The MITH community and University of Maryland were well represented at the important Digital Humanities 2006 conference which just concluded in Paris, at the Sorbonne.

MITH Director Neil Fraistat organized and chaired a roundtable discussion on “The Fate and Function of Digital Humanities Centers,” which included MITH’s Founding Director Martha Nell Smith among its speakers. Fraistat also attended the Association for Computers and the Humanities Executive Council Meeting.

Associate Director Matthew Kirschenbaum organized a session on the ongoing Nora Project, and with HCIL’s Catherine Plaisant presented a multi-authored paper, “‘Undiscoverd Public Knowledge’: Mining for Patterns of Erotic Language in Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence with Susan Huntington (Gilbert) Dickinson,” which also included Smith and Maryland English graduate student Tanya Clement as co-authors. MITH Web designer Greg Lord was co-author on another paper presented as part of the same session.

Maryland English graduate students Jennifer Rowe and Marc Ruppel presented papers on their current work on new media poetry and cross-sited narrative, respectively. Ruppel was one of four student winners of an ACH travel bursary.

Finally, former MITH Assistant Director Susan Schreibman (and currently the Maryland Libraries’ Head of Digital Collections and Research) presented a paper co-authored with the Libraries’ Gretchen Gueguen and Jennifer Roper on “Cross-Collection Searching: A Pandora’s Box or Holy Grail?”

Below we find Fraistat and Kirschenbaum hobnobbing in a salon at the Sorbonne.