We very much look forward to working with three University of Maryland faculty as their research fellowships begin this Fall. Through this partnership, MITH will play a role in software and design consultation, project management guidance, building and deploying web applications, and providing workspace for the Fellows’ teams. Faculty fellows will blog on their work-in-progress and give a Digital Dialogue during their fellowship.

Hayim Lapin Ph.D., Robert H. Smith Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of History, will create a digital edition of the Mishnah, a Jewish legal treatise from roughly 200 CE. An artifact of great significance to cultural, religious, and social history, this text manifests itself in several forms dating roughly from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, including a significant 1492 printed edition. The project will encode the text in TEI, in order to provide a research tool for the collation and comparison of text. Additionally, the database will include targeted searching, transcriptions, and an annotated translation for a wider audience.

Peter Mallios Ph.D., Associate Professor of English and American Studies, will use his fellowship to direct the scholarly Foreign Literatures in America project (FLA). The FLA is a digital project dedicated to the recovery and analysis of the significance of foreign authored literature in the United States, and related questions. The project seeks to understand foreign authored literature as an integral part of both American literature and the cultural domains of the U.S., and it seeks to provide new tools of both archivally accessing and quantitatively studying the cultural and political significance of foreign authored literature in the U.S. over the course of U.S. history.

Carla L. Peterson Ph.D., Professor of English, will build an interactive website in order to deepen understanding of nineteenth-century black New York. Seen as an enhanced extension of Peterson’s book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (Yale University Press, 2011), the project will use the chronological history of Peterson’s own family as an entry point into a broader social and cultural history of New York City’s black elite from about 1810 to 1895. Peterson will represent the spatial history of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn via interactive maps linked to commentary from her book and the work of other writers, to create walking tours that will allow users to queue into certain locations from their smartphones.

Please join us in welcoming Hayim, Peter and Carla to the MITH Community. Stay tuned to the latest project updates by following us @UMD_MITH.