A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, April 21, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“What Happens When You Teach Students to Lie Online?”
by MILLS KELLY

What happens when undergraduate students are encouraged to create false history and then post it online for all the world to see? In this talk, Professor Mills Kelly, Associate Director of the Center for History and New Media, will discuss the results of a recent course he taught called “Lying About the Past” in which his students created an online historical hoax that fooled a fair number of people (including several professors). Along the way the students worked harder than any group of students he’s taught in more than a dozen years in the college classroom. What lessons can we learn about teaching and digital culture from his experiences? Come to the talk and find out.

T. Mills Kelly is Associate Dean for Enrollment Development at George Mason University, where he is also an Associate Director of the Center for History and New Media and an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History. His conventional training is in East European history and he is the author of one book and many articles in that specialty. His unconventional training is in history and pedagogy as they happen in the digital world. In that capacity he has been the co-director or PI of several major NEH-funded web projects in history and is the author of numerous articles and several book chapters on the intersection of digital media and historical pedagogy. He blogs at edwired.org.

Coming up @MITH 4/28: “Preserving Virtual Worlds: A MITH Research Update”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2009.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

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

Hot on the heels of our recent coverage in the Chronicle, MITH’s role in the Preserving Virtual Worlds project is profiled at length in a feature-length story now out in Crispy Gamer, a major online games news outlet.

Faculty Research Assistant (Web Programmer)

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland in College Park seeks a web programmer to work on two grant funded projects. The first involves the creation of a collaboratively-edited database of 3-dimensional models of historical theater buildings. The second will integrate MITH’s web-based multimedia annotation tool (AXE) into the Center for History and New Media’s world-renowned citation management system, Zotero. Both are potentially very high profile projects in the digital humanities and it is likely this one year appointment will lead to other exciting opportunities in the digital humanities.

The successful candidate will at the minimum have a bachelor’s degree and will be proficient in PHP, XML, JavaScript, and HTML/CSS. Familiarity with cross browser compatibility issues and the ability to work well individually and in a team environment and to produce high-quality work under tightly defined deadlines is also essential. The ideal candidate will also have thorough knowledge of SVG (scalar vector graphics), ActionScript 3.0, and the Yahoo User Interface
(YUI).

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. 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 in a suburb of Washington DC, MITH also offers all of the opportunities that come from the libraries, museums, and cultural institutions of the area.

Salary range: $45,000 - $55,000, commensurate with experience. The University also offers a comprehensive benefits package, including 22 Days Annual Leave; 15 Days Sick Leave; 3 Days Personal Leave; 15 Paid Holidays; Tuition Remission; Health, Dental, Vision and Prescription coverage. This is a full time (40 hrs/week) position on a one year appointment. Consideration of applications to begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled. To apply, please send a letter of application, CV, and the names, addresses, and current phone numbers of three professional references to:

Dr. Doug Reside
Chair, MITH Search, Web Programmer
Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities
B0131 McKeldin Library
University of Maryland Web
College Park, MD 20742
dreside@umd.edu

Applications from women and minorities are encouraged. The University of Maryland is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

EOE/AA

SN:91C310

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, April 14, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Formalization, Transformation, and the Digital Scholarly Edition”
by ANDREW STAUFFER

This talk considers how the scholarly edition (whether print or digital) processes information via formalization, and about the implications of this for our understanding and practice of digital scholarly editing. More specifically, I identify a basic concern with the protocols governing best practices in digital text editing — namely, XML markup with a TEI schema. Because of such protocols and their associated transformations, online scholarly editions are vitiated by a gap between the edition as formalized in markup language and the edition as encountered by the end user. Part of my argument is on behalf of fuller transparency for online projects, which need to turn themselves inside out on demand. Scholar-users need to know more about the provenance of the data they encounter in web environments and not remain satisfied with the orchestrated performances that the interface runs.

ANDREW STAUFFER is an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he also serves as the director of the NINES project (http://nines.org). He is the author of /Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism/ (Cambridge UP, 2005), and has edited works by Robert Browning (Norton) and H. Rider Haggard (Broadview). He has published a number of essays on topics in nineteenth-century British literature, and he served as a research assistant on the Rossetti Archive in the 1990s. He is writing a book, /The Digital End of the Scholarly Edition/, for the University of Michigan Press.

