The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is seeking to hire an Assistant Director to join our management team, which currently consists of Neil Fraistat, Matt Kirschenbaum, and Doug Reside.

Made possible by a major Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is a collaboration of the University of Maryland’s College of Arts and Humanities, Libraries, and Office of Information Technology. In the ten years since its founding, MITH has become internationally recognized as one of the leading digital humanities centers in the world. As the host of the 2009 Digital Humanities conference and the co-organizer of centerNet (an international network of similar centers), MITH is one of the centers at the heart of the now burgeoning international field of digital humanities.

MITH is generously supported by the University administration and enjoys productive collaborations with allied campus units, including the University Libraries, the College of Information Science, and the Human Computer Interaction Lab. Geographically situated within the Washington DC Beltway, MITH is perfectly positioned for its frequent collaborations with the world-class libraries, museums, and cultural institutions in the metropolitan area, but our partnerships have also extended around the world. Recent projects include a collaboration with several major libraries in the U.K. and the United States to create an online archive of all extant pre-1642 quartos of Shakespeare’s plays and participation on a national research team charged by the Library of Congress with the preservation of virtual worlds (e.g. Adventure, DOOM, and Second Life). This latter project is part of MITH’s larger focus on the preservation of born digital creative work, also represented by our hosting of the Electronic Literature Organization and the Deena Larsen Collection–one of the world’s largest publicly held collections of electronic literature.

The Assistant Director will bear primary responsibility for project management and oversight of all MITH projects, including creation of deadlines for all deliverables and project tracking; the supervision of MITH’s development team, that includes programmers, web designers, graduate assistants, and interns; and computer programming services, data, and application architecture design and modeling for MITH projects. We are therefore seeking a web programmer experienced with web scripting languages (JavaScript, PHP, Ruby) and with some knowledge of compiled languages (Java, C++). Ability to work with Unix/Linux based applications is required, and preference will be given to candidates with database and XML expertise. Strong organizational and project management skills are also mandatory, as are excellent communication skills. A humanities background is especially desirable. Bachelor’s degree required; MA, MLS, or Ph.D. preferred.

The Assistant Director is a full-time, 12-month staff position at the University. Salary is commensurate with experience, ranging from $51,304-$64,131. The University also offers a competitive benefits package. To apply, please send a letter of application, CV, and contact information for three references to Doug Reside, Search Chair, via email: dreside@umd.edu. For best consideration, apply by close of business on October 9, 2009. The University of Maryland actively subscribes to a policy of equal employment opportunity and will not discriminate against any employee or applicant because of race, age, gender, color, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, religion, national origin, or political affiliation. Women and Minorities are strongly encouraged to apply.

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

“The Harlem Rennaisance in Second Life”
By Zita Nunes

This talk will address various aspects of teaching in Second Life. Drawing on their two-year experience co-teaching courses on the Harlem Renaissance that have brought together students from the University of Maryland, the University of Central Missouri, and the Sorbonne, Bryan Carter and Zita Nunes will discuss the pedagogical opportunities afforded “in-world.”

Bryan Carter is an Associate Professor of literature at the University of Central Missouri. He specializes in African American literature of the 20th Century with a primary focus on the Harlem Renaissance and has a secondary emphasis on visual culture. He has published numerous articles on his project, Virtual Harlem, an educational sim in Second Life representing Harlem as it existed during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and has presented it at locations around the world.

Zita Nunes is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature and an organizer of the Digital Humanities and African American/African Diaspora Studies Conference.

Coming up @ MITH 10/6: Brad Pasanek (Virginia), “A Dictionary, a Database, and a Desultory Reader: Metaphors for the Mind in Eighteenth-Century Literature.”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2009.pdf

All talks are free and open to the public!

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

We are pleased to announce that the centerNet steering committee has received a Digital Humanities Start Up Grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities to help it develop a robust and sustainable organizational infrastructure and to run a World Summit of digital humanities centers directors and funders this July in London, immediately preceding DH 2010. centerNet currently has over 200 members from centers across the globe. The grant will enable it to play a larger role on the world stage beginning with the Summit, which is intended to facilitate collaborations on a global level among centers, among funders, and between both groups–with the ultimate goals of building international cyberinfrastructure for the digital humanities and developing centerNet regional affiliate groups in other parts of the world. More information about the Summit and centerNet’s other new initiatives will be forthcoming on this list.

