Listen to the podcast of this Digital Dialogue

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

“Omeka: Easy Web Publishing for Scholarship and Cultural Heritage”
by Tom Scheinfeldt and Dave Lester (George Mason)

Well into the second decade of the web, many aspiring digital humanists still find it difficult to mount online exhibitions and publish collections-based research because they lack either technical skills or sufficient funding to pay high priced web design vendors. The digital libraries and archives fields have produced high quality repository and collections management software, but these packages carry too much technical overhead and pay too little attention to web presentation and end user interface for most digital humanities projects. Commercial blog packages have made it easy for digital humanists to publish materials to the web, but the blog’s structure of serial text posts does not allow them to present deep collections or complex narratives.

That is why the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, in partnership with the Minnesota Historical Society, has created Omeka . From the Swahili word meaning “to display” or “to lay out for discussion,” Omeka is a next generation web publishing platform for academic work of all kinds, one that bridges the university, library, and museum worlds through–and by helping to advance–a set of commonly recognized web and metadata standards. Omeka is free and open source. It offers low installation and maintenance costs–appealing to individual scholars and smaller cultural heritage projects and institutions that lack technical staffs and large budgets. It is standards based, extensible, and interoperable–insuring compliance with accessibility guidelines and integration with existing digital collections systems to help digital humanists of all stripes design online exhibitions more efficiently. Omeka brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to digital humanities websites–fostering the kind of user interaction and participation that are central to the mission of digital humanities, and providing the contribution mechanisms, tagging facilities, and social networking tools that audiences are coming to expect.

In the first part of this session, Omeka Executive Producer, Tom Scheinfeldt, will introduce the ideas and technologies behind Omeka. In the second part, Omeka Community Liason, Dave Lester, will demo the software, provide tips for getting started, and explain how you can get involved in Omeka’s open source community. An extended period of Q&A will follow.

Tom Scheinfeldt is Managing Director of the Center for History and New Media and Research Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. Dr. Scheinfeldt received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard and his master’s and doctoral degrees from Oxford, where his doctoral thesis examined inter-war interest in science and its history in diverse cultural contexts, including museums, universities, World’s Fairs and the mass media. A research associate at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and a fellow of the Science Museum, London, Dr. Scheinfeldt has lectured and written extensively on the history of popular science, the history of museums, history and new media, and the changing role of history in society, and has worked on traditional exhibitions and digital projects at the Colorado Historical Society, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, The Louisiana State Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the Library of Congress. In addition to managing general operations at the Center for History and New Media, Dr. Scheinfeldt directs several of its online history projects, including Omeka , the September 11 Digital Archive <911digitalarchive.org>, the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 , and Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives .

Dave Lester is the Omeka Community Lead at the Center for History and New Media, and an active developer on the Omeka project. He is also Digital Curator of the American Studies Crossroads Project at Georgetown University, launching a series of exhibitions focusing on the confluence of cultural studies and information technology. Dave is the co-founder of ScholarPress, a development hub for Educational WordPress plugins , co-organized this year’s THATCamp, a barcamp-style Digital Humanities unconference , and is organizing an upcoming Wordcamp for Educators .”

Coming up @MITH 10/7: Brent Seales (University of Kentucky), “EDUCE: Enhanced Digital Unwrapping for Conservation and Exploration.”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2008.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 23, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Cyberinfrastructure and the Future of Libraries”
by JOYCE RAY, IMLS

What can libraries (and digital libraries) contribute to the infrastructure of the web, and how do libraries need to change to do this?

JOYCE RAY has directed the agency’s discretionary library programs since 1997. An archivist by training, Joyce also has responsibility for agency-wide digital initiatives. Prior to joining IMLS, she held positions as Assistant Program Director for Technological Evaluation and Acting Program Director, National Historical Publications and Records Commission; Special Assistant to the Archivist, National Archives and Records Administration; and Head of Special Collections, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

She currently serves as a member of the program committee of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, is the U.S. organizer of the International Digital Cultural Content Forum, and is the principal organizer of the annual IMLS Web-Wise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World.

She helped to organize and was one of the first members of the Joint Committee on Libraries, Archives and Museums sponsored jointly by the American Library Association, the American Association of Museums, and the Society of American Archivists.
She is a certified archivist and holds a Master of Library Science from the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, she holds a PhD in American history, with a specialty in the social history of women and medicine in the U.S., and has taught women’s history at Georgetown University. She has presented at numerous professional meetings about IMLS and its programs, and about trends in libraries, archives and museums relating to technology, professional education, and convergence.

