With Assistant Professor Kari Kraus in the iSchool and the campus Mobility Initiative, MITH ran a mobile scavenger hunt that used iPhones and Web 2.0 technology to educate visitors about a dramatic moment in campus history, the Great Fire of 1912. Maryland Day attendees were able to use GPS systems and online services to locate the original buildings, as well as a replica of the “Cornerstone Box,” a campus artifact, in a practice known as geocaching.

A MITH Digital Dialogue

Tuesday, May 5, 12:30-1:45

MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Networked Reenactments: how television, museums, and universities tried to find audiences in the nineties”

By KATIE KING

Some knowledge engineers claim that the 20 disciplines that came into being in 1900 fractured into 8000 specialized topics in science alone ninety years later. Reenactments were among the experiments in communication across knowledge worlds that began to take particular form in the nineties. Science-styled television documentary forms, internet repurposings, museum exhibitions, and academic historiographies worked hard to shape an array of cognitive sensations accessed, skilled and displayed by new technologies. These experiments became epistemological melodramas of identity, national interests, and global restructuring that tried to solve the tricky mapping problems of addressing many audiences simultaneously.

KATIE KING is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Fellow of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). She received her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her interdisciplinary scholarship is located at the intersection of feminist technoscience studies, cyberculture and media studies, and LGBT Studies. Her first book was “Theory in its Feminist Travels: conversations in U.S. women’s movements.” She has two others in progress now, “Speaking with Things,” an introduction to writing technologies, and the other, “Networked Reenactments,” flexible knowledges under globalization.

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, April 28, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Preserving Virtual Worlds: A MITH Research Update”
By NEIL FRAISTAT, MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM, KARI KRAUS, and DOUG RESIDE

Interactive media are highly complex and at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is actively exploring methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. Major activities include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games, electronic literature and Second Life, an interactive multiplayer game. Project partners are the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (lead), the University of Maryland, Stanford University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Linden Lab. Second Life content participants include Life to the Second Power, Democracy Island and the International Spaceflight Museum. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is funded by the Preserving Creative America initiative under the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) administered by the Library of Congress. In this MITH Research Update, we will discuss the current state of the project eighteen months into the grant cycle, and suggest directions for future research.

NEIL FRAISTAT, Director of MITH & Professor of English
MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM, Associate Director of MITH & Associate Professor of English
KARI KRAUS, Assistant Professor in the iSchool and English
DOUG RESIDE, Assistant Director of MITH & Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater

Coming up @MITH 5/5: Katie King (Women’s Studies), “Networked Reenactments”

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, 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).