The co-chairs of the centerNet steering committee, Katherine Walter (CDRH, University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Neil Fraistat (MITH, University of Maryland) are co-principal investigators for the grant. Other members of the steering committee are Dan Cohen (CHNM, George Mason University); Julia Flanders (Brown University Women Writers Project); Matt Kirschenbaum (MITH); Dean Rehberger (Matrix, Michigan State University); Geoffrey Rockwell (TAPoR, University of Alberta); Raymond Siemens (SDH/SEMI, University of Victoria, British Columbia); and John M. Unsworth (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, September 15, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“At Glance at the Current State of Video Game Preservation”
by RACHEL DONAHUE

A number of cultural institutions have begun to take an interest in videogame preservation–but before materials make it to the archives, they are managed by their creators. Understanding what the videogame industry itself is doing with the concept art, tools, and other records they create is an important step to ensure that these increasingly important artifacts are preserved for future generations. In this talk Donahue will discuss findings from her preliminary survey of videogame industry (and player community) preservation and records management practices.

RACHEL DONAHUE is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland’s iSchool, researching the preservation of complex, interactive digital objects. She received a BA in English and Illustration from Juniata College in 2004, and an MLS with a specialization in archival science from UMD in 2009. Rachel is a Research Assistant at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, currently supporting the Preserving Virtual Worlds and Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections projects . Additionally, she supports the research and communications activities of the National Archives and Records Administration’s Center for Advanced Systems and Technology.

Coming up @MITH 9/29, Zita Nunes (English and Comparative Literature), “The Harlem Renaissance in Second Life”

Note: there will be no talk next week so as to avoid conflict with the university town hall.

View MITH’s complete Fall Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2009.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

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

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, September 15, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“A Glance at the Current State of Videogame Preservation”
by Rachel Donahue

A number of cultural institutions have begun to take an interest in videogame preservation — but before materials make it to the archives, they are managed by their creators. Understanding what the videogame industry itself is doing with the concept art, tools, and other records they create is an important step to ensure that these increasingly important artifacts are preserved for future generations. In this talk, Rachel Donahue, doctoral student at the iSchool, will discuss her findings from a preliminary survey of videogame industry (and player community) preservation and records management practices.

RACHEL DONAHUE is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland’s iSchool, researching the preservation of complex, interactive digital objects. She received a BA in English and Illustration from Juniata College in 2004, and an MLS with a specialization in archival science from UMD in 2009. Rachel is a Research Assistant at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, currently supporting the Preserving Virtual Worlds and Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections projects. Additionally, she supports the research and communications activities of the National Archives and Records Administration’s Center for Advanced Systems and Technology.

Coming up @MITH 9/29: Zita Nunes (English & Comparative Literature), “The Harlem Renaissance in Second Life”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2009.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

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

At this year’s annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists (SAA), MITH GA Rachel Donahue was elected to the Electronic Records Section (ERS) steering committee. Established in 1994, ERS “functions as a locus of expertise, leadership, and information sharing for SAA regarding management and preservation of records in electronic form.”

The ERS Steering committee composed of six members. Each member serves a term of three years, and one new member is elected by a majority of section members present at the annual meeting.

Steering committee members assist the chair and vice chair in leading and organizing section activities including endorsing session proposals for the annual meeting, advocating for and consulting with SAA on issues related to electronic records, and creating task forces and other projects as necessary.

Call for Participation: Advanced TEI Seminar as MITH

An advanced seminar in TEI encoding for manuscripts will be offered at MITH January 20-22, 2010. The seminar is sponsored by the Brown University Women Writers Project with generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It will be led by Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman, the instructors for a very successful introductory seminar on TEI held at MITH in 2008.

This seminar assumes a basic familiarity with TEI and will be focused on the detailed challenges of encoding manuscript materials, including editorial, transcriptional, and interpretive issues and the methods of representing these in TEI markup.

Intended for people who are already involved in a text encoding project or are in the process of planning one, the seminar will be focused on the detailed challenges of encoding manuscript materials, including editorial, transcriptional, and interpretive issues and the methods of representing these in TEI markup. It will include a mix of presentations, discussion, case studies using participants’ projects, hands-on practice, and individual consultation. It will also be strongly project-based: participants will present their projects to the group, discuss specific challenges and encoding strategies, develop encoding specifications and documentation, and create encoded sample documents and templates.

