Emma Millon
February 8, 2012
Community, Digital Dialogues
No Comments

2/14 MITH Digital Dialogue: Melanie Kill, “Knowledge and Meaning in the Information Age: A Humanist Perspective on Wikipedia”

Tuesday, February 14, 12:30-1:45PM
MITH Conference Room, B0135 McKeldin Library
Co-sponsored by the Department of English

“Knowledge and Meaning in the Information Age: A Humanist Perspective on Wikipedia” by MELANIE KILL

Over the past decade, Wikipedia has drawn together a community of volunteer editors, translators, and programmers who have created the largest encyclopedia in history and one of the ten most visited websites in the world. But, while Wikipedia was born online, many of the ideas that inform its composition have long histories. Human beings have strived to give order to knowledge in the face of worries about information overload for ages. Their various responses have been shaped by the cultural norms, social needs, and technological possibilities of their historical contexts. This talk will focus on the old media precedents for Wikipedia’s new media success story to explore what reciprocal relationships they reveal between concepts like knowledge and information and the technologies we design to build and distribute them.

This talk will be held in the MITH Conference Room, in the basement of McKeldin Library.

Melanie Kill is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her scholarship is in rhetorical genre theory, digital rhetorics, and critical discourse analysis, with specific interests in genre change in new media, the concept of uptake, and innovative rhetorics. She is currently at work on a book entitled, The Last Encyclopedia: Wikipedia and the Networking of Human Knowledge. Follow Dr. Kill on Twitter @mkkill.

A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues webpage.

Unable to attend the events in person?

Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions.

All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: Emma Millon, Community Lead, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-9887).


Amanda Visconti
February 7, 2012
Community
1 Comment

Extremely Visible and Incredibly Close Reading of Logos

The Foreign Literatures in America (FLA) project’s intellectual goals present a graphic design challenge marked by a delicate balance. We’re creating an archive that will demonstrate how the idea of Americanness has been shaped by actors beyond those traditionally labelled “American”; how do we create a logo and other graphic properties that reflect this focus on Americanness, without also presenting symbols of the United States (the U.S. flag, the shape of our portion of the continent, etc.) as visually—and thus thematically—dominant?

We found design inspiration in images such as Edward Brewer’s dark, estranging presentation of the Statue of Liberty on the front of a 1908 Life magazine, book covers like Kafka’s Amerika, and the iconic photographs of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses. We researched estranged geographies: maps estranging the usual world placing of the United States by moving it from its usual central position or erasing it, showing the U.S. inscribed by bits of foreign textuality (e.g. by a grid of foreign flags or book covers). We thought about the Statue of Liberty in terms of its global history (images of the Statue being built in France or on the boat to the United States) and possible estrangement (perspectives aimed from behind the Statue and away from the U.S., or dividing the wrought-metal grid of the original “flame” into cells filled by flags of foreign nations). We even imagined a counterpart to Robert Buss’s “Dickens Dreaming” painting, with Uncle Sam or the Statue of Liberty dreaming of key figures from foreign literature (way too complex for a logo!).

Throughout our discussions of imagery representing our project, we struggled with ways to indicate focus without dominance, influence without appropriation. Imagery like the melting pot or Manifest-Destiny-era political cartoons, although demonstrating both planetarity and an American focus, was shot down because it carried obvious implications of an imperialist America dominating or improving the literatures of other countries. The current FLA image uses a global map with an only partially imagined America, but we’ll probably transition to using images of circulation or communication (to use Peter’s phrase, “capillary exchange”) for our final logo; imagery involving bloodlines, trade routes, or circulation all speak to global routes passing through American culture. The difficulty with such images is to imply circular movement rather than an omnidirectional power emanating from or draining into the United States; a logo with the effect of a two-headed arrow would help us show a pluralized and opened United States, while at the same time demonstrating the cultural influences flowing in.

A logo is admittedly a small thing, and only one item in a network of web design decisions that will frame how visitors interpret our project. At the same time, it’s the single most visible representative of the goals of our project; we’d be remiss if we didn’t port our close reading skills into our digital humanities design work. Follow us @FLAProject and @UMD_MITH to hear when the FLA’s official site is released and check out the results of our current design work!

Amanda Visconti is MITH Webmaster and a Ph.D. student in the English Department at the University of Maryland; she serves as both a member of the FLA’s founding executive editorial board and its digital liaison. Foreign Literatures in America is a project directed by MITH Faculty Fellow Peter Mallios. Read more about FLA in Dr. Mallios’ recent blog post.


MITH
February 7, 2012
DLC
No Comments

The DLC is Back!

