http://mith.umd.edu/podcast en-us Copyright 2011 Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:42:29 -0500 Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:42:29 -0500 mith@umd.edu (MITH Staff) MITH's Weekly Digital Humanities Speaker Series Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities Digital Dialogues is MITH's signature events program. Held almost every week while the academic semesters are in session, and (almost) always on the same day and time--Tuesdays, 12:30-1:45--Digital Dialogues is an occasion for discussion, presentation, and intellectual exchange that you can build into your weekly schedule. Past presentations have run the gamut from current Fellows and members of the MITH community presenting their work in progress to distinguished visiting speakers engaging with audiences in an informal seminar setting. Digital Dialogues is MITH's signature events program. Held almost every week while the academic semesters are in session, and (almost) always on the same day and time--Tuesdays, 12:30-1:45--Digital Dialogues is an occasion for discussion, presentation, and intellectual exchange that you can build into your weekly schedule. Past presentations have run the gamut from current Fellows and members of the MITH community presenting their work in progress to distinguished visiting speakers engaging with audiences in an informal seminar setting. Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities mith@umd.edu no Beth Coleman Pervasive Media and the Networked Subject In a world of pervasive media and ubiquitous computing, this talk asks what happens as everything (objects, subjects, and actions) moves toward animation across a network. How does media and mediation affect our sense of agency? I use the example of A Scanner Darkly (dir. Linklater 2006) to discuss the effects of pervasive media and how it affects the parameters of self-reflection and agency. I look at issues surrounding mediated presence (copresence) and the threat to face-to-face engagement that pervasive media implies. The question I ask is: if as a society we are subjected to a pervasive mediation, how may we imagine modes of agency within an animated world? http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_11_15.mov Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500 00:35:35 mith, digitaldialogues, beth, coleman, pervasive, media, society, animated, network Peter Kay The vanishing physical book provides a set of discovery, marketing and publicity (and not a few existential) challenges to trade publishers. As the book transitions from physical object to a licensed file cohabitating with other forms of media on an electronic device, we need to unpack the sense of permanence and cultural heft inherent in the physical form and figure out what exactly makes a book a book. I do not come to wallow in nostalgia nor lament the rise of ebooks, but to participate in a discussion about how the publishing industry (which has seen many technological disruptions to its business model) moves forward. Because books matter. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_11_08.mov Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500 00:30:24 mith, digitaldialogues, peter, kay, norton, ebook, book, physical, future, media Trevor Munoz Data Curation by Humanists, Librarians, and the Public The research environment within which professional humanists and librarians have been accustomed to working is being reshaped by both internal and external pressures. In different ways, scholars’ debates about publishing, tenure and promotion systems, libraries’ straining budgets and physical spaces, and funding agencies’ new mandates require that all these communities engage with basic research on and professional practice of data curation in order to fulfill their missions. In the sciences, the expectation that data supporting published research will be available for review and re-use is becoming more common and any fundamental reform of peer review in the humanities would hopefully encompass a similar position on the relationship between data and publications. Moreover, the acceptance of digital projects as scholarship depends on the data for these projects continuing to remain available. In an era of abundant, networked information, a crucial part of the value proposition of libraries will depend on their ability to steward unique local resources and invent new services to meet the evolving needs of students and research faculty. Funding agencies have begun to mandate data management plans in order to protect their investment of public funds in research but these agencies will need advice from the scholarly community and libraries to refine and fully operationalize these mandates. For humanists, librarians, and the public, which remains deeply invested in the subjects and materials of the humanities, data curation is not a passing fad or a temporary innovation; data curation is an important part of the solution to many key challenges in the conduct and support of innovative research in the humanities. This talk will explore how humanists, librarians, and members of the wider public might all learn “on the job”, as it were, to participate in the curation of data through changes to core courses in humanists’ professional training, through inflecting numerous existing positions throughout libraries with a new data curation focus, and through open sharing of tools, strategies and best practices in a manner that acknowledges the opportunities for peer-to-peer training. