Ian Bogost, Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing & Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. Georgia Institute of Technology @ibogost

MITH Conference Room Tuesday, April 30, 2013 12:30pm

Crowdsourcing is a hot not-so-new trend that’s been heralded as a solution for funding creative works of all kinds, from films to games to manufactured products. Popular sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are also venture-funded startups that facilitate distributed contribution to ideas, providing the appearance of investment or pre-orders. But even as more and more individuals source and fund projects through sites like Kickstarter, few realize that the satisfaction (or disappointment) they take away from the process has more to do with the experience of kickstarting, rather than from the product itself. As crowdfunding becomes its own form of entertainment irrespective of whether or not projects succeed or fail, the projects created risk becoming empty shells, lies that can never produce the results they promise because their existence was never meant to produce them in the first place. This talk offers a philosophy of crowdfunding as entertainment, and then presents a new project in development at Georgia Tech as a part of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing that tries to apply some of these lessons from popular personal electronics projects, including Kickstarted products like Twine, and related projects like Arduino and Raspberry Pi. . . . Continue Reading

Irene Eleta, Doctoral Candidate College of Information Studies, University of Maryland @ieleta

MITH Conference Room Tuesday, April 23, 2013 12:30pm

Social media is international: users from hundreds of different cultures and language backgrounds are generating and sharing content. As a result, language and national borders emerge in the communication landscape online. What can we do to make those borders more porous? Expatriates, migrants, minorities, diasporic communities, and language learners play an important role in forming transnational networks, by creating social ties across nations and communities. A closer look to their connections and interactions online might illuminate us in many ways, i.e. how to increase intercultural awareness, information diffusion across language borders, and promote international relations, outreach or activism at a global scale. Focusing on the personal social network of multilingual Twitter users, I will discuss how social network analysis unveils the intersections of language groups. In general, the use of social network analysis to discover patterns of intercultural connections constitutes an enriching approach that can be applied in many disciplines. Also, I will talk about the influence of the social network on the language choices of multilingual users, with particular attention to the use of English as a Lingua Franca. Finally, I will invite the audience to reflect on what prevents or encourages translation behaviors and cross-cultural awareness in the social media context. . . . Continue Reading

Robin Pike, Digital Collections Librarian University of Maryland Libraries

MITH Conference Room Tuesday, April 9, 2013 12:30pm

In February 2012, as the new manager of DCMR, I was tasked with revamping the digitization center, increasing production, expanding services throughout the Libraries, and expanding services to include audio and video digitization, in addition to managing digitization projects. After consulting with stakeholders throughout the Libraries, just over one year later, we have expanded our staff, acquired new equipment, are in a newfacility, and are testing production-level workflows and standards. Our digitization center is modeled on other, larger digitization centers, but scaled to fit the Libraries’ estimated, near-future needs.

My colleagues and I have also worked to define the separation of digital unit responsibilities between production and preservation, digitization and digital projects. Though DCMR focuses solely on production-based on content-managers’ requests, we maintain a larger focus on overall digital operations. Beyond digitization request orders for patrons, many of the larger projects we undertake frequently include other presentation or digital humanities components. Some of these projects include: the digitization of Katherine Ann Porter’s correspondence to create a digital scholarly edition, in collaboration with various other units and departments; digitizing a collection of Civil War-era letters and diaries that may be used in future classes as education exercises to perform transcription and TEI; and digitizing multiple formats and series of materials throughout a broadcasting collection, providing an extensive picture of the collection for a Special Collections exhibit. . . . Continue Reading

Abigail McEwen, Assistant Professor of Latin American Art Department of Art History and Archeology, University of Maryland

MITH Conference Room Monday, April 1, 2013 12:30pm

In January 2012, the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston launched the Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art Digital Archive and Publications Project. Available online (http://icaadocs.mfah.org), the Documents Project is dedicated to the recovery and dissemination of primary source materials related to modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino art. A working group was established in the greater Washington, DC area last July, and the University of Maryland is part of a consortium of institutional partners that includes the Archives of American Art (Smithsonian Institution), the Organization of American States, the Inter-University Program for Latino Research (University of Notre Dame), and George Mason University.

This talk will introduce the ICAA Documents Project and its recovery initiative in the Washington area. Undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Maryland have worked on this project over the academic year 2012-13, and their contributions – from archival discovery to digitization and scholarly analysis – will be profiled as part of the group’s work. The Documents Project is at the forefront of digital initiatives in the field of modern Latin American art history, and it has tremendous potential for use in teaching, research, and collaboration among scholars across the Americas. . . . Continue Reading