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MITH
May 15, 2012
Community , Events , News
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Announcing the Digital Humanities Winter Institute

MITH will host the first annual Digital Humanities Winter Institute (DHWI), from Monday, January 7, 2013, to Friday, January 11, 2013, at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. We’re delighted to be expanding the model pioneered by the highly-successful Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria to the United States.

DHWI will provide an opportunity for scholars to learn new skills relevant to different kinds of digital scholarship while mingling with like-minded colleagues in coursework, social events, and lectures during an intensive, week-long event located amid the many attractions of the Washington, D.C. region.

Courses are open to all skill levels and will cater to many different interests. For the 2013 Institute we’ve assembled an amazing group of instructors who will teach everything from introductory courses on project development and programming, to intermediate level courses on image analysis, teaching with multimedia, and data curation. DHWI will also feature more technically-advanced courses on text analysis and linked open data. We . . . Continue Reading

Jennifer Wellman
May 9, 2012
Faculty Fellows , Fellows , Research
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Progress Update on the Modern British Archive

After a brief pause to reevaluate resources, aims, and methods, the Modern British archive of the Foreign Literatures in America project is back on track and slowly making progress. I’ve recently come to appreciate even more Peter Mallios’ previous blog posts comparing the FLA project to a sea voyage, both in terms of the excitement it holds for potential discovery and in terms of the daily routine of rote, occasionally monotonous, activities that it takes to sail a ship…or build an online archive. It’s been a long few weeks at the scanning machine! Of course, there have been small but extremely rewarding discoveries along the way, and, as it did for Joseph Conrad, our time “at sea” has provided space for reflection. In this blog post, I’d like to share how the Modern British sub-team of the FLA project has remapped its goals and focus, as well as some of the questions and ideas that have come up on our journey.

To briefly fill-in anyone just joining the conversation, the . . . Continue Reading

Lisa Rhody
May 7, 2012
Fellows , Research , Winnemore Fellows
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Why use visualizations to study poetry?

The research I am doing presently uses visualizations to show latent patterns that may be detected in a set of poems using computational tools, such as topic modeling. In particular, I’m looking at poetry that takes visual art as its subject, a genre called ekphrasis, in an attempt to distinguish the types of language poets tend to invoke when creating a verbal art that responds to a visual one. Studying words’ relationships to images and then creating more images to represent those patterns calls to mind a longstanding contest between modes of representation—which one represents information “better”? Since my research is dedicated to revealing the potential for collaborative and kindred relationships between modes of representation historically seen in competition with one another, using images to further demonstrate patterns of language might be seen as counter-productive. Why use images to make literary arguments? Do images tell us something “new” that words cannot?

Without answering that question, I’d like instead to present an instance of when using images (visualizations of data) to . . . Continue Reading

Wendy Hagenmaier
May 4, 2012
Research
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Wireframe as Metaphor: Architecting a Digital Edition for Katherine Anne Porter’s Letters

According to Christina Wodtke and Austin Govella in Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, wireframes are the spaces in which thinking becomes tangible. As my semester-long exploration of digital scholarly editions comes to a close, I have been thinking about how to synthesize the insights I’ve gleaned from the different phases of the project—from the literature review to the TEI encoding guidelines—into a set of visual representations, or wireframes, for a digital edition of Katherine Anne Porter’s letters. In other words, I have been attempting to transform my thinking into something tangible.

But I’ve also been reflecting on the connections—and the gaps—between thought, (research, intellectual endeavor) and the tangible (the physical, the authentic object). Archivists have long been preoccupied with the authenticity of the original object, the power of evidence, of historical aura. And in so many ways, archivists have been attempting to connect their tangible collections with the thinking that preoccupies researchers and scholars. Archives, then, are also spaces in which thought becomes tangible (Porter’s letters are the tangible . . . Continue Reading

MITH
May 2, 2012
Community , Digital Dialogues
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5/8 MITH Digital Dialogue: Mark Matienzo, “Contextual Futures: The Meaning, Structure, and Use of Archival Description”

Tuesday, May 8, 2012, 12:30-1:45pm MITH Conference Room co-sponsored by University Libraries

“Contextual Futures: The Meaning, Structure, and Use of Archival Description” by MARK MATIENZO

Archival description is a cornerstone of the practice of archivy, and in most cases is the initial interface between an archival institution’s holdings and the audience for those holdings. While many authors within the archival profession have written both practical and theoretical articles on archival description, there is relatively little within the professional literature that provides a conceptual framework or formalization of archival description. When these frameworks or formalizations do exist, they are seldom interconnected to the critical trend in archivistics which has developed within the last twenty-five years. These two intellectual strands investigating the larger context of archives and archival description have the potential to inform each other and become highly intertwined. This presentation will discuss the meaning, structure, and use of archival description from a variety of perspectives. We will define archival description both abstractly and in terms of its constituent components and . . . Continue Reading

Hayim Lapin
April 30, 2012
Faculty Fellows , Fellows , Research
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Housekeeping

The Site I’ve now updated the “Examples of Work” page on digitalmishnah.org to include viewable samples. Thanks to Kirsten Keister for setting up the light box format to view the samples. The examples include two samples of work that processes more than one text (collation, synopsis) and a number of examples of manuscripts.