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_11_01.mov Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500 00:39:30 mith, digitaldialogues, data, curation, humanists, librarians, public, munoz, trevor Rachel Frick Library Peer-Sourced Collaborative Services Macrosolutions are shared global services that provide institutions with resources and solutions that have the opportunity to take advantage of networked enterprise-class scale. These types of services, which were once only locally provided, can now be distributed among institutions for a peer-sourced type of community support. By investing in a shared networked solution, academic libraries can achieve efficiencies and market influence, that would be impossible at the scale of any one institution. In order to realize the promise of networked macrosolutions, libraries must be able to externalize their service need and trust their peer counterparts to help provide services that were once traditionally a single source operation. A key factor for success is in directly engaging with faculty and academic officers to communicate a compelling strategy in which selective externalization of services can be win-win situation for the local institution as well as for the external partners. Traditional library functions improve the libraries’ ability to fulfill a local contextual academic and research mission. However, creating new avenues for networked global scale shared services can be in the best interest of all parties. For some shared services, managing them at the largest scale offers savings both in terms of that particular service as well as in terms of capital re-investment in other more locally contextually dependent services. Externalizing functions is not new – but doing so in a highly networked environment, at global-scale is. The HathiTrust Digital Library and the Digital Public Library of America will be discussed as examples of macrosolutions and how they have the potential to change how libraries engage with scholars. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_10_25.mov Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500 00:52:24 digitaldialogues,mith,rachel,frick,macrosolutions,network, library, peer, collaborative Jennifer Guiliano 10 Things I Wish Someone Would Have Told Me Before I Began Digital Humanities Research This talk offers lessons learned from managing individual, multi-institutional, and international research agendas in the digital humanities. From topics as varied as “Collaboration: Why we love it and how it can harm a project” to “Your great idea: why it isn’t innovative” and “failure matters”, Practical Strategies offers tips and hints to scholars looking to build or maintain their own digital humanities research agenda. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_10_18.mov Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500 00:36:41 mith,digitaldialogues,jennifer,guiliano,digital,humanities,research, project,strategy, strategies Fred Gibbs As the digital humanities community expands beyond its computing roots, and as humanistic inquiry and interpretation (as opposed to methodological novelty) feature more prominently in its projects, the boundaries between digital and analog humanities grow increasingly blurred and permeable. One fortunate result is that more DH work has been opened up to scholarly critique by a considerably broader humanities audience. However, much of this work — often the most innovative —' cannot be fully evaluated through the traditional critical lenses of the humanities. This talk argues that the DH community neither has established a sufficient rubric for critiquing its work, nor has been critical enough of its own projects. It argues, too, that DH work does require special consideration that is not part of typical humanities criticism, and without it, calls its own value into question. So what constitutes a scholarly DH project? How many critical rubrics might be needed to accommodate the variety of valuable projects? Can the diversifying DH community ever agree on these? This talk grapples with a critical theory for the digital humanities with hopes of fostering a much longer conversation about how humanities scholars can appreciate and fruitfully critique the variety of digital work that is reshaping the humanities. You can read Gibbs' blog post follow-up to his Digital Dialogue 'a href='http://historyproef.org/blog/digital-humanities/critical-discourse-in-the-digital-humanities/''here'/a'. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_10_11.mov Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500 00:42:10 mith, digitaldialogues, fred, gibbs, criticism, critical, theory Robert K. Nelson Topic Modeling in Civil War Newspapers During the Civil War, newspaper editors in the Union and Confederacy were called upon to help motivate their male readers to die and to kill for their respective countries. This presentation will present some preliminary research that uses topic modeling to analyze how and when these editors used patriotism and nationalism to convince men to engage in the terrible work of death. This presentation will also reflect upon some methodological challenges raised by topic modeling and other text-mining techniques, particularly the desirability of toggling between distant and close readings to combine the power of algorithmically generated visualizations with the subtlety of traditional humanistic research methods. