“The International Children’s Digital Library – Not Just for Children Anymore”
By Ann Weeks, Professor of the Practice, College of Information Studies
and Benjamin Bederson, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science

The International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) is a full-text library of children’s
books from around the world that is freely available via the Internet. Developed by an
interdisciplinary, intergenerational research team at the University of Maryland, the
collection currently includes contemporary and historic children’s books in 48 languages
from 60 countries. The interface is available in sixteen languages. Although originally developed for children from ages 3-13, the research team has been working on extending the ICDL for use by other audiences and available on other platforms. Through partnerships with the Universities of Florida, Connecticut, and Minnesota, as well as the Boston Public Library, four special collections of historic children’s materials, which may be of particular interest to humanities scholars, are now available.

The members of the technology team have created a new prototype that explores how the simplicity of the ICDL interface can be extended to a broader set of content for a wider audience. This new interface targets content for adults and adult users. Working with the Boston Public Library, this first effort demonstrates its application to 1,500 books from John Adams’ collection in the Open Content Alliance (OCA). The Team also has built a new prototype that extends the reach of the ICDL to mobile phones. An iPhone application that offers four books in multiple languages using a special “ClearText” technology that makes the picture books readable even on these small screens, will be available soon. Members of the ICDL research team will describe the new special collections, demonstrate the new technologies, and discuss the project’s goal of using technology to deliver the widest range of books to the widest range of audiences.

Coming up @MITH 11/25: Clifford Lynch – postponed until spring semester due to Thanksgiving holiday.

Coming up @MITH 12/2: Elizabeth Bearden (English), “Renaissance Moving Pictures: From Sidney’s Funeral Materials to Collaborative, Multimedia Nachleben”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2008.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

Intended for students whose dissertations engage the intersections between new media and the traditional concerns of the Arts and Humanities, the Winnemore Fellowship will provide a stipend of $9,570, plus full benefits and tuition remission up to five credits.

Nominees will be evaluated on three main criteria: (1) The potential contribution of the dissertation to the Digital Humanities; (2) The quality of the student’s work; (3) The likelihood of the student successfully completing the dissertation.

Applicants will be asked to submit an application form; a 500-1000 word abstract written for a general audience; a statement of work completed to date, work remaining, and expected completion date; a curriculum vitae; and two letters of recommendation, one of which must be from the student’s dissertation director. The application form can be found here: http://mith.umd.edu/research/winnemore_application_2009.pdf

Students who wish to apply for the fellowship should submit a copy of the application form and the required attachments to Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH, McKeldin Library B0131, Campus.

Students who have funding that is related to their dissertation research or another substantial fellowship should not apply.

Applications for Spring 2009 are due at MITH by noon, Monday, December 8, 2008. The recipient will be announced in mid-December 2008.

Please address any questions to Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH.

“New World Ordering: Shaping Geospatial Information for Scholarly Use.”
by Bethany Nowviskie

With the exception of a few exemplary projects, geospatial information technology has played a surprisingly a small role in humanities scholarship, given the importance of space and place to historical and literary understanding. However, the ubiquity of easy mapping interfaces and handheld devices is now bringing GIS to the attention of researchers beyond science, architecture, and engineering. The Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library is developing a new technical infrastructure and discovery mechanism to aggregate and visually layer terabytes of its own geospatial data with open-access information on the Web. But can we design a system to meet the special interpretive requirements of the humanities? How can we serve disciplines for which subjectivity inflects results, and ambiguous or contradictory evidence necessarily shapes every map?

BETHANY NOWVISKIE is Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library. Her department includes the Scholars’ Lab (formerly UVA Library’s GeoStat and EText Centers and ITC Research Computing Support) and Digital Scholarship R&D, a team of programmers building cyberinfrastructure and partnering on faculty projects. Dr. Nowviskie is Program Associate with the Scholarly Communication Institute and serves on the executive councils of NINES (the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) and the ACH (Association for Computers and the Humanities). Her doctoral degree is in English from the University of Virginia, where she recently held a position on the research faculty of the College of Arts & Sciences as lead designer for NINES.