The Project I’ve been working on two issues. One is pointing. I now have a complete set of pointers from the reference file (ref.xml) to the witness files for locating spans of damaged text and page and fragment beginnings and ends for fragmentary texts. Of course, because nothing is simple, the direction of all of these will have to be reversed, so that the individual witnesses point into the reference text. In addition, I’ve improved the tokenization process, so that I can process “rich” tokens, retaining data about the word in question (e.g., that it is an abbreviation, or deleted ….; hold a regularized spelling as well as the original) as well as simple tokens, . . . Continue Reading

Amanda Visconti
April 27, 2012
Research
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“How Can You Love a Work If You Don’t Know It?”: Six Lessons from Team MARKUP

Team MARKUP, a group of graduate students working with the Shelley-Godwin Archive, evolved as a encoding project in Professor and MITH Director Neil Fraistat’s Technoromanticism graduate seminar (English 738T) during the Spring 2012 term at the University of Maryland; our team was augmented by several students in the sister course taught by Professor Andrew Stauffer at the University of Virginia. The project involved using git and GitHub to manage a collaborative encoding project, practicing TEI and the use of the Oxygen XML editor for markup and validation, and encoding and quality-control checking nearly 100 pages of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein manuscript for the Shelley-Godwin Archive, with each student encoding ten pages of the manuscript.

Team MARKUP collaboratively authored a post on the several phases of the project over on the Technoromanticism blog, so here I’ll address my personal experience of the project.

Six takeaways from the Team MARKUP project:

1. Affective editing is effective editing? One of . . . Continue Reading

MITH
April 25, 2012
Digital Dialogues
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5/1 MITH Digital Dialogue: Carla Peterson and Seth Denbo, “From Print to Digital: The Black Gotham Digital Archive”

Tuesday, May 1, 12:30-1:45pm 6137 McKeldin Library, Special Events Cosponsored by the Departments of African-American Studies, American Studies, and English

“From Print to Digital: The Black Gotham Digital Archive” by CARLA PETERSON Co-presenter: SETH DENBO

I’ve spent my MITH fellowship year working on “The Black Gotham Digital Archive.” My goal is to link an interactive web site, smart phones, and the geographic spaces of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn to create a deeper understanding of nineteenth-century black New York. The project is an extension of my book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (Yale UP, 2011), and is motivated by my search for new media forms that will allow greater flexibility, interactivity, and potential for reaching a broader audience.

I structured my book around two principal concepts. The first was chronology, in which I took family history as a starting point to construct a broader social and cultural history of New York City’s . . . Continue Reading

Carla Peterson
April 23, 2012
Faculty Fellows
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Taking Stock

This will be one of my last blog entries prior to the launch of the Black Gotham Digital Archive so it seems like an appropriate moment for me to step back and take stock of all things Black Gotham.

Looking back. By my count, since the publication of Black Gotham in February 2011 I’ve given some forty-five book talks with three more scheduled for this spring. I’ve spoken in venues as varied as bookstores, museums, historical societies, libraries, academic conferences, college campuses, genealogical societies, churches, and in front of audiences as diverse as scholars in the field, the general public, genealogists, and students from junior high to college. If you’ve missed any of these talks, you can always catch them on YouTube.

In addition, I’ve given several radio interviews ranging from NPR’s Leonard Lopate show in New York to black talk radio covering all regions of the country—Dallas in the South, Madison in the Midwest, California and Oregon in the far West.  I’ve even done some interviews . . . Continue Reading

Emma Millon
April 18, 2012
Community , Digital Dialogues

4/24 MITH Digital Dialogue: Jeremy Dibbell, “Enhancing the Bibliosphere: Bringing Historical Libraries to Life at LibraryThing”

Tuesday, April 24, 12:30-1:45pm B0135 McKeldin Library, MITH Conference Room

“Enhancing the Bibliosphere: Bringing Historical Libraries to Life at LibraryThing” by JEREMY DIBBELL

I will discuss the Libraries of Early America project, an effort to digitize and make widely available the library collections of American readers from the early colonial period through 1825. Using the online book-cataloging site LibraryThing.com, scholars and volunteers from institutions around the country – including Monticello, the Boston Public Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Athenaeum, the American Antiquarian Society and others – have begun the process of creating an extensive online database of early American libraries. Current subjects include Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Lady Jean Skipwith, James and Mary Murray, and other early American readers (some well-known, others obscure).

Unlike standalone institutional databases or online library catalogs, the Libraries of Early America collections through LibraryThing allow users to quickly and easily make comparisons between libraries (what books did John Adams and Benjamin Franklin have . . . Continue Reading