Project teams and collaborative groups are encouraged to apply, although individuals are also welcome. A basic knowledge of the TEI Guidelines and some prior experience with text encoding (e.g. an introductory workshop, job experience, etc.) will be assumed.

Travel funding is available of up to $500 per participant.

The application deadline is August 10.

For information on how to apply, and for more detailed information on the seminar program, please visit http://www.wwp.brown.edu/encoding/seminars.

New Grant Funds Tools & Research to Support the Sharing of Digital Annotations

Ann Arbor, MI, Brisbane QLD (Australia), College Park, MD, Fairfax, VA, Los Alamos, NM, and Urbana, IL ― The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (New York) has awarded $362,000 to the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) for Phase I of a project to build new digital annotation tools and define and demonstrate a framework for sharing annotations of digital content across the World Wide Web. The OAC includes humanities scholars, librarians, and information scientists from four universities — George Mason University, the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland, and the University of Queensland (Australia) — from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, and from the Office of Advanced Technology Research at JSTOR, an integrated online archive of over five million items digitized from scholarly journals and primary source archives.

Annotating is a method by which scholars across disciplines organize existing knowledge and facilitate the creation and sharing of new knowledge. It is used by individual scholars when reading as an aid to memory, to add commentary, and to classify. It can facilitate shared editing, scholarly collaboration, and pedagogy. Over time annotations can have scholarly value in their own right as a compelling form of evidence for historians and others studying the evolution of scholarly thinking. The OAC effort will focus on annotation interoperability, creating data models, standards, and tools that allow scholars working in disparate locations to share and leverage annotations of digital resources across the boundaries of individual annotation applications and content collections.

As part of the OAC Phase I work funded by the Mellon Foundation, a new annotation tool, leveraging ongoing work at the Maryland Institute for the Humanities (MITH) that was initiated previously with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, will be integrated into the popular Zotero Firefox Web browser extension. Created by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, Zotero helps users collect, manage, and cite research sources found on the World Wide Web.

In parallel with this work, researchers at the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the eResearch Lab of the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE) at The University of Queensland in Australia will examine the breadth and diversity of current annotation models and system architectures in the context of scholarly practices and scholarly-focused use cases involving annotations in both online and traditional settings.

This research, in combination with what is learned in adding new annotation functionality to Zotero, will inform the development of a shared model of scholarly annotation that supports interoperable annotations, is adaptable by existing systems, and is rooted in traditional scholarly practice. The effort to define and describe this data model and the rules for sharing and exchanging annotations will be led by researchers at the Research Library of Los Alamos National Laboratory with contributions from other members of the OAC and from the broader community involved in scholarly communications. To ensure community input, the work of the OAC will be guided by a Project Advisory Board composed of community leaders, a broad-based committee of Web technology experts, and feedback openly solicited from scholars and the scholarly communications community at large over the course of the Project.

The co-Principal Investigators for the OAC Phase I project are Timothy W. Cole of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Neil Fraistat of the University of Maryland, Jane Hunter of the University of Queensland, and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

All work produced as part of the OAC Phase I project will be made available under open source license for the free use and exploitation by other scholars and non-profit educational, scholarly and charitable institutions.

For additional information contact t-cole3 at illinois dot edu or consult the OAC Website at http://www.openannotation.org/

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland is pleased to announce the receipt of an $81,000 award from the Scholarly Communications program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The award will support research for and the writing of a report entitled Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, to be published in fall 2010 by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR); the award will also fund a symposium on the same topic at the University of Maryland in May 2010, at which experts from the cultural heritage sector and computer and information science, as well as practitioners in government, industry, and defense will convene to comment on the report and explore shared interests and practices.

Maryland’s work on the report and symposium will be lead by principal investigator Matthew Kirschenbaum (Associate Director of MITH and Associate Professor of English); he will be joined by co-authors Richard Ovenden (Keeper of Special Collections and Associate Director, Bodleian Library, Oxford) and Gabriela Redwine, an archivist and electronic records specialist at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

MITH’s director Neil Fraistat comments, “Matt Kirschenbaum’s leadership in bibliography, digital forensics, and digital preservation has helped position MITH at the forefront of crucial new work that is reconfiguring archival studies and practices. One of two recent grants from the Mellon Foundation on which MITH will be working in the coming year, _Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections_ allows us to continue fruitful partnerships with the Bodleian Library and the Ransom Center and promises to be a major leap forward for the field.”

See you all next week! (Can you spot the swag?)