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.

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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.

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

“Are Robots Real? The Robot as an Object of Study”
by DESPINA KAKOUDAKI

This talk explores the figure of the robot as an object of study, and one that specifically requires an integration of methodologies from both the humanities and the sciences. Traditionally, the figure of the robot has been regarded very differently in these two realms: in the sciences, it is related to the promises of scientific inquiry, and motivates research and innovation in actual technological applications, or the future possibility for such applications. In the humanities, however, the robot is a figure of fiction and science fiction, which, despite its un-reality channels feelings about culture and technology, difference and justice, often in indirect ways. After exploring the implications and fundamental trends of the two modes, the paper proposes that an integrated interdisciplinary methodology would allow us to better understand the attraction and meaning of the robot as a figure, without resorting to the binary opposition between fantasy and reality. Using examples from fiction, popular culture, recent scientific applications and research in robotics, I argue that the two approaches fuel each other: as cultural figures, robots are both real and imaginary, and indeed it is often their imaginary qualities that fuel and inspire actual research. Despite the claims of roboticists that real robots are immanent, the cultural power and meaning of robots comes from their fictional and literary tradition, indeed from their unreality, their virtuality.

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DESPINA KAKOUDAKI teaches interdisciplinary courses in literature and film, visual culture, and the history of technology and new media at American University. She completed her doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, and has taught at UC Berkeley and Harvard University, where she was instrumental in the formation of the film studies undergraduate and graduate programs. This talk is part of a larger two-book project on the representation of artificial people, such as robots, cyborgs and androids, in literature, film and philosophy. She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her current book project, The Human Machine: A Cultural History of Artificial People, which traces the history and cultural function of constructed people and animated objects from antiquity to the present.

Kakoudaki’s interests include cultural studies, silent cinema, science fiction, apocalyptic narratives, and the representation of race and gender in literature and film. She has co-edited a new collection of essays on the work of Pedro Almodóvar (with Brad Epps, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press), and published articles on robots and cyborgs, race and melodrama in action and disaster films, body transformation and technology in early film, the political role of the pin-up in World War II, and the representation of the archive in postmodern fiction.

Coming up @MITH 3/31: “Shakespeare’s Quartos: 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).

Registration for Digital Humanities 2009, hosted by MITH on the College Park campus June 22-25, is now open. Everything you need to know is right here.

We will try to reschedule.