At this year’s annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists (SAA), MITH GA Rachel Donahue was elected to the Electronic Records Section (ERS) steering committee. Established in 1994, ERS “functions as a locus of expertise, leadership, and information sharing for SAA regarding management and preservation of records in electronic form.”

The ERS Steering committee composed of six members. Each member serves a term of three years, and one new member is elected by a majority of section members present at the annual meeting.

Steering committee members assist the chair and vice chair in leading and organizing section activities including endorsing session proposals for the annual meeting, advocating for and consulting with SAA on issues related to electronic records, and creating task forces and other projects as necessary.

Call for Participation: Advanced TEI Seminar as MITH

An advanced seminar in TEI encoding for manuscripts will be offered at MITH January 20-22, 2010. The seminar is sponsored by the Brown University Women Writers Project with generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It will be led by Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman, the instructors for a very successful introductory seminar on TEI held at MITH in 2008.

This seminar assumes a basic familiarity with TEI and will be focused on the detailed challenges of encoding manuscript materials, including editorial, transcriptional, and interpretive