultural property such as pottery, statues, buildings and even entire cities. Current projects at IATH will be used as examples, including Virtual Williamsburg, the Digital Forma Urbis Project, and Rome Reborn. In the conclusion, new directions and challenges in this field will be discussed, including populating models of buildings and cities with people and their activities; using models as tools for discovery (and not simply as illustrations of previous knowledge); and the online collection and dissemination of real-time 3D models on the Internet.

Links: http://graphics.iath.virginia.edu/, http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu, http://www.iath.virginia.edu/save/

BERNARD FRISCHER is a leading scholar in the application of digital technologies to humanities research and education. Frischer has overseen many significant projects, including a virtual recreations of sites such as the Roman Forum and Roman Colosseum. The works of Frischer and the Lab have received international acclaim and have been featured on the Discovery Channel, the RAI, German Public Radio, the BBC, in Newsweek, Scientific American, Business Week, the New York Times and many other magazines and newspapers around the world. Professor Frischer is the author, or co-author, of seven printed books, three e-books and many articles on virtual heritage and on the Classical world and its survival. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Digital Roman Forum web site. He received his B.A. in Classics from Wesleyan University in 1971 and his Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Heidelberg in 1975. He taught Classics at UCLA from 1976 to 2004. Since then he has been Professor of Art History and Classics at the University of Virginia, where he also serves as Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). He has been a guest professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1993), the University of Bologna (1994), and held the post of Professor-in-Charge of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome (2001-02).

Coming up @MITH 3/11: KEN PRICE(Nebraska), “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?” Presented for the Rosenzweig Forum on Technology and the Humanities, 4:00 pm, McKeldin Special Events Room (6th floor, room 6137).

View MITH’s complete spring Digital Dialogues schedule: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2008.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, February 26, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Play and Pedagogy: Videogames and Writing Instruction”
by DOUGLAS EYMAN

Podcast now available!

Games and gaming as social experiences are starting to be explored in depth through a variety of collections and special journal issues, but relatively little has been published about games and writing instruction specifically (whereas much has been recently published on games and learning in general, and on gaming and literacy). This presentation examines the role of computer gaming in composition pedagogy, positioning games as objects of critique that are available for use in writing classes, and as locations of production for multimedia/multimodal texts. Using the example of massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), Dr. Eyman will present a five-part ecological framework for situating game activities as specific genres of production that can be used in writing classes.

DOUGLAS EYMAN is an assistant professor of English at George Mason University; he received his PhD in Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing from Michigan State University in 2007. Eyman is Senior Editor of the journal _Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy_ and is the list and review editor of the H-Net discussion list H-DigiRhet. His level 70 troll rogue can often be seen adventuring through the Shadowmoon Valley on the _World of Warcraft_ Aggramar server.

Coming up @MITH 3/4: Bernard Frischer (Virginia), “Making Culture Virtual: Recent 3D Modeling Projects at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities”

MITH’s complete Spring Speakers Schedule will be posted very soon.

All talks free and open to the public!

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

There will be no Digital Dialogue next week, February 19. Digital Dialogues will resume on February 26th with Doug Eyman (George Mason), “Play and Pedagogy: An Ecological Framework for Teaching Writing with Video Games.”

Meanwhile, this weekend, several of the MITH team travel to Stanford University for the Metaverse U conference followed by a day and a half of meetings to kick off our work on Preserving Virtual Worlds, the Library of Congress funded project on which we’re partnering with Stanford, the University of Illinois, and RIT.

At Metaverse U, Maryland’s own Kari Kraus (College of Information Studies and English) will speak alongside of luminaries like Howard Rheingold, Brewster Khale, Raph Koster, and Cory Ondrejka.

Look for a trip report and conference notes here on the MITH blog.

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

The Gamer Symphony Orchestra
with CHRIS APPLE, GREG COX, and JARRED YOUNG

MITH is very pleased to welcome UMD’s Gamer Symphony Orchestra for music and conversation as we place the digital in dialogue with horns, strings, and voice. The GSO plays classical arrangements of music and scores from popular video games; no tinny Pac-Man Fever jingles here, rather music that brings to life the richness and breadth of the complex auditory soundscapes surrounding contemporary games like Halo, World of Warcraft, and Final Fantasy.

The GSO is composed of students from UMD as well as the surrounding community. Join us for a discussion and samples of their unique performances with music director CHRIS APPLE, conductor and arranger GREG COX, and president JARRED YOUNG.

For more information, including photos and recordings of their music, visit the GSO at http://www.umgso.com/.

Coming up @MITH: 2/19, there is no talk. 2/26, Doug Eyman (George Mason), “Play and Pedagogy: An Ecological Framework for Teaching Writing with Video Games.”

View MITH’s complete spring Digital Dialogues schedule: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2008.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 pleased to welcome its 2008 Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellow, Tanya Clement, from the Department of English. Tanya’s dissertation, The Making of Digital Modernism: Re-reading Modernist Texts with Computer-Assisted Analysis, is genuinely groundbreaking and will contribute new readings and new knowledge to the scholarship on Gertrude Stein as well as a lesser-known figure, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (who was pivotal in the American Dadaist movement). By using a wide range of computational tools and techniques, ranging from text encoding to text mining and visualization, Clement’s project is a bracing demonstration of just how completely our readings and understandings of complex literary work can be reconfigured with the intervention of new media.

Clement says, “I am very excited to receive the Winnemore fellowship and start my residency at MITH this semester. Support from MITH provides for an essential combination of practice and theory that ensures my dissertation research in humanities computing and literature will be both productive and ahead-of-the-curve.” She adds, “This semester, I will create an electronic sampling of poetry from the manuscripts of dadaist poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. I will use current encoding standards while also augmenting the Versioning Machine (http://v-machine.org/), an open-source tool used for visualizing textual variants. As a result, I will explore the possibility that a digital edition could invigorate scholarly interest in her poetry and the extent to which digital methods meant to facilitate humanist inquiry are still challenged by the difficult work literary study engages.”

Clement’s dissertation is directed by Matthew Kirschenbaum.