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Emma Millon
April 16, 2012
Faculty Fellows , News

Carla Peterson Wins 2011 NYC Book Award for Black Gotham

We are thrilled to announce that Carla Peterson, professor of English at the University of Maryland and MITH Faculty Fellow has won a 2011 New York City Book Award from the New York Society Library for her recent book Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (Yale University Press, 2011). Peterson will travel to the New York Society Library on May 2nd to claim her award and celebrate the other two winners.

Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, Black Gotham is Carla Peterson’s riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and business associates, she brings to the forefront the rarely acknowledged achievements of nineteenth-century African Americans and a vital yet forgotten part of American history and culture.

“The New York Society Library’s New York City Book Awards, established in 1996, honor books of literary quality or historical importance that, . . . Continue Reading

Nicholas Slaughter
April 16, 2012
Community , Faculty Fellows , Research
2 Comments

Names of the Game

For the past six to seven months I have been leading the way for developing what we hope will be the first full blooded Foreign Literatures in America (FLA) archive based on receptions of Russian authors. While Peter Mallios has given Foreign Literatures in America its initial intellectual impetus, during the day to day research and archiving I have encountered innumerable small points of inquiry, seemingly mundane at first but then suddenly realized as potent obstacles to our research goals. Thus far and into the foreseeable future, no one hiccup in my process has crippled my efforts, but these moments raise questions the will ultimately enrich our archive and computational analysis in unexpected ways. For example, as the title of this entry suggests, the issue of names has raised a number of red flags. As one should expect, the transliteration of names from one alphabet into another is asking for trouble.

Let me provide a concrete case: Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский, or perhaps better known to most . . . Continue Reading

MITH
April 12, 2012
Events , News

Upcoming Event This Saturday 4/14: Theorizing the Web Conference

This Saturday, April 14th the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities will be co-sponsoring the second annual Theorizing the Web Conference along with the Department of Sociology, Cyborgology, and the iSchool. It should be a fantastic event. Come on out!

THEORIZING THE WEB CONFERENCE APRIL 14, 2012 UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

cyborgology.org/theorizingtheweb #TtW12

On Saturday April 14, the University will host the second annual Theorizing the Web conference in the Art-Sociology building, where emerging and established researchers, activists, educators and artists from around the world will meet to explore the social implications of the Internet. Last year’s event drew over 250 people and included 14 panels, two workshops, two symposia, two plenaries by Saskia Sassen and George Ritzer, and a keynote by danah boyd of Microsoft Research. This year we’re focused on bringing in perspectives not usually heard in technology circles and on the ways the Internet refigures political processes. . . . Continue Reading

Emma Millon
April 11, 2012
Community , Digital Dialogues

4/17 MITH Digital Dialogue: Jeffrey Schnapp, “Building the Digital Public Library of America”

Tuesday, April 17, 12:30-1:45pm 6137 McKeldin Library, Special Events Co-sponsored by the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

“Building the Digital Public Library of America” by JEFFREY SCHNAPP

I will be speaking about extraMUROS/Zeega, metaLAB’s effort to allow anyone to easily explore, visualize and curate collections from public APIs and then use this media to collaboratively create multimedia projects that are accessible online, on mobile devices and in physical spaces. While books (in material and digital form alike) are vital to the future of libraries, I believe that in an increasingly audiovisual world of public knowledge and discourse, it is essential that libraries play a major role in preserving, making available and providing innovative tools for interpreting society’s audiovisual past, present and future across media.

This talk will be held in the Special Events Room of McKeldin Library.

Before moving to Harvard in 2011, Jeffrey T. Schnapp occupied the Pierotti Chair of Italian Studies at Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000.

. . . Continue Reading
Grant Dickie
April 10, 2012
Community , Research

Looking Back and Looking Ahead: Interedition Symposium 2012

Why do informal hackathons matter in the Digital Humanities community? I argue that the answer can be found by reading the (soon to be written and released) proceedings of the Interedition Symposium: Scholarly Digital Editions, Tools and Infrastructure. Joris Van Zundert, a member of the Huygens Institut in The Hague, Netherlands, played host to over 40 scholars, researchers, and programmers this past March. I got to meet Joris last year when I was invited through former MITH project lead Doug Reside and my work on the TILE project. The well-spoken and incredibly intelligent Van Zundert has been working on the Interedition project since 2008 to promote interdisciplinary, inter-collegial, and inter-departmental work in the Digital Humanities. To quote their website’s advert for the Symposium, Interedition sponsors groups of programmer-scholars (such as Doug, MITH Software Architect Jim Smith, and myself) to gather and develop interoperable tools as well as generate “roadmaps” toward crossing institutional boundaries and research schedules to get DH centers to work collaboratively. March . . . Continue Reading

Emma Millon
April 6, 2012
Faculty Fellows , News

Carla Peterson Interviewed by Brian Lehrer

On Monday, April 9th CUNY TV show host Brian Lehrer will interview Carla Peterson on her book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (Yale University Press, 2011) and the Black Gotham Digital Archive.