Coming up @MITH 4/21: Mills Kelly, “What Happens When You Teach Your Students to Lie Online?”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2009.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

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

MITH’s ongoing research in digital curation and preservation is featured prominently in the front-page story “Archiving Writers’ Work in an Age of E-Mail” in this week’s edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The story profiles the challenges and opportunities associated with libraries and archives receiving disks, drives, and sometimes entire computers as part of an author’s literary “papers.” This work is being actively pursued at MITH in conjunction with our research partners at Emory University and the Harry Ransom Center. Both Matthew Kirschenbaum and Doug Reside comment in the article.

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

“How to Play XML: Markup Technologies as Nomic Game”
by WENDELL PIEZ

What is a “game”? A definition is famously difficult. Wittgenstein, for example, after having described language as a game in his Philosophical Investigations, goes on to problematize the question of what a game is, using the word (”Spiel” in German) as a vivid example of the contingency and provisional nature of the supposedly clear concepts communicated by language. Game Theory, a branch of mathematics, solves this question by avoiding it, providing its own definition of “game,” which only partially fits many or most games as we know them. And talking about games becomes really interesting when we reflect, as is inescapable since Peter Suber coined the term “nomic game” in 1982, that part of the action of many games, and indeed the essence of some, is in the process, play or competition of providing the game itself with its rules and hence its definition. Originally developed in reference to legislative systems as an illustration of “a game of self-amendment,” Suber’s rule set for the game “Nomic” quickly took on a life of its own and spawned a thought industry related to economics, sociology and anthropology, life sciences, psychology and politics.

Markup technologies such as HTML, XML and everything that go with them, from schemas to processing languages to public specifications and standards, have many game-like aspects. As in many games, much of the activity of markup technologies is devoted to rules enforcement; it also, in nomic fashion, extends to breaking received rules and making new ones. An engagement with markup technologies, or with any media production or software application design that relies on them, demands tactics and strategy, presenting us with problems and tradeoffs enmeshed in complexities both on and off the board, and challenging us to decide not only how we play, but what game we wish to be playing. Not only that, but the deeper we go, the more nomic it gets. As we ponder what we are doing with markup technologies and how they are changing what else we do — as scholars, teachers, publishers and creative producers — it is well if we reflect on who is making the rules, how, for whose benefit, and whether, to what extent and how we might aspire to be doing this ourselves.

WENDELL PIEZ was educated at the American School in Japan, Yale College (BA Classics, 1984) and Rutgers University (PhD English, 1991). Since 1994 he has worked with markup technologies, beginning with TEI and EAD SGML at the Center for Electronic Text in the Humanities at Rutgers and Princeton, and continuing with many varieties of document- and publishing-oriented XML since 1997. Since 1998 he has worked as a consultant at Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a leading developer of XML-based publishing solutions known for its work with (among many others) the Library of Congress and NLM/NCBI, the publishers of the Pubmed Central repository at the National Institutes of Health. He has taught numerous courses on XML, XSLT and related technologies to audiences in the public, private and academic sectors, and presented papers at industry and academic conferences on both practical and theoretical topics related to markup languages and their application. A member of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, since 2007 he has served as General Editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Coming up @MITH 4/14: Andrew Stauffer (University of Virginia), “From Electronic Editions to Digital Scholarship: Using What We’ve Made”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2009.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

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

MITH is currently inviting applications from the University of Maryland’s College of Arts & Humanities and from the University Libraries for a MITH Resident Fellowship during the 2009-2010 academic year.

Resident Fellowships offer customized programming and technical support, as well as server space, consultation on project design, project 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 for a year-long residence in MITH) and prospective fellows should apply to their unit, to their Dean, to one of the university’s research or instructional improvement support award programs, and to outside sources for funds to support course buyouts. Librarians will be relieved of the equivalent of half-time yearly teaching duties and should seek support from the Dean of Libraries and outside funding sources.

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

Those interested in applying for a MITH fellowship should contact Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH (fraistat@umd.edu) in order to formulate a strategy (for course relief and other support) for a successful MITH residency. Further information about the MITH Resident Fellowship, as well as application instructions, can be found at http://www.mith2.umd.edu/about/fellowsprogram.php.

Applications should be submitted to Neil Fraistat at MITH and are due by Monday, May 4; notifications will be made by May 12.