The Deena Larsen Collection (DLC) is back up and running. Thank you for your patience while we fixed the website.


MITH
February 2, 2012
Community, News
No Comments

Former MITHer Doug Reside Featured in The New York Times

Former MITH Associate Director Doug Reside, now Digital Curator for the Performing Arts at the New York Public Library, was recently covered by Jennifer Schuessler in “Tale of the Floppy Disks: How Jonathan Larsen Created ‘Rent’” on The New York Times Arts Beat blog. The article highlights Doug’s research on musical theatre preservation, specifically the curation of the 189 floppy disks left behind by Jonathan Larsen, creator of Rent.

When he’s not rummaging through stacks of floppy disks, Doug is leading the encoding and documentation of Music Theatre Online, a digital archive of texts, images, video, and audio files relating to early musical theatre, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. To learn more about Doug’s work, follow @dougreside on Twitter or read his posts on the NYPL blog.

Well done, Doug!


Emma Millon
January 31, 2012
Community, Digital Dialogues
3 Comments

2/7 MITH Digital Dialogue: Julia Flanders, “Small TEI Projects on a Large Scale: TAPAS”

*As of 10 am on 2/6/2012, this talk has been cancelled due to illness. MITH will be rescheduling and will update as soon as we have a new date. *

 

Tuesday, February 7, 12:30-1:45PM
2115 Tawes Hall
Co-sponsored by the Department of English

“Small TEI Projects on a Large Scale: TAPAS” by JULIA FLANDERS

The TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS) is tackling one of the trickiest problems of scholarly text encoding. How can we provide robust, large-scale TEI publication services, while accommodating the detailed scholarly insight that makes TEI such a valuable tool for the digital humanities? What level of customization and variation can we support without compromising on interoperability, and what are the mechanisms by which we can achieve the optimal balance? And who needs variation anyway–what kinds of scholarly insight are at stake, or at risk?

TAPAS seeks to offer long-term TEI repository and publishing services, with special focus on supporting scholars who lack access to XML publishing infrastructure or expertise at their own institutions. Supported by a planning grant from the IMLS and now by a two-year IMLS National Leadership Grant and an NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant, the TAPAS service will make it possible for scholars to use TEI in their teaching and research without mastering the full suite of XML technologies. The service will also provide access to consulting, training, documentation, and community-developed tools. This talk will explore the conceptual and strategic challenges in developing TAPAS, and in particular the problem of how to harmonize–or transcend–divergent approaches to TEI encoding.

This talk will be held in 2115 Tawes Hall.

Julia Flanders is the Director of the Women Writers Project,  part of the Center for Digital Scholarship in the Brown University Library. She is also editor-in-chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly, an online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal of digital humanities, and has served in a variety of positions within the Text Encoding Initiative, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, centerNet, and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Her research focuses on text encoding, digital methods of scholarly communication, and the politics of labor in the digital academy.

A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues webpage.

Unable to attend the events in person? Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions.

All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: Emma Millon, Community Lead, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-9887).


Carla Peterson
January 30, 2012
Faculty Fellows, Research
No Comments

Storytelling

I ended my last blog entry with the suggestion that one possible virtue of virtuality might be that a digital archive inverts the book’s relationship between word and image (in the case of Black Gotham, portraits of people as well as depictions of places—maps, streets, buildings, etc.).  “In my book,” I wrote, “word was the primary vehicle for telling my story and image functioned as supporting illustration; in the digital archive, image is the primary vehicle and word supporting document.”

I’m well aware, however, that much like a printed book a digital archive must create and sustain a narrative arc—consisting not only of a beginning, middle, and end, but also of a certain narrative tension that impels the viewer forward to look, search, discover.  But unlike a book (at least unlike the case of Black Gotham where Yale University Press was incredibly generous in the number of pages it allotted to me) a digital archive seems to demand greater concision and focus.  It seems to be a question of how to get more out of less.

How then does a person of the word like me create a narrative out of images?  At our last MITH meeting, Seth suggested that I might think in terms of organizing my archive by chapters.  But the very term chapter now strikes me as too bookish, so I’ve begun to think more in terms of stories, maybe even episodes, each of which forms what I’m calling a “cluster.”

So far, I’ve identified about eighteen clusters.  I envision that each one will start with a “portal,” a doorway through which the viewer enters.  In the first cluster, the portal will be my family tree: viewers will be able to click on names of family members and meet them through photographs, obituaries, personal commentary, and the like.  The portals of the remaining clusters will be maps that foreground place.  By means of clickable icons, they will pinpoint, and allow the viewer entry into, the many sites—neighborhoods, streets, buildings—that anchor my story.  A first map will introduce nineteenth-century Gotham—its commercial areas, ports, fashionable neighborhoods of the white elite, as well as areas inhabited by poorer folk, whether black, native born whites, Irish or German immigrants.  Later maps will highlight specific sites of particular significance to the black community—churches, schools, institutions—or to individuals—home, work places, etc.—and tell their stories.

