MITH Consultations are available to any faculty member in the College of Arts and Humanities or the University Library. They are intended to provide expert-level feedback on a new or early-stage project in any aspect of applied technology and new media in arts and humanities research and teaching. Consultations draw upon the Institute’s established expertise in scholarly electronic publishing, content-driven Web development, database design, document encoding, image processing, music and other forms of multimedia, visualization, graphic and information design, and project management.

To schedule a Consultation, contact the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at mith@umd.edu or 5-8927.

Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellowship

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.

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 1, 2008. The recipient will be announced in mid-December 2008.

Application available here

MITH provides support to applicants from the University of Maryland’s College of Arts & Humanities and from the University Libraries, offering server space and customized programming as well as consultation on project objectives, design, and 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 if they choose a year-long residence in MITH, full-time if they opt for a semester of residence). Prospective fellows are encouraged to apply to their units, to their Deans, or other sources to support course buy-outs. Librarians will be relieved of the equivalent of half-time yearly teaching duties and should seek support from the Dean of Libraries.

Fellowships will be offered to professors and/or librarians developing their research, teaching, creative performances, 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 or performance 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.

Application Process

Applications are judged by a committee appointed by the Director of MITH and consideration will be given to the extent to which digital technologies are a part of the research plan and/or the pedagogical methodology being developed. Proposals should specify why MITH would be crucial to the project’s development. To apply, applicants should provide:

• a current short c.v.
• a one-paragraph abstract of the proposal
• the proposal itself, which should be no longer than four pages and which should specifically address the following points:
  • the project that you will work on if awarded the fellowship at MITH
  • how the use of advanced technology would help achieve your research goals and contribute to the intellectual outcome
  • hardware and software needs
  • a detailed timetable or workplan for completion of the project
  • a description of the rights situation of the materials to be used for the project (in other words, whether permissions have been obtained to use the material and what will be required to obtain permission)
  • what other electronic research is relevant to your project
  • what other funding sources you have or will pursue in relation to the project
• a supporting letter from the applicant’s Chair

Questions about the application or the process should be addressed to Professor Neil Fraistat, Director, at fraistat@umd.edu. Applications should be submitted electronically and are DUE no later than April 14, 2008. Decisions will be determined and notifications issued by May 5, 2008.

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The University of Maryland is pleased to announce the receipt of an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up award, “Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use.” The project, directed by Matthew Kirschenbaum, Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, will involve a series of site visits and planning meetings among personnel working with the born-digital components of three significant collections of literary material: the Salman Rushdie Papers at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (which includes Rushdie’s laptops), the Michael Joyce Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. The meetings and site visits will facilitate the preparation of a larger collaborative grant proposal among the three institutions aimed at developing archival tools and best practices for preserving and curating the born-digital documents and records of contemporary literary authorship.

According to Kirschenbaum, “Today nearly all literature is born-digital in the sense that before it is ever printed as a book the text is composed with a word processor, saved on a hard drive or other electronic storage media, and accessed as part of a computer operating system. This new technological fact about writing means that an author working today will not and cannot be studied in the future in the same way as writers of the past, since the basic material evidence of their creative activity–manuscripts and drafts, working notes, correspondence, journals–is, like all textual production, increasingly migrating to the electronic realm. We look forward to the process of examining how to best meet these challenges, balancing the needs of both scholarship and archives in the new textual environment.”

Stephen Enniss, Director of the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory, notes “The born-digital archive not only contains enormous data, it also contains enormous potential for literary scholars to pose new questions of the archive not even contemplated in the past.” Thomas F. Staley, Director of the Ransom Center, comments “The Ransom Center is very pleased to be part of this vitally important project to explore how we can best preserve and make accessible the map of an author’s creative process in the digital age. This collaborative effort between the Ransom Center, MITH, and Emory will help lead the way in the preservation of born-digital materials and ensure that these materials are available to students and scholars for generations to come.” Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH, adds “This project will deepen MITH’s focus on the preservation and analysis of born digital literary artifacts, which is already well established in its work with the Electronic Literature Organization and on an NDIIPP funded project on the preservation of virtual worlds.”

Other project participants include Erika Farr (Emory), Naomi Nelson (Emory), Kari Kraus (Maryland), Catherine Stollar Peters (New York State Archives), and Gabriela Redwine (Ransom Center).

Further Inquiries:

Matthew Kirschenbaum
Associate Professor of English
Associate Director,
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)
University of Maryland
301-405-8505
mgk at umd dot edu