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

“To Read or Not to Read: A Discussion of the NEA’s Latest Report about Reading”
by SUNIL IYENGAR

To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence <http://www.nea.gov/news/news07/TRNR.html> gathers statistics from more than 40 studies on the reading habits and skills of children, teenagers, and adults. The compendium reveals recent declines in voluntary reading and test scores alike, exposing trends that have severe consequences for American society. Like its controversial predecessor, Reading at Risk (2004), the new report has provoked a widespread debate with recent coverage in such outlets at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian. SUNIL IYENGAR, one of the primary architects of the report, will present an overview of its findings and take questions about its methodology and conclusions.

SUNIL IYENGAR directs the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. In November 2007, Mr. Iyengar’s office released To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence, a new and comprehensive analysis of reading patterns in the United States. He also manages a national evaluation project for the Big Read. The Office of Research and Analysis is responsible for the U.S. Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and for routine dissemination of research notes on various arts topics ranging from performing artist income trends to classical music radio program access.

His book reviews have appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The American Scholar, The New Criterion, and Contemporary Poetry Review. He was a board member of the American Poetry & Literacy Project, co-founded by Andrew Carroll and the late Joseph Brodsky. Mr. Iyengar earned his B.A. in English from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

NOTE: because of the size of our seminar room, we regret that we cannot accommodate entire classes.

Coming up @MITH 4/8: John Carlson’s talk has been cancelled. We will announce a replacement session shortly.

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

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).

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - The University of Maryland’s Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) will join national and international partners to create an innovative “freely-accessible, high resolution” digital interactive archive of William Shakespeare’s pre-1641 quartos - living artifacts that tell the story of how Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Henry V, King Lear, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet, to name just a few, first circulated in print.

“The University of Maryland is thrilled to be part of this international collaboration to bring Shakespeare’s works to life in a digital way,” said University of Maryland President C. D. Mote, Jr. “MITH has continually demonstrated the important role of technology in the humanities. This high-impact initiative will provide ready access to the Bard for scholars, students and the public alike.”

The transatlantic digital collaboration is being made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and Britain’s Higher Education Funding Council working though the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). “This is a truly collaborative project. Institutions in the U.S. and England will contribute digital images of their Shakespeare quartos, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities will provide the technology to allow scholars, students, and the public to analyze and compare these texts in an entirely new way,” according to NEH Chairman Bruce Cole.

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. will be the grant recipient for the collaborative in the United States, which includes MITH and the Huntington Library in California. The Folger holds the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s quartos. “The Shakespeare Quartos Archive heralds the future of textual studies, bringing these rare early texts out of their separate archives and onto the screens of individual scholars,” says Folger Director Gail Kern Paster.

The nearly $120,000 NEH grant will provide initial funds for one year to create a technical proof of concept “working model” for the project by digitizing all 32 pre-1641 versions of Hamlet held by the participating libraries. “The JISC/NEH initiative gave us the opportunity and the incentive to attempt a truly international, collaborative, digital project,” says Folger Project Director Richard Kuhta. “The guidelines challenged us to think collectively about what was possible, and to realize a shared ambition. It was exactly the prompt we needed to launch a conversation that transformed geographically distant collections into partner institutions.”

NEH Chairman Cole announced the Shakespeare Quartos Archive grant during a news conference Tuesday (March 25) at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

The Shakespeare Quartos

MITH Director Neil Fraistat says “The quartos themselves offer crucial evidence about what actually was performed” by Shakespeare’s troupe.

Because Shakespeare himself did not authorize a printed edition of his plays, what was published at the time represented what others heard, memorized or took from the marked-up “foul papers” of a particular production. The quartos were essentially paperbacks produced soon after a play was produced and were meant to be read and thrown away. Fraistat uses the example of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy to show how different the published versions were:

To Be or Not To Be, That is the Question.
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.
- Hamlet Quarto 2 1604/5

To be, or not to be, ay there’s the point,
To die, to sleep,, is that all? Ay all:
No, to sleep, to dream, ay marry there it goes…

- Hamlet Quarto 1 1603

Fraistat estimates that it will take approximately three years after completion of the working model to complete the project for the remaining Shakespeare quartos. MITH’s interactive site will ultimately be housed at Oxford University.