Coming up @MITH 11/11: Merle Collins (English) - POSTPONED until spring semester
Digital Dialogues will resume 11/18: Ann Weeks (iSchool and HCIL), “The International Children’s Digital Library: An Introduction for Scholars.”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2008.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

“War (and) Games” (discussion)
By Matthew Kirschenbaum (English and MITH)

A conversation about the long history and seemingly unlikely combination of warfare and gaming, and the representation of war and militarism in computer and board games (for example, the official Pentagon recruiting game America’s Army). Questions to consider might include: how can the procedural mechanisms of a game capture the chaos of lived experience that is a battle? What are the ethics of “playing” with war? How do we evaluate the professionalization of gaming and simulation in relation to modernity? How do games function as sites of resistance or mobilization among “Generation Kill” (the title of the recent book and miniseries by Evan Wright and David Simon)? This will be an exploratory roundtable discussion for those interested in the topic, not a lecture. Professor Kirschenbaum will have examples on display from his personal collection of several hundred boardgames; attendees are likewise encouraged to bring copies of games they would like to discuss. Part of the ARHU semester on War and Representations of War (www.war.umd.edu).

Matthew Kirschenbaum is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. Kirschenbaum specializes in digital humanities, electronic literature, virtual worlds, serious games and simulations, textual studies, and postmodern/experimental literature. His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in 2008. Much of his work at MITH now focuses on born-digital archiving and preservation: he is principal investigator for the NEH funded start-up “Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use” and is also a co-investigator on an NDIIPP-funded project devoted to Preserving Virtual Worlds. He oversees work on the Deena Larsen collection, a vast personal archive of hardware and software furnishing a cross-section of the electronic writing community during its key formative years, roughly 1985-1995. He is Articles Editor for Digital Humanities Quarterly and serves on the editorial or advisory boards of a number of projects and publications, including Postmodern Culture, Text Technology, Textual Cultures, and MediaCommons. He is a regular contributor to the Chronicle Review section of the Chronicle of Higher Education. For more information, see his blog.

Coming up @MITH 11/4: Bethany Nowviskie (University of Virginia), “New World Ordering: Shaping Geospatial Information for Scholarly Use.”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2008.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

An invitational meeting, digital humanities leaders and experts from around the world will convene to discuss future directions in software development, cyberinfrastructure, and services for the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Keynote speakers are Chris Blizzard from Mozilla and Maura Marx, executive director of Knowledge Commons (formerly the Open Content Alliance). A report from the meeting will be issued to the wider community.

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, October 21, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library

“Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy.”
by Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Much attention has been paid in recent years to the digital future of scholarship, and in particularly to the technological and infrastructural development necessary to new publishing structures. This talk will argue, however, that there is a set of social, intellectual, and institutional changes that will be a precondition for any such technological development to succeed, requiring scholars to think differently about the ways we write, the ways we publish, and the ways we review, in order to make any digital publishing future a reality.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of English and Media Studies and chair of the Media Studies program at Pomona College in Claremont, California. She is the author of “The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television” (Vanderbilt UP, 2006), which was selected as an “Outstanding Academic Title” for 2007 by CHOICE. She serves on the editorial board of the Pearson Custom Introduction to Literature database anthology, as well as of the Journal of e-Media Studies and the Journal of Transformative Works, and is a member of the executive committee of the MLA Discussion Group on Media and Literature. She is currently working on a book-length project, to be published by New York University Press, entitled “Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy.”

Coming up @MITH 10/28: Matthew Kirschenbaum (English and MITH), “War (and) Games”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2008.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, October 14, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library

“The Videogame Text”
by ZACH WHALEN

The word ‘text’ in this title does double duty. First, it identifies the videogame itself as a text in the general sense: the object of study, the type of artifact which is here subjected to analysis. Second, the specific textual phenomenon which will be the focus of this presentation is, literally, videogame text — that is, the design, appearance, and uses of alphanumeric characters within videogames. By situating videogame typography in an appropriate historical, cultural, and technological context, an analysis of letter and number forms and their uses on the videogame screen can yield insights into the design history and dissemination of videogame texts. Further, the aesthetic properties of videogame text are shown to be one means by which specific videogame platforms express their influence over videogame discourse. This presentation, which summarizes the major research of my dissertation, will focus on typography in early videogame systems. It will also include a demonstration of a data-mining tool developed for this purpose.
ZACH WHALEN is an Assistant Professor in the English, Linguistics and Communication Department of the University of Mary Washington. He recently completed his PhD at the University of Florida, and his collection, co-edited with Laurie N. Taylor, _Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Videogames_ has recently been published by the Vanderbilt University Press. He has published several journal articles and book chapters on videogames and new media studies and is currently completing a book on videogame typography.

