A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, March 3, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“An Abundant Humanities Library”
by Sayeed Choudhury

One of the most exciting and potentially transformative aspects of digital humanities is an inflection from dealing with scarcity to dealing with abundance. Traditionally, humanities libraries have been defined by their emphasis on rare materials or special collections. What are the implications of having an abundant humanities library?

As a greater amount of these materials becomes available in digital format, there is growing evidence that humanists might adopt data-driven research or teaching methods that are typically common in the sciences. The recent “Digging into Data” request for proposals represents an example of this new frontier. The Roman de la Rose Digital Library led by the Johns Hopkins University represents a useful case study in this realm. Choudhury will discuss the implications of the Rose Digital Library for digital librarians and scholars and offer ideas about how humanists might consider developing and leveraging cyberinfrastructure across domains.

G. Sayeed Choudhury is the Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University. He is also the Director of Operations for the Institute of Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) based at Johns Hopkins. He is also a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins, a Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Senior Presidential Fellow with the Council on Library and Information Resources.

Choudhury serves as principal investigator for projects funded through the National Science Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He has oversight for the digital library activities and services provided by the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University. Choudhury has published articles in journals such as the International Journal of Digital Curation, D-Lib, the Journal of Digital Information, First Monday, and Library Trends. He has served on committees for the Digital Curation Conference, Open Repositories, Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, and Web-Wise. He has presented at various conferences including Educause, CNI, DLF, ALA, ACRL, and international venues including IFLA, the Kanazawa Information Technology Roundtable and eResearch Australasia.

Coming up @MITH 3/10: Project Bamboo: An Open Meeting (facilitated by Neil Fraistat)

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).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, February 24, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a
manuscript of extraordinary importance to the history of science. This
thirteenth century prayer book contains erased texts that were written
several centuries earlier still. These erased texts include two
treatises by Archimedes that can be found nowhere else, The Method and
Stomachion. The manuscript sold at auction to a private collector on
the 29th October 1998. The owner deposited the manuscript at The
Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, a few months later. Since
that date the manuscript has been the subject of conservation, imaging
and scholarship, in order to better read the texts. The Archimedes
Palimpsest project, as it is called, has shed new light on Archimedes
and revealed new texts from the ancient world. It has also generated a
great deal of public curiosity, as well as the interest of scholars
throughout the world.

On 29th October 2008, we celebrated the ten year anniversary of the
project. What was erased text, in terrible condition, impossible to
access, and yet foundational to the history and science of the West,
is now legible, and instantly available for free on the Web. This talk
will cover the evolution of the project as well as its future
directions.

WILLIAM NOEL, Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at the Walters Art
Museum, received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in England in
1993. He has served as director of studies in the history of art at
Downing College, Cambridge University, and as Assistant Curator of
Manuscripts at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Noel is the
author of The Harley Psalter (1995), an in-depth investigation into
the making of an illustrated 11th-century Psalter. He is also
co-editor and contributor of the exhibition catalogue The Utrecht
Psalter in Medieval Art: Picturing the Psalms of David (1996). In
2002, together with Prof. Daniel Weiss and Dr. Griffith Mann, he
curated the exhibition The Book of Kings: Art, War, and the Morgan
Library’s Medieval Picture Bible. His recent book, The Oxford Bible
Pictures (2004), concerns a series of English miniatures of the
13th-century at the Walters. Since January 1999, Noel has directed an
international program to conserve, image, and study the Archimedes
Palimpsest, the unique source for three treatises by the ancient Greek
mathematician Archimedes (www.archimedespalimpsest.org). He has
co-written with Prof. Reviel Netz a popular account of the project
entitled The Archimedes Codex (2007). Will has taught and lectured
widely. He is on the faculty of the Rare Book School, University of
Virginia, and is an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Coming up @MITH 3/3:
Sayeed Choudhury (Johns Hopkins), “An Abundant Humanities Library”
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).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, February 17, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Copyright in the Real World”
by JEAN DRYDEN

Archival institutions have enthusiastically begun to digitize their holdings to make them more widely available via the Internet; however, in doing so, they face a number of challenging copyright issues. As yet, we know little about the operation of copyright in the digital environment, and archives and other cultural heritage institutions are seeking to develop best practices that will make their holdings more widely available while protecting the legitimate interests of rights holders. Jean Dryden will discuss the findings of her doctoral dissertation, which found that Canadian repositories’ copyright practices in making their holding available online are more restrictive than copyright law envisages, both in terms of what they select for Internet access, and their attempts to control further uses of their online holdings.

In 2008, JEAN DRYDEN joined the faculty of Maryland’s i-School, where she teaches in the archives, records, and information management program. Her dissertation explored the copyright practices of Canadian archival repositories in digitizing their holdings for Internet access. Her research interests include copyright in the digital environment, information law and policy, archival arrangement and description, and digital preservation, as these issues pertain to access to information.

Coming up @MITH 2/24: William Noel (Walters Art Museum), “Archimedes in Bits: Ten Years of Work on the Archimedes Palimpsest”

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).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, February 10, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Managing Projects in the Digital Humanities”
by JEREMY BOGGS

Crucial to the success of any digital humanities project is a clear and deliberate plan for management, design and development, and connecting with users. In this presentation, Jeremy Boggs will discuss project management approaches and design/development process for digital humanities. The talk will cover initial planning for a project, working with various personnel, creating time frames and milestones, establishing an in-house design and development process, and connecting with users once a project is public.

JEREMY BOGGS is the Creative Lead at the Center for History and New Media, where he leads the web design and development team and is the project manager for Omeka. He is also a PhD student in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. His dissertation focuses on the history of cascading style sheets as a design language for the Web. His research interests include the history of technology, history of design, and US cultural history. You can learn more about Jeremy at his website, ClioWeb (clioweb.org).

Coming up @MITH 2/17: Jean Dryden (iSchool), “Copyright in the Real World”

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).