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, March 31, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“The Shakespeare Quartos Archive: A MITH Research Update”

by DOUG RESIDE & GRANT DICKIE

The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is a freely-accessible, high-resolution digital collection of the seventy-five pre-1641 quarto editions of William Shakespeare’s plays. This one-year project has also produced an interactive interface and toolset for the detailed study of the quartos, with full-functionality applied to all
thirty-two copies of one play, Hamlet, held at participating institutions. Contributing content to this multi-institutional project are the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, the British Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the National Library
of Scotland. Textual encoding is provided by staff of the Oxford Digital Library of the University of Oxford. Programming and prototype design is undertaken by staff of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities of the University of Maryland. Now, three months from the conclusion of the grant, the production team will demonstrate the current state of the interface and seek advice and feedback to
guide the completion of their work.

—-
DOUG RESIDE is the Assistant Director of the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of Maryland in College Park. Doug holds undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and English and earned his PhD in English at the University of Kentucky where he worked on several digital humanities projects, including Kevin Kiernan’s celebrated Electronic Boethius. Doug’s primary research interest is musical theater and the way in which digital technology can be used both to create and to preserve the art form. In addition to his managerial, and programming work at MITH, Doug is currently working on a book on the “born-digital” musical.

GRANT DICKIE, recent graduate of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Information Science Master’s Program (http://sils.unc.edu), joined MITH as a web programmer. While an undergraduate at University of Richmond, he studied English and German comparative literature. While working as a student for the University of Richmond Boatwright Library, Grant worked alongside Dr. Andrew Rouner and Chris Kemp on the Richmond Daily Dispatch project (http://dlxs.richmond.edu/d/ddr/) as well as other digital initiatives. In addition, he has also digitized and encoded the Anna Burwell 1855-1856 diary for the Historic Burwell School site in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

Coming up @MITH 4/7: Wendell Piez (Mulberry Technologies), “How to Play XML: Markup Technology as Nomic Game”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2009.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

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

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities is pleased to announce that we have been awarded a $400,000 NEH Preservation and Access grant to create the next generation of technical infrastructure supporting image-based editions and electronic archives of humanities content.

Despite the proliferation of image-based editions and archives, the linking of images and textual information remains a slow and frustrating process for editors and curators. TILE, the Text Image Linking Environment, built on the existing code of MITH’s NEH-funded AXE image tagger, will dramatically increase the ease and efficiency of this work. MITH Director Neil Fraistat comments, “We’re delighted that the NEH is supporting the further development of MITH’s groundbreaking markup tool AXE and that Doug Reside, the developer of AXE, will be leading a distinguished multi-institutional team on the TILE project, along with Co-PI’s Dot Porter of the Digital Humanities Observatory (Irish Royal Academy) and John Walsh of Indiana University.”

At the end of two years, we will have produced software interoperable with other popular tools and capable of producing TEI-compliant XML for linking image to text and image to image with some level of automation. We will also put the image linking features of the newest version of the Text Encoding Standard (TEI P5) through it’s first rigorous, “real world” test, and, at the close of the project, expect to provide the TEI with a list of suggestions for improving the standard to make it more robust and effective. TILE will be developed and thoroughly tested with the assistance of our project partners, who represent some of today’s most exciting image-based editions projects, in order to create a tool generated by the community, for the community, with the expectation that, unlike so many other tools, it will be used by the community. According to Reside, “TILE attempts to create not just a set of tools but a methodology for generating truly useful software for humanities scholarship.”

Stay tuned for yet more exciting news from MITH about future projects resulting from our recent grant activity!

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

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and the Department of Theatre are pleased to announce the receipt of an NEH Level 2 Digital Humanities Startup Grant for CAMP, a Collaborative, Ajax-Based, Modeling Platform. Development will be overseen by Doug Reside, Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre and Assistant Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and Frank Hildy, Professor of Theatre. This the fourth Digital Humanities Startup for MITH in two years.

As the name suggests, this tool is an open source, collaborative, 3d modeler that will allow users with very little experience to generate a 3-dimensional model in their web browser which they can then allow other users to both view and edit. The tool will initially be used to construct an international database of pre-19th century theater buildings, but will be intentionally generic so that scholars interested in structures of any sort can easily port it into their own projects. CAMP will initially be used as a component in the Comprehensive World Wide Digital Archive of Existing Historic Theatres– a collaboratively edited, peer reviewed, online database of historic theatre architecture from the Minoan “theatrical areas” on the island of Crete, to the last theatre built before 1815. The Comprehensive World Wide Archive of Existing Historic Theatres is an attempt to create the necessary finding aid for these buildings and provide a consistent body of relevant data, most especially digital reconstructions at a consistent scale, about them.