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_10_04.mov Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500 00:45:56 mith, digitaldialogues, robert, nelson, civil, war, newspaper, topic, modeling, model, analysis, text, text-mining, mine, visualization David Mimno What do you do with a book? Until recently, this has not been a difficult question, but the creation of massive databases of digitized documents has begun to enable researchers to explore new possibilities. Text can be seen not just as words to be read but as data to be measured. In this dialog, Mimno will present some examples of the use of computational methods to analyze 100 years of journal articles from JStor. Mimno will then consider how to extend this case study to general practice. How can we empower scholars to formulate hypotheses and test them experimentally, all while maintaining appropriate caution and skepticism? http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_09_27.mov Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500 00:45:30 mith, digitaldialogues, david, mimno, computational, computation, historiography, history, classics, classical, journal, analysis, text, JStor, Perseus Aditi Muralidharan Methods and Challenges To tackle increasingly large digitized archives of text, the digital humanities community has responded with an avid interest in text mining and visualization. Everywhere one looks these days, computer scientists are bringing text analysis to humanities scholars with tutorials, workshops, and toolkits. Nevertheless, crucial information is being lost in translation. If text analysis toolkits are to be truly successful, information needs to start flowing the other way and computer scientists must learn from humanities scholars what humanistic text analysis really means. If not, they will continue making 'natural' assumptions that do not always translate into the humanities. For example, concepts like 'question', 'hypothesis', 'data', 'evidence' are always well-defined in scholars' minds and are universal to all analysis. In the extreme case, this misalignment of basic assumptions could lead to fleets of powerful text analysis tools that nobody knows how to actually apply to humanistic analysis. In this talk, Aditi Muralidharan, Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, will describe her experiences collaborating with English scholars to build the NEH-funded WordSeer text analysis toolkit, and discuss differences between the ways that computer scientists and humanities scholars view text analysis, and ways in which communication between the two fields can be improved. Aditi Muralidharan is a Ph.D. candidate within the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She builds and researches systems for large-scale text analysis. This April, her work on the WordSeer project won the support of a 2011 NEH Startup Grant. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_09_20.mov Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500 56:32:00 mith, digitaldialogues, Aditi, Muralidharan, text, mining, visualization, wordseer, computer, science, analysis Siva Vaidhyanathan Who is watching? Why should we worry? These questions, among others, are asked by SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, in his recently published tome The Googlization of Everything — and Why We Should Worry. Using Google Street View as the prime example and case study, Dr. Vaidhyanathan explores the ways and means through which Google engineers and justifies its systems of surveillance around the world. Despite proclaiming cultural sensitivity, Google engages in a “one-size-fits-all” model of privacy - and the defaults are always set to Google’s advantage. On Tuesday, May 3rd, at 12:30, Dr. Vaidhyanathan will deliver a talk as part of the Digital Dialogue series at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). In addition to discussing his book, Dr. Vaidhyanathan will introduce the notion of “infrastructural imperialism” to describe how Google goes about managing its relations with users and states around the world. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_05_03.mp3 Tue, 03 May 2011 00:00:00 -0500 00:42:30 mith, digitaldialogues, siva, vaidhyanathan, google, surveillance, street, view, infrastructural, imperialism, osama, abbottabad Seth Denbo and Neil Fraistat In his 2005 book, Franco Moretti aims to open “a new front of discussion” by calling for a “distant reading” of texts in the pursuit of literary history. Abstraction in the form of the Graphs, Maps and Trees of the book’s title, he argues, reduces the number of elements in focus, providing a “sharper sense of their overall interconnection.” Moretti’s call is being been taken up by scholars working in a digital milieu, though not without controversy. With mass digitization of print culture the potential for new types of investigation into the human condition is enormous, but just as scholars have always required a network of libraries and archives to support their use of books, manuscripts and other textual resources, digital resources require an infrastructure for discovery, study, and maintenance. Partnerships between research libraries, IT departments, and digital humanities centers have developed to support digitally enhanced scholarship in the arts and humanities. Internationally, in recent years several large-scale projects have been funded within the humanities and social sciences, to provide infrastructure to support the new digital scholarship. The University of Maryland is currently partnering with 9 other