But in and of themselves the clusters don’t really create narrative tension.  So how can I organize them to create a narrative that will pull viewers in and stimulate their interest?  I’m thinking that one technique might be that of contrast: for example, the introductory map would be organized around the contrast of wealthy neighborhoods of the white elite to the downtrodden areas that were home to black New Yorkers and lower class whites.

Another technique could be what I call “point-counterpoint” that illustrates how every step forward taken by the black elite was met with resistance by white New Yorkers, forcing them to take at least half a step back.  Proceeding chronologically, I would show how black leaders of the 1820s, ‘30s, and ‘40s struggled to form a cohesive community by establishing schools and other kinds of institutions, but were consistently opposed by white racists for whom mob violence was often the weapon of choice (the African Grove theater riot in the early 1820s, the 1834 Chatham Street Chapel riot).  At the same time, I would juxtapose black New Yorkers’ sense of themselves—their hopes and aspirations—during these decades against the views of British visitors like Mrs. Felton, Mrs. Trollope, and Charles Dickens, who wrote about the city’s black population from the ignorant, negative perspective of an outsider.  I would also point out how such a juxtaposition is replicated in the 1850s as the rise of black entrepreneurship in the city was met with similar hostile and derogatory reactions from American writers William Bobo, George Foster, and others.  My archive’s narrative arc reaches its zenith (or maybe I should say its nadir) with the draft riots of July 1863 during which white mobs set out to destroy everything black New Yorkers had so painstakingly tried to build.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  I first need to get back to Omeka, create my clusters and enter my data and metadata.

editor’s note: Carla L. Peterson is professor of English at the University of Maryland. She currently is completing a faculty fellowship at MITH. This post originally appeared at Black Gotham Archive on January 27, 2012.


Emma Millon
January 27, 2012
Community, News
No Comments

Spring MITH Monitor Hot Off the Press!

A new semester has begun here at the Maryland Institute of Technology for the Humanities (MITH). With it brings news of collaborative projects, successful workshops we’ve attended and hosted, and the fun always had in the daily life of MITH. The MITH Monitor is available in hard copy and digital formats. We invite you to take a look!

If you’d like to be added to our print mailing list, please contact Emma Millon, Community Lead, emillon[at]umd[dot]edu.


MITH
January 26, 2012
Community
No Comments

Deena Larsen Collection Temporarily Down

The Deena Larsen Collection website is temporarily down. We are working to get it back up and running. Thanks for your patience! Check back here and follow @UMD_MITH for updates.


Hayim Lapin
January 26, 2012
Faculty Fellows
No Comments

Thinking about the End Product

Since my last post, I have been working on a grant application. This has afforded the opportunity of some stock taking. I’ve also had some very helpful conversations with scholars in the field: Juan Garcés and Matt Munson in Hebrew Biblical Studies, Tim Finney in New Testament and Desmond Schmidt in textual computing and classics.

1. Collation. Based on very simple normalization and tokenization and a few samples, CollateX will remain error prone, unless the algorithm changes significantly. Examples: (1) In a Mishnah section with repeated words, slight differences in spelling resulted in pushing a whole clause off to the second match. (2) In another passage, CollateX failed to diagnose a missing clause in the text and aligned non matching tokens. My estimate is that currently the error rate is above 10% (for one passage it was about 15%). Better normalization will improve this result. This raises the question of whether the normalization (or, which may amount to the same thing, having CollateX ignore certain characters in comparison) can be carried out automatically, and what this would look like, or whether, as Desmond Schmidt assures me, the whole enterprise is wrongheaded.

2. Statistical measures, now done by hand, but ideally automated. I have now invested in a license for SPSS. This, and my old friend Excel have allowed me to run some preliminary analyses. First: run collations on every Mishnah section in my sample chapter using a few representative witnesses. Transfer the output to Excel; manually fix the alignment (remember, high error rate). Then start flagging variations. I have opted for a method that is akin to what Schmidt and Tim Finney have used: effectively to create a master document with all possible readings, and use a binary encoding (1, 0) for each witness for whether the reading appears in a given witness. Use SPSS to generate a distance matrix, multi-dimensional scaling (MDS), and clustering. I have also experimented with sites providing a graphic interface to Bioinformatic software (FastME and Phylip) to produce phylogenetic trees.

