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MITH
March 31, 2010
Community , Digital Dialogues

4/6 MITH Digital Dialogue: Patrik Svenson, “Envisioning the Digital Humanities: Digital Facelifts & Turtle-necked Hairshirts”

“Envisioning the Digital Humanities: Digital Facelifts and Turtle-necked Hairshirts.” by Patrik Svenson

In this talk, Patrik will explore the multiple ways in which the digital humanities have been envisioned and how the digital humanities can often become a means for thinking about the state and future of the humanities at large. Patrik will also briefly introduce HUMlab at Umeå University as well as the four-part article series on the digital humanities he hopes to finish in 2010.

Patrik Svensson, Ph.D., is a docent in the humanities and information technology and the director of HUMlab at Umeå University. His research and practice span language learning and technology, the field of digital humanities, virtual environments, digital cultural heritage, cultural innovation and learning spaces. His publications include a textbook on Gothic, a recent monograph on language education and technology and a planned four-part article series on the field of digital humanities.

Coming up @ MITH April 13th: Sharon Leon (George Mason), “Doing History in Public: Digital History in the Digital Humanities.”

View MITH’s . . . Continue Reading

MITH
March 31, 2010
News

MITH Fellowship Call

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 2010-2011 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 (from RASA, Undergraduate Studies, the Diversity Initiative Faculty Relations Committee, for example), 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 . . . Continue Reading

MITH
March 24, 2010
Community , Digital Dialogues

3/30 MITH Digital Dialogue: Nick Chen & Kari Kraus, “Prototyping a Dual-Display e-Reader in the Literature Classroom”

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

“Prototyping a Dual-Display e-Reader in the Literature Classroom” by NICK CHEN and KARI KRAUS

This semester, the Computer Science Department and the English Department at UMD teamed up to provide Honors students in Book 2.0: The History of the Book and the Future of Reading with a prototype electronic reading device. The deployment is part of a longitudinal study to understand how electronic reading devices are used in an academic setting. One of the goals this semester is also to determine how the introduction of a second device–wirelessly linked to the first–affects the reading experience. In this Digital Dialogues talk, Chen will describe the devices being used by Kraus and her students, their design rationale, and some of the more unique aspects of the study being conducted. Kraus will preview an upcoming assignment that has students reading a 20th-century avant-garde novel on the dual-display e-readers, a novel originally published in unbound sheaves that the reader is . . . Continue Reading

MITH
March 17, 2010
Community , Digital Dialogues , Events

3/23 MITH Digital Dialogue: Beth Bonsignore, “The Design and Use of StoryKit: An Intergenerational Mobile Storytelling App”

A MITH Digital Dialogue Tuesday, March 23rd, 12:30-1:45 MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“The Design and Use of StoryKit: An Intergenerational Mobile Storytelling App” by BETH BONSIGNORE

Today’s mobile devices are natively equipped with multimedia means for families to capture and share their daily experiences. However, designing authoring tools that effectively integrate the discrete media-capture components of mobile devices to enable rich expression remains a challenge. This presentation will provide a brief overview of collaborative technologies that support children’s storytelling, with a focus on mobile applications. It will detail a 4-month study on the observed use of StoryKit, a mobile interface that integrates multimodal media-capture tools to support the creation of multimedia stories on an iPhone/iPod Touch. The primary objectives of the study were to explore the ways in which applications like StoryKit enable families to create and share stories; and to investigate how the created stories themselves might inform the design of, and learning potential for mobile storytelling applications. Its results suggest that StoryKit’s relatively simple but well-integrated . . . Continue Reading

MITH
March 7, 2010
News , Research

Announcing Musical Theatre Online!

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is proud to announce the launch of the prototype of Music Theatre Online (MTO), a freely accessible web-based archive of musical and music theatre. Funded by a Digital Humanities Startup grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, MTO provides a model for online scholarly archives of the exceptionally multimodal art form of music theatre. “Under the inspired leadership of Doug Reside,” comments MITH Director Neil Fraistat, “MTO promises to revolutionize the study of musical theatre, and adds to an increasing number of MITH projects involving the performing arts.”

The MTO prototype makes available, with the generous permission of creators James Gardiner and Nick Blaemire, audio and video files, photographs, and seventeen TEI encoded drafts of the 2008 Broadway musical, Glory Days charting the development of the show from early sketches through regional productions to opening night. For several versions of the show, the lyrics have been linked to audio transcriptions of related performances, allowing a reader to closely study both . . . Continue Reading

MITH
March 1, 2010
News

Doug Reside Promoted to Associate Director!

Dear all,

It is my great pleasure to share with you the news that Doug Reside has just been promoted from Assistant to Associate Director of MITH in recognition of the superb work he has done since arriving here in 2006.

As many of you know, Doug is one of those rare humanities scholars who also has a degree in computer science. During the past three and a half years as assistant director of MITH, he has supervised all of our technical work while also serving as our lead programmer. At the same time, he has written a series of successful and important grants, helping us to establish an international profile in digital tool building and in the nexus of the digital humanities and the performing arts. His multimedia XML markup tool AXE has already been at the center of three recent grants; two from NEH and one from Mellon, and he was responsible for the technical design and management of the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, a project supported by an . . . Continue Reading