The British Museum’s Shakespeare in Quarto website will house the new interactive quarto website.

Another exciting aspect of the project is that Washington-area high school teachers will be able to provide their feedback to the project as it progresses. “We also have one other partner in this grant - the Shakespeare Institute, which is in Stratford, but based from the University of Birmingham. Their teachers, scholars and students will also be working with the prototype giving us feedback and functionality about what they’d like to see,” Fraistat says. He also hopes that English students at the University of Maryland will be part of the review process.

The MITH director says, “We are proud to have as partners such institutions as the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. This grant caps what has been an extraordinary year for MITH, in which it has received five major grants, covering the gamut from Shakespeare’s Quartos to the preservation of Virtual Worlds.”

Newsdesk recently interviewed Prof. Fraistat about the Shakespeare Quartos Archive project. Read or listen to the interview in our “Conversation With… MITH Director, Prof. Neil Fraistat.”

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

“The Mandrake Vehicles: Kinetic Poetry in Physical and Digital Forms” by ONI BUCHANAN

Oni Buchanan will discuss her kinetic poem “The Mandrake Vehicles” (see an early version of the animation at: http://www. conduit.org/online/buchanan/buchanan.html). She will demonstrate how the elaborate Mandrake form operates, reveal her inspirations for the form, and discuss how the form evolved as it came into being. In addition, she will discuss how this originally paper-based kinetic poem came to be transformed into its current Flash-animated state, and enumerate the strengths and weaknesses of its two existent forms (its physical form on the printed page, and its digital Flash-animated form), especially as compared to its ideal form which currently exists only in concept.

ONI BUCHANAN is a young American pianist who focuses her virtuosity and inventiveness on creating and bringing to life themed concerts full of originality, curiosity, vitality, and a wide range of amazing piano works. Ms. Buchanan’s concerts have been described as “mesmerizing,” “insightful,” “exciting,” “inspiring,” and full of “flair, abandon, and color,” and her audiences have felt “transported,” “connected,” and “awed.” She has performed solo recitals throughout the U.S. and abroad, at such venues as the Instituto Brasileiro de Administração Municipal (IBAM) in Rio de Janeiro, BRAZIL, the University of Guelph as well as Conrad Grebel University College in Ontario, CANADA, the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts in Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Harvard University Hall Concert Series, among many others. Ms. Buchanan has been a guest soloist on many occasions, including performances for the Harvard Arts First festivals, the Harvard Music Department’s Composer Colloquium series, the Cicada Festival Emerging Artists Recital (Mount Gretna, PA), and as the guest concerto soloist with the Waynesboro Orchestra (Waynesboro, VA), conducted by Eric Stassen. In addition, Ms. Buchanan has given ensemble performances in New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, Harvard University, and at the New School of Music in Cambridge, MA.

Ms. Buchanan received her Master’s degree in piano performance from the New England Conservatory of Music, her Bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Virginia, and conducted three years of her music studies at the University of Iowa School of Music while pursuing an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In addition to her music degrees, Oni Buchanan holds a B.A. in English from the University of Virginia and an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Oni’s second poetry manuscript, Spring, has just been selected by Mark Doty as a winner of the 2007 National Poetry Series Open Competition, and will be published by the University of Illinois Press in August 2008. Her first book of poems, What Animal, won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition (chosen by Fanny Howe), and was published in October 2003. Oni’s poems are featured in several anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2004 and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, and have been published in numerous journals across the country, including Conduit, Seneca Review, and Gulf Coast. A Flash version of Oni Buchanan’s kinetic poem “The Mandrake Vehicles” is on permanent display at the Conduit website, and she is currently at work on two other motion- and technology-driven poem projects.

Coming up @MITH 4/1: Sunil Iyengar (National Endowment for the Arts), “To Read or Not to Read: A Discussion of the NEA’s Latest Report about Reading.”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

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).