Coming up @MITH 9/30: Tom Scheinfeldt and Dave Lester (George Mason University), “Omeka: Easy Web Publishing for Scholarship and Cultural Heritage”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2008.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

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

The call for papers for Digital Humanities 2009 is now available. (In case you’ve been living in a digital humanities cave for the last twelve months, this prestigious international conference is being hosted by MITH.)

Listen to the podcast of this Digital Dialogue

MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, September 16, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Digital Humanities 3.0: Where We Have Come From and Where We Are Now?”
by STANLEY KATZ

I want to ask the related questions of where we are and where we are headed in the digital humanities. Since I am an historian, I approach these questions by asking where we have been and how we got here. Digital Humanities 1.0 was the use of information technology and computing to produce forms of scholarship that literally could not be done in the analog age: the encoding of text (TEI), computational linguistics and the creation of humanities databases (Perseus) were the two most prominent examples. DH 2.0 was the era inaugurated by IATH and scholars such as Jerry McGann, Ed Ayers and others in reconceptualizing traditional humanities questions through the intellectual power of technology — relating text to image, creating complexly interrelated databases, use of large-scale digitization. DH 3.0 is where I hope we are, searching for a new order of technical possibilities that will change modes of thought. DH 3.0 assumes the technology and moves on to give primary consideration to intellectual problems that were inconceivable in either the analog or early digital eras. The challenge is no longer either the usage of technology or the linking of technology to more or less traditional humanities problems, but reconceptualizing the problems. But of course all of this assumes what is not true — that we put a digital humanities infrastructure into place.

STANLEY KATZ, Lecturer with the rank of Professor in the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University, is President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies. He graduated from Harvard University in 1955 with a major in English History and Literature, and his Ph.D. in the same field from Harvard in 1961. He attended Harvard Law School in 1969-70. His recent research focuses upon the relationship of civil society and constitutionalism to democracy, and upon the relationship of the United States to the international human rights regime. Formerly Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University, Katz is a scholar of American legal and constitutional history, and on philanthropy and non-profit institutions. He is the Editor of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States and of the forthcoming Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History (6 vols., February, 2009). The author and editor of numerous books and articles, he has served as President of the Organization of American Historians and the American Society for Legal History and as Vice President of the Research Division of the American Historical Association. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Newberry Library, the Copyright Clearance Center and numerous other institutions. He is currently Vice President of the International Society for Cultural Property and a Commissioner of the National Historic Publications and Records Commission. He also currently serves as Chair of the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council Working Group on Cuba. Katz is a member of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society; a Fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society of American Historians; a Corresponding Member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and an Academico Correspondiente of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. He has honorary degrees from several universities.

Coming up @MITH 9/23: Joyce Ray (IMLS), “Digital Humanities and the Future of Libraries”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2008.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 pleased to announce another great semester of digital humanities talks at the University of Maryland: our fall 2008 Digital Dialogues schedule is now online. We look forward to seeing you this coming Tuesday, when Doug Reside presents on his recent work with AXE, the Ajax XML Encoder.

As always, all talks are free and open to the public.

Listen to the podcast of this Digital Dialogue

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, September 9, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“The MITHological AXE: Multimedia Metadata Encoding with the Ajax XML Encoder”
by DOUG RESIDE

For our first Digital Dialogue of the new academic year, come learn about recently completed work at MITH funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Start Up grant.

The Ajax XML Encoder (AXE) allows users with limited technical knowledge to add metadata to text, image, video, and audio files. Users can collaboratively tag a text in TEI, associate XML with time stamps in video or audio files, and mark off regions of an image to be linked to external metadata. With an intuitive, web-based interface, AXE makes the process of preparing online digital editions and archives more efficient and accurate. AXE also facilitates collaboration in the digital humanities by permitting multiple scholars to work on the same document or archive at the same time from various locations, and will track all work so that variant versions can be collated and all versions can be archived. The Ajax XML encoder, with its intuitive Web-based interface, will come as a breath of fresh air to those who have previously been frustrated by text-centric tagging tools which require an expert knowledge of mark-up languages.

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.

Coming up @MITH 9/16: Stan Katz, “Digital Humanities 3.0: Where We Have Come From and Where We Are Now?”

Watch for MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule available soon!

All talks free and open to the public!

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