The results were interesting enough that I wanted to see the results with more careful identification of variance (I’m doing these by hand, after all) and more witnesses. I used the sections with the fullest representation among witnesses (Chapter 2, Mishnah 1-2), choosing a total of 10 witnesses. The results I got were consistent with the larger text sample and fewer witnesses, but neither represented the accepted wisdom on the relationship between manuscripts. I therefore divided the cases between no-variation, substantive (different word, different gender, change in grammatical form), and orthographic (initial waw, matres lectiones, spacing between preposition and word). As an example, the Greek word emporia generated no fewer than six variant spellings, but all represented a recognizable version of the word.

Now, there were some interesting results: the manuscripts thought to be of the “Palestinian type” clustered closely on substantive differences, considerably less so (and differently) on orthographic differences.

MDS for Substantive Differences
MDS for Substantive Differences, 10 Witnesses

 

MDS for Orthographic DifferencesMDS for Orthographic Differences, 10 Witnesses 

 

Rooted Tree (Phylip) for Substantive Differences, 10 Witnesses 

 

The lesson: Orthographic and substantive variations do not coincide, probably due to scribal decision-making (and inconsistency). Substantive differences  seem to be better for groupings of text families. (This may be easier to identify automatically as well: normalizing orthography to improve collation erases orthographic difference (by definition), while retaining non-orthographic difference). But lingusitic and orthographic differences are of research significance too.  We may need a way for the user to flag readings to be compared.

Hayim Lapin is Robert H. Smith Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland. He currently is completing a faculty fellowship at MITH. This post originally appeared at Digital Mishnah on January 25, 2012.


Amanda Visconti
January 25, 2012
Community, Events, News
1 Comment

THATCamp Games: Maryland Is For Gamers

Sheet of stickers from THATCamp Games 2012.

THATCamp Games, last weekend’s four-day unconference on digital humanities and gaming, had its origin in a packed “humanities gaming” catch-all session at THATCamp Prime 2011, where we quickly realized that “games” was too broad a topic for a single session. THATCamp Games brought together members of the games industry, games researchers and designers, and games teachers to discuss games in as many genres (e.g. board games, alternate reality games, video games) and areas (e.g. games for teaching writing, game programming, and historical gaming) as possible. Almost one hundred people attended, coming from both the local DC/MD area and states across the country: Washington, California, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, to name a few.

Our first event was one of the first screenings of Lorien Green’s new documentary Going Cardboard, a documentary about the players and designers in the burgeoning eurogaming scene; after the film showing, Green answered questions via Skype.

Friday offered a full day of fifteen workshops (“Bootcamps”) divided into three tracks: beginner-friendly introductions to game design (e.g. a “my first board game” prototyping session), a “hack track” for people with some previous game coding experience (e.g. HTML5, Inform 7, and the Kinect), and a track devoted to games in the classroom (e.g. alternate reality games and video games in the classroom). After the workshops, we headed over to MITH (avoiding the grue) for a reception.

Two happy THATCamp Organizers (one Angry Bird)

Saturday started off menacingly: an overnight snowstorm left sheets of black ice between attendees and the conference. Most of the attendees and all of the coffee managed to make it to the conference building on time, however, and we cast our votes to narrow down almost forty attendee-proposed sessions to fit into five time slots in five rooms. (If you’re not familiar with THATCamps, attendees don’t present papers but instead write blog posts about topics they’d like to discuss, then facilitate sessions on those topics). You can see which sessions got placed on the schedule here; these included discussions on quest-based evaluation schemes, teaching games in the literature classroom, and course game design using learning management systems. We ran a game lounge all-day on Saturday, but since most attendees were busy with sessions then, we also met for game-playing and a Glorious-Trainwrecks-style rapid-prototyping game design jam on Sunday morning.

If you weren’t following the overwhelming volume of “#thatcamp games” tweets last weekend, we’re happy to report that the event satisfied both unconference novices and THATCamp veterans, with assessments such as “a truly intellectually (and personally) meaningful event” and “THATCamp Games: totally awesome.” Amidst the sessions, we ran an unconference-long alternate reality game, participated as a group in a spoken text adventure, logged onto an attendee-run Minecraft server, and thought really hard about the puzzle on the backs of the conference shirts. If you’re sad you missed the event, we’re collecting names of potential future attendees via a sidebar form on thatcampgames.org.

THATCamp Games was co-organized by MITH Webmaster Amanda Visconti and Anastasia Salter. Follow us on Twitter via @thatcampgames or #thatcampgames.


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