universities on one such international effort: the Mellon-funded Project Bamboo 'http://www.projectbamboo.org/', which is attempting to answer the question: “How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?” In this presentation and the ensuing discussion, we aim to present and contextualize our work on Project Bamboo in light of new modes of humanities digital scholarship and reading, including text mining and corpora analysis. Utilizing the high profile Google Books Ngram Viewer project 'http://ngrams.googlelabs.com' and reactions to the “culturomics” 'http://www.culturomics.org/' approach as examples of the benefits and pitfalls of textual analysis at scale, we will argue for a scalable approach to humanities research, simultaneously distant and close, where for each step of abstraction away, the scholar can step back into the detail of the text. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_04_26.mp3 Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0500 01:11:50 mith, digitaldialogues, neil, fraistat, seth, denbo, project, bamboo, franco, moretti, culturomics, ngrams James Smith Mechanizing the Humanities Using music and imagery, James Smith considers what it means to compute the humanities. From recognizing faces to understanding music to reading text, the pace at which we experience media impacts how we understand it. The speed with which we compute determines how we interpret our computation, from simply pushing buttons to get a particular result to creating works of art. How can we elevate the computer to be a participant in our own artistic and humanistic endeavors? http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_04_19.mp3 Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0500 00:37:53 digitaldialogues, mith, james, smith, piano, bach, music, theory, computation, art, media, tempo Travis Brown Natural Language Processing Challenges for Literary and Historical Texts Many popular natural language processing techniques and tools rely on annotated training corpora to learn models that can be used to process new data from a similar domain. We can train a parser on Wall Street Journal text from the Penn Treebank, for example, and expect it to perform reasonably well on recent blog posts or movie reviews, but not necessarily on eighteenth-century conduct manuals. Unfortunately it’s often hard to find or create appropriate training data for specific literary genres or historical periods, even in English. In this talk Travis Brown, Research ' Development Software Developer at MITH, will look at some examples of semi-supervised and unsupervised methods that can be used to explore large text collections in domains with little or no available training data. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_03_29.mp3 Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500 01:28:35 mith, digitaldialogues, travis, brown, reading, machines, language, processing, historical, literary, texts Thomas Gideon The federal government has produced and continues to produce a staggering amount of material, most of which is released directly into the public domain. The policies and processes for providing broad access in the age of the internet are still catching up both to that volume and new technologies. Experiments in public-private partnerships have been tried with varying degrees of success. Even the most successful are burdened with odd limitations and restrictions. A small group of volunteers working directly with the National Archives are trying to change that. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_03_15.mp3 Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500 00:22:21 mith, digitaldialogues, thomas, gideon, federal, archive, access, restrictions, change Mary Flanagan rule systems & relational art In this talk, Dr. Mary Flanagan presents games and artworks that function to create emergent values among both designers and players. Arguing that agency is a key concept to designing play systems, Flanagan explores games, values, and the conceptual concerns inherent in the rule systems that constitute contemporary play, especially focusing on the implications of the ‘gamification’ of everyday life. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_03_08.mp3 Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500 00:56:00 mith, digitaldialogues, mary, flanagan, games, rule, systems, art, designers, players Tim Carmody Professional Education for Professional Humanists We’ve generally done everything we can in the humanities to ignore that a PhD is a every bit as much a professional degree as a degree in law, medicine, educational administration, information science, or business. The irony is that explicit training in the professional tools employed by professors, would actually make PhDs who end up off the tenure track, more widely employable. This presentation is intended to open up a discussion to identify professional tools that will make PhDs better professors, better alt-ac employees, and create better paths to non-academic careers. All we have to do is shake the fantasy that scholarship alone will save us, that everything practical can be absorbed through osmosis, that even admitting contingency is tantamount to failure. It’s time to get real about who we are and what we do. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_03_01.mp3 Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500 01:12:30 mith, digitaldialogues, tim, carmody, professionalism, degree, get, real, career, tools Julie Meloni Developing and Deploying Open Source Tools in the UVa Online Library Environment The University of Virginia Library is a key partner in the collaborative project known as “Hydra”; the goal of the Hydra Project is to create a comprehensive set of open source repository workflow tools that allow librarians and scholars to manage describe, deliver, reuse and preserve digital information. U.Va.’s committment to the project includes the definition of metadata standards, the creation of search and discovery interfaces, and the development and implementation of multiple Hydra “heads” such as the interface and workflow in use for the U.Va. institutional repository. This talk will provide a brief overview of the Hydra Project and the tools under development, describe some of the processes and challenges for development teams working within a library setting, discuss the value of having a Digital Humanities R'D group (the Scholars’ Lab) embedded in this same setting, and the types of “alt-ac” positions, roles, and responsibilities that can be found in this environment. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_02_22.mp3 Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500 00:50:42 mith, digitaldialogues, julie, meloni, uva, hydra, information, preservation Trevor Owens Interfaces to distributed cultural heritage collections Digital cultural heritage collections include temporal, locative, and categorical data which are increasingly enabling new interfaces to our cultural heritage. These kinds of dynamic interfaces are what end users are starting to expect of their interactions. Trevor Owens, digital archivist at the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress and a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University, will open a discussion of the way these kinds of interfaces change the way curators, librarians, archivists, researchers and general public see materials in these collections. To ground this discussion in a concrete example, the presentation will focus on one NDIIPP project, Recollection. Recollection is a free platform built by Zepheira LLC for the Library of Congress which empowers historians, librarians, archivists and curators to create and customize views, (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) of digital collections. The demonstration will show how the software can import collections from spreadsheets or MODS records, augment and transform that data online, generate distinct interactive visual interfaces, and ultimately copy-paste to embed the interfaces they design in any webpage. The discussion of this specific tool will serve as a place to ground a broader general discussion of the possibilities and implications of these kinds of dynamic interfaces to collections. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2011_02_15.mp3 Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500 00:52:27 mith, digitaldialogues, trevor, owens, cultural, heritage, collections, interfaces Franklin J. Hildy Theatre Finder is a comprehensive online guide of all theatres world-wide that are over 100 years old. Collaboratively edited and peer reviewed, it has been designed for both tourist and scholarly audiences. The project combines 25 years of research by two-time MITH fellow, Prof. Franklin J. Hildy of the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, with the technical and design expertise of the MITH staff. Theatre Finder is intended to serve as the test platform for CAMP, a Collaborative, Ajax-Based, Modeling Platform, developed separately at MITH with funding from an NEH Level II Digital Humanities Startup Grant. This talk will examine the relationship between content and collaboration, both in terms of the development of content with international scholars and in terms of the relationship between content development and technology support http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2010_11_30.mp3 Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500 00:00:00 mith. digitaldialogues, frank, hildy, theatre-finder.org, world, CAMP Tara Rodgers Legacies of Analog Signification in Digital Audio How did it become commonplace for creative practitioners and engineers in contemporary audio cultures to think of sounds as individual entities, with distinct aesthetic properties that can be technologically controlled? This talk will address this metaphor of electronic sounds as individuals, which is such a familiar concept in epistemologies of digital audio that it has escaped critical attention. This metaphor took shape over the nineteenth century in tandem with the development of graphical methods that represented diverse phenomena in a common language of waveforms. Notions of sonic individuation and variability also emerged in the contexts of Darwinian thought, and a cultural fascination with electricity as a kind of animating force. Tara Rodgers argues that practices of classifying individual sounds by aesthetic variations are deeply entwined with epistemologies of gender and racial difference in Western philosophy and modern science, and that these legacies persist in contemporary representations of digital audio. This talk will also introduce some of her recent sound and music projects that complement this research by engaging metaphor as a creative tool. http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2010_11_16.mp3 Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500 01:11:35 mith, digitaldialogues, tara, rodgers, analog, sound, digital, audio, wave, technology