A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, November 7, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“The Virtual Humanities Lab and the Evolution of Remote Collaboration”
by VIKA ZAFRIN (Brown University)

The Virtual Humanities Lab was a two-year project, generously
supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2004-06.
VHL was housed in Italian Studies at Brown University; we have
collaborated with scholars at Brown, and throughout North America and
Europe. First, we employed humanities scholars previously unfamiliar
with semantic text encoding. The scholars were tasked with studying
two information-rich primary sources — by encoding them using
idiosyncratic encoding structures. This required training and various
types of support, and was complicated by the scholars’ disparate
geographical locations. We also made contact with a group in Mexico
that is studying one of our texts, Giovanni Boccaccio’s _Expositions
on the Divine Comedy_. We’ve set up a discussion forum for them to do
their work using our encoded text. Finally, we collaborated amongst
ourselves across three continents on writing papers, designing the VHL
interface, and further textual analysis.

At MITH, I will talk about the results of these different types of
collaboration. I will relate what worked well (a strategic blend of
facetime and online communication) and what could have worked better
(training humanists in the fundamentals of humanities computing). I
will stress and illustrate the importance that collaboration has begun
to play in the humanities, and propose to introduce collaboration more
substantively into humanities research, arguing for its benefits over
our usual solitary work.

VIKA ZAFRIN is a PhD candidate in Special Studies (Humanities
Computing) at Brown University, expecting graduation next spring. She
was Project Director for NEH-funded Virtual Humanities Lab in 2004-06,
and actively participated in the development of the Decameron Web at
Brown. Besides collaboration, Zafrin’s interests include
intercultural transmission through art, idiosyncratic XML encoding of
cultural artifacts, web delivery technologies for semantically encoded
materials, the usage of internet resources for teaching, and science
fiction as a source of inspiration for humanities work.

Coming up @MITH Nov. 14: Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan (School of
Information Arts, University of Baltimore), title TBA. View the
complete Fall 2006 schedule for Digital Dialogues here:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2006.pdf

Free and open to the public.

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-5896).