A final reminder of the amazing Digital Diasporas conference beginning on campus later this week. We look forward to seeing many members of the MITH community at this landmark event.

We regret that Tuesday’s Digital Dialogue with Greg Crane has had to be canceled. We look forward to rescheduling with Greg for the fall.

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is seeking a full time TEI encoder to work on in-house text encoding projects as well as a collaboration with the National Gallery in Washington DC on a new digital archive under development: “The History of the Accademia di San Luca, 1589-1635: Documents from the Archivio di Stato, Rome.” The successful candidate will have experience with humanities encoding projects and knowledge of TEI (preferably P5). Experience with transforming TEI via XSL and DOM manipulations is preferred.

MITH is the University of Maryland’s primary intellectual hub for scholars and practitioners of digital humanities, electronic literature, and cyberculture, as well as the home of the Electronic Literature Organization, the most prominent international group devoted to the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature. MITH functions as an applied think tank for the digital humanities in its symposia and weekly seminar series; in its furthering the excellence of MITH Fellows’ research; and in its cultivation of an innovative in-house research agenda that currently clusters around digital tools, text mining and visualization, and the creation and preservation of electronic literature, digital games, and virtual worlds. MITH and the University of Maryland will host the international Digital Humanities 2009 conference.

Salary range: $40,000 to $50,000 plus benefits. We will begin accepting applications immediately and will continue until the position is filled. To apply, send a cover letter and resume to MITH’s assistant director, Doug Reside (dreside at umd dot edu).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, April 29, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Cyberinfrastructure for Global Cultural Heritage”
by GREGORY CRANE

Cultural heritage materials are traditionally accessible either to highly trained professionals or in the form of manually produced translations with hand-crafted background information. The challenge today is to design fields that are accessible across barriers of language, culture and immediate intent: we are beginning to design fields for translation, customization and personalization. This talk looks at the interaction between wholly automated and largely general systems and the knowledge structures on which particular domains depend.

On the one hand, we need to update our models of intellectual activity to keep pace the already present and rapidly emerging practices. At the same time, as we identify new services to support new activities, we need to develop methods whereby we can mine the machine actionable data from vast libraries of legacy print data available as page images and scalable accept user contributions of every type. One goal in the next five years is to have available for speakers of Arabic and Chinese the core data about Greco-Roman culture and then to make available corresponding materials about Chinese and Arabic culture to the English speaking public. This involves a suite of data driven services that provide high performance results for particular domains.

GREGORY CRANE is Professor of Classics and Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship at Tufts University. He is also the founder and director of the Perseus Project, which has been working on digital libraries and cyberinfrastructure for twenty years. He is directing projects aimed at developing a coherent cyberinfrastructure for cultural heritage in general and for Greco-Roman culture in particular.

This talk concludes MITH’s Digital Dialogues series for the semester. It is free and open to the public.

It’s not too late to register for Digital Diasporas, the first conference devoted exclusively to the intersection of African American/African Diaspora Studies and the digital humanities: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/diaspora2008/

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

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, April 22, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Early Cinema as New Media”
by JONATHAN AUERBACH

In this talk I will discuss early cinema as new media in the context of my recent book, Body Shots: Cinema’s Incarnations, 1893-1904 (University of California Press, 2007). Body Shots puts the human body at the center of cinema’s first decade of emergence, arguing for the complexity, richness, and sophistication of these moving corporeal representations as both formal objects and culturally resonant ones. Rather than treat the body as primarily marking identity–gendered, racial, national–or invoke it to make claims about early cinema’s sensational attractions in relation to modernity (two common approaches to the subject), I begin by focusing on films that reveal striking anxieties and preoccupations about persons on public display, both exceptional figures, such as1896 presidential candidate William McKinley, as well as ordinary people self-consciously caught by the movie camera in their daily routines. The book closes with a meditation on early cinema and death (when the body stops moving), with implications for new media and technology studies more generally.

JONATHAN AUERBACH is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of numerous articles and books on American literature, culture, and film, including The Romance of Failure (1989), Male Call: Becoming Jack London (1996), and Body Shots: Cinema’s Incarnations, 1893-1904 (2007). He is currently writing a book on the politics of film noir.

Coming up @MITH 4/29: Greg Crane (Tufts), “Cyberinfrastructure and Cultural Heritage”

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).