The African American/African Diaspora Studies Area Group of the English Department and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) announce “Digital Diasporas: Digital Humanities and African American/African Diaspora Studies” to take place at the University of Maryland, College Park on May 1-3, 2008.

The program will begin on May 1st and 2nd with hands-on workshops, including one sponsored by the TEI Consortium and funded by the NEH, which will provide a practical introduction to text encoding: a second that will focus on navigating online resources in African American and African Diaspora Studies; and a third on using Second Life in teaching and research. The workshops will be followed by a panel showcasing work by scholars in the field of African American/African Diaspora Studies that address and/or make use of digital technologies and new media. The keynote address by Abdul Alkalimat (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) will be followed by a reception and the presentation of a multi-media art installation by the artist, Pamela Z. The last day will be taken up by panels and seminars; a digital “poster” session, where presenters will use laptops to introduce projects by students, faculty and independent scholars; a book fair; and a closing multi-media performance and book/cd signing by DJ Spooky. Confirmed participants include Abdul Alkalimat, Bryan Carter, Merle Collins, Howard Dodson, Anna Everett, Jerome Handler, Kara Keeling, Paul D. Miller (AKA DJ Spooky), Angel David Nieves, Alexander Weheliye, and Pamela Z.

Please visit the conference web site for schedule and registration information:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/diaspora2008

For further information, please contact Zita Nunes at znunes at umd dot edu

MITH is currently inviting applications from the University of Maryland’s College of Arts & Humanities and from the University Libraries for a MITH Resident Fellowship during the 2008-2009 academic year.

Resident Fellowships offer customized programming and technical support, as well as server space, consultation on project design, project management, software selection, and other crucial components of any digital humanities project. Ideally, faculty MITH fellows will be relieved of teaching responsibilities during the fellowship period (half-time for a year-long residence in MITH) and prospective fellows should apply to their unit, to their Dean, to one of the university’s research or instructional improvement support award programs (from the General Research Board, Undergraduate Studies, the Diversity Initiative Faculty Relations Committee, for example), and to outside sources for funds to support course buyouts. Librarians will be relieved of the equivalent of half-time yearly teaching duties and should seek support from the Dean of Libraries and outside funding sources.

Fellowships will be offered to professors and/or librarians developing their research, teaching, and information studies work in ways that implement and productively exploit electronic resources, with preference given to those who have worked especially to integrate their scholarly discoveries and methods into their pedagogy, mentoring, and library practices. Besides working on their proposed project, fellows are expected to present their work in MITH’s Digital Dialogue series and to become active members in the MITH community.

MITH is currently inviting applications from the University of Maryland’s College of Arts & Humanities and from the University Libraries for a MITH Resident Fellowship during the 2008-2009 academic year.

Resident Fellowships offer customized programming and technical support, as well as server space, consultation on project design, project management, software selection, and other crucial components of any digital humanities project. Ideally, faculty MITH fellows will be relieved of teaching responsibilities during the fellowship period (half-time for a year-long residence in MITH) and prospective fellows should apply to their unit, to their Dean, to one of the university’s research or instructional improvement support award programs (from the General Research Board, Undergraduate Studies, the Diversity Initiative Faculty Relations Committee, for example), and to outside sources for funds to support course buyouts. Librarians will be relieved of the equivalent of half-time yearly teaching duties and should seek support from the Dean of Libraries and outside funding sources.

Fellowships will be offered to professors and/or librarians developing their research, teaching, and information studies work in ways that implement and productively exploit electronic resources, with preference given to those who have worked especially to integrate their scholarly discoveries and methods into their pedagogy, mentoring, and library practices. Besides working on their proposed project, fellows are expected to present their work in MITH’s Digital Dialogue series and to become active members in the MITH community.

Those interested in applying for a MITH fellowship should contact Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH (fraistat@umd.edu) in order to formulate a strategy (for course relief and other support) for a successful MITH residency. Further information about the MITH Resident Fellowship, as well as an application, can be found at http://www.mith2.umd.edu/about/fellowsprogram/.

Applications should be submitted to Neil Fraistat at MITH and are due by Monday, April 14; notifications will be made by May 5.