Recognize these lines? They’re from the opening screen of Will Crowther’s ADVENTURE (1975), the first example of the genre known as interactive fiction and arguably our first example of a virtual world (and as such the distant ancestor to places like World of Warcraft and Second Life). There is also an appropriate literary resonance: this path in the forest where the straight way is lost is reminiscent of another great underground epic.

As part of our work on a project funded by the Library of Congress dedicated to Preserving Virtual Worlds (http://www.ndiipp.uiuc.edu/pca/), MITH will be hosting a table-read of the original version of ADVENTURE, recently recovered from backup tapes at Stanford University. We will read through the complete text of the game, and also (geeks that we are) have a look at its FORTRAN source code.

We’re inviting anyone with an interest in gaming, interactive fiction, or virtual worlds to join us for an hour or two on Thursday, May 15, at 12:00 noon in our conference room (MITH is located on the basement level of McKeldin Library). Appropriately, we will provide tasty food: pizza. As with all adventures, we’re unsure of where this one will end or exactly how we will get there. But there are sure to be breathtaking views along the way. Please RSVP to mgk at umd dot edu if you would like to attend.

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).

“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).

“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).

“Rezzing Books: Codex Technology in the Metaverse”
by KARI KRAUS

Podcast available!

Since its official launch in 2003, Second Life, the popular 3D interactive world created by Linden Lab, has become an unlikely destination for librarians, bibliophiles, authors, readers, publishers, booksellers, and book artists. At the center of this nexus of users is the book itself, a virtual artifact that differs from its physical counterpart by being comprised of bits, not atoms; of textures, animated scripts, and geometric primitives rather than paper, ink, cloth, and thread. In this talk I will examine the infrastructure that supports this in-world bibliographic culture: specifically, the technologies used to create and read SL books; the social networks designed to promote and popularize them; the information services to collect, access, curate, and catalogue them; and the legal and economic systems developed to commodify them. I will look at how the Second Life platform conditions our ideas of “bookness” by presenting us with interfaces for reading that borrow incongruously from print and manuscript traditions, first-person shooter games, and even military aviation. And I will suggest that the mixed economy of Real Life and Second Life makes it necessary to understand these immersive books as compound objects that exist within a system of relationships that include both in-world and out-world content, thereby complicating efforts to study, link, document, and preserve them. The talk will also include a demonstration of books I have made in SL and discuss future projects.

KARI KRAUS’s research and teaching interests focus on new media and the digital humanities, textual scholarship and print culture, digital preservation, and intellectual property. This past fall she joined the College of Information Studies and the Department of English at the University of Maryland as an assistant professor. Kraus is a local Co-PI on a Library of Congress NDIIPP grant for preserving virtual worlds, including the multi-user virtual environment Second Life; a project participant on an NEH Digital Humanities Level I Start-Up grant on approaches to managing and collecting born-digital literary materials for scholarly use; a founding member of the editorial board for MediaCommons, a digital scholarly network under development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book; and a member of the internal advisory board for Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building (CLiMB). She has taught at the University of Rochester and the Eastman School of Music, and in the Art and Visual Technology program at George Mason University. In 2006-2007 she was technology evangelist for Zotero, an open-source research tool for the Firefox web browser, produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Coming up @MITH 4/22: Jonathan Auerbach (English), “Early Cinema as New Media”

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).

Introducing the Shakespeare’s Quarto’s Project
with NEIL FRAISTAT, JIM KUHN, RICHARD KUHTA, and DOUG RESIDE

Many of you will have seen the news about MITH’s most recent grant activity, a new NEH/JISC funded project on digitizing Shakespeare’s Quartos undertaken in collaboration with the Folger Shakespeare Library, the British Library, the Bodleian at Oxford, and various other prestigious institutions. More detail is available here:

http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/culture/release.cfm?ArticleID=1620

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.” NEIL FRAISTAT adds, “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.”

In this Digital Dialogue, we will introduce the project to the university community, solicit initial feedback, and discuss ways to involve interested constituents as our work progresses. The discussion will be led by NEIL FRAISTAT (Professor of English and Director, MITH), JIM KUHN (Head of Collection Information Services, Folger), RICHARD KHUTA (Librarian, Folger), and DOUG RESIDE (Assistant Director, MITH).

Note: John Carlson’s talk, originally scheduled for this day, has been cancelled.

Coming up @MITH 4/15: Kari Kraus (Information School and English), “Rezzing Books: Codex Technologies in the Metaverse.”

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).

Located in McKeldin Library at the heart of the campus, MITH is the University of Maryland’s primary intellectual hub for scholars and practitioners of digital humanities, new media, 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’s house research includes projects in text mining, tool building, visualization, digital libraries, electronic publishing, and digital preservation. We collaborate actively with allied campus units, including the University Libraries, the College of Information Science, and the Human Computer Interaction Lab. Situated just outside of Washington DC, MITH also offers all of the opportunities that come from the libraries, museums, and cultural institutions of the area.

Salary range, $50,000 - $55,000. To apply, please send a letter of application, CV, and contact information for three references. Best consideration by April 9, 2008. Application materials may be sent electronically to mith@umd.edu or to Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. Consideration of applications to begin immediately. Applications from women and minorities are encouraged.