Coming up @MITH 10/21: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, (Pomona College) “Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy.”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2008.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, October 7, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library

“EDUCE: Enhanced Digital Unwrapping for Conservation and Exploration.”
by BRENT SEALES

Often, any attempt to read fragile texts, such as papyrus rolls, fundamentally and irreversibly alters the structure of the object in which they are contained. The EDUCE project is developing a non-destructive volumetric scanning framework to enable access to such objects without the need to physically open them. This work is based on earlier achievements in digital restoration that have recently been applied to the Venetus A in order to digitally flatten its pages. In this presentation I will discuss the overarching theme of digital restoration and will present current progress on the EDUCE project and results from work on the Venetus A.

W. BRENT SEALES received the BS degree in computer science from the University of Southwestern
Louisiana and the MS and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1991, he joined the Computer Science Faculty of the University of Kentucky and is now Gill Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments. His central research interest is in computer vision and image processing, with applications in digital libraries, medical visualization, and multimedia.

Coming up @MITH 10/14: Zach Whalen, (University of Mary Washington) “The Videogame Text”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2008.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, September 30, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Omeka: Easy Web Publishing for Scholarship and Cultural Heritage”
by Tom Scheinfeldt and Dave Lester (George Mason)

Well into the second decade of the web, many aspiring digital humanists still find it difficult to mount online exhibitions and publish collections-based research because they lack either technical skills or sufficient funding to pay high priced web design vendors. The digital libraries and archives fields have produced high quality repository and collections management software, but these packages carry too much technical overhead and pay too little attention to web presentation and end user interface for most digital humanities projects. Commercial blog packages have made it easy for digital humanists to publish materials to the web, but the blog’s structure of serial text posts does not allow them to present deep collections or complex narratives.

That is why the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, in partnership with the Minnesota Historical Society, has created Omeka . From the Swahili word meaning “to display” or “to lay out for discussion,” Omeka is a next generation web publishing platform for academic work of all kinds, one that bridges the university, library, and museum worlds through–and by helping to advance–a set of commonly recognized web and metadata standards. Omeka is free and open source. It offers low installation and maintenance costs–appealing to individual scholars and smaller cultural heritage projects and institutions that lack technical staffs and large budgets. It is standards based, extensible, and interoperable–insuring compliance with accessibility guidelines and integration with existing digital collections systems to help digital humanists of all stripes design online exhibitions more efficiently. Omeka brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to digital humanities websites–fostering the kind of user interaction and participation that are central to the mission of digital humanities, and providing the contribution mechanisms, tagging facilities, and social networking tools that audiences are coming to expect.

In the first part of this session, Omeka Executive Producer, Tom Scheinfeldt, will introduce the ideas and technologies behind Omeka. In the second part, Omeka Community Liason, Dave Lester, will demo the software, provide tips for getting started, and explain how you can get involved in Omeka’s open source community. An extended period of Q&A will follow.

Tom Scheinfeldt is Managing Director of the Center for History and New Media and Research Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. Dr. Scheinfeldt received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard and his master’s and doctoral degrees from Oxford, where his doctoral thesis examined inter-war interest in science and its history in diverse cultural contexts, including museums, universities, World’s Fairs and the mass media. A research associate at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and a fellow of the Science Museum, London, Dr. Scheinfeldt has lectured and written extensively on the history of popular science, the history of museums, history and new media, and the changing role of history in society, and has worked on traditional exhibitions and digital projects at the Colorado Historical Society, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, The Louisiana State Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the Library of Congress. In addition to managing general operations at the Center for History and New Media, Dr. Scheinfeldt directs several of its online history projects, including Omeka , the September 11 Digital Archive <911digitalarchive.org>, the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 , and Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives .

Dave Lester is the Omeka Community Lead at the Center for History and New Media, and an active developer on the Omeka project. He is also Digital Curator of the American Studies Crossroads Project at Georgetown University, launching a series of exhibitions focusing on the confluence of cultural studies and information technology. Dave is the co-founder of ScholarPress, a development hub for Educational WordPress plugins , co-organized this year’s THATCamp, a barcamp-style Digital Humanities unconference , and is organizing an upcoming Wordcamp for Educators .”

Coming up @MITH 10/7: Brent Seales (University of Kentucky), “EDUCE: Enhanced Digital Unwrapping for Conservation and Exploration.”

View MITH’s complete Digital Dialogues schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2008.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).