Black Gotham is a riveting account of Peterson’s quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and business associates, she illuminates the wider history of African-American elites in New York City.

During her current MITH faculty fellowship, Peterson is creating the Black Gotham Digital Archive, a dynamic website based upon her book. The site chronicles the visual and textual history of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and links this information to interactive maps in order to create a deeper understanding of nineteenth-century black New Yorkers. Follow the project on Twitter @bgarchive.

About the Show: Brian Lehrer’s local Emmy-nominated New York TV show focuses on community and society and is . . . Continue Reading

James Smith
April 5, 2012
Research
1 Comment

Designing Applications for Extensibility and Reuse

Underlying all of the scholarly work in a digital humanities project is the digital, something that tends to be swept under the rug along with managing a DH center. I want to spend a little time today talking about how we are approaching the technical side of some of our DH projects, namely how we are designing our JavaScript libraries.

Here at MITH, we want to do more with less. We want our output to be exponential: proportional to how much we have already produced. This means that we have to be able to leverage our past work in our current work. We have to maximize reusability of everything we write.

The problem is that we can’t spend a lot of time on a grant writing code that we aren’t going to use for the grant deliverable. It would be wonderful to be able to create a platform on which we could build our projects, but that platform isn’t a grant deliverable, and probably . . . Continue Reading

Emma Millon
April 4, 2012
Community

4/10 MITH Digital Dialogue: Jordan Boyd-Graber, “Making Topics More Human(e)”

Tuesday, April 10, 12:30-1:45PM MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Making Topics More Human(e)” by JORDAN BOYD-GRABER

Imagine you need to get the gist of what’s going on in a large text dataset such as all tweets that mention Obama, all e-mails sent within a company, or all newspaper articles published by The New York Times in the 1990s. Topic models, which automatically discover the themes which permeate a corpus, are a popular tool for discovering what’s being discussed. However, topic models aren’t perfect; errors hamper adoption of the model, performance in downstream computational tasks, and human understanding of the data. However, humans can easily diagnose and fix these errors. We present a statistically sound model to incorporate hints and suggestions from humans to iteratively refine topic models to better model large datasets.

We also examine how topic models can be used to understand topic control in debates and discussions. We demonstrate a technique that can identify when speakers are “controlling” the topic of a conversation, which . . . Continue Reading

Katherine Stanutz
April 2, 2012
Faculty Fellows
1 Comment

Archive of Emotion

Often in working on a project, we tend to focus on the series of day-to-day tasks and the minutiae and forget the greater issues and implications inherent in what you are doing. What I appreciate about these blog posts is that they give us space to reflect upon our project, to evaluate our project’s goals and to consider the numerous questions that arise while making a proposed archive an actual one. One of the benefits of being involved in an archival project from the ground up is in seeing just how many pieces must be assembled before the machine can start to work. From identifying our target data to collecting the raw materials to annotating texts to running them through OCR to collating everything, the entire process is carefully choreographed and organized in a methodical way. There is a way that these initial procedures may seem mechanical, automatic, devoid of imagination or emotion. However, in many ways, our archive is actually driven by sentiment and by emotion – . . . Continue Reading

Lisa Rhody
April 2, 2012
Community
1 Comment

Small Projects & Limited Datasets

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the significance of small projects in an increasingly large-scale DH environment.  We seem almost inherently to know the value of “big data:” scale changes the name of the game.  Still, what about the smaller universes of projects with minimal budgets, fewer collaborators, and limited scopes, which also have large ambitions about what can be done using the digital resources we have on hand?  Rather than detracting from the import of big data projects, I, like Natalie Houston, am wondering what small projects offer the field and whether those potential outcomes are relevant and useful both in and of themselves as well as beneficial to large-scale projects, such as in fine-tuning initial results.

My project in its current iteration involves a limited dataset of about 4500 poems and challenges rudimentary assumptions about a particular genre of poetry called ekphrasis—poems regarding the visual arts.  It is the capstone project to a dissertation in which I use the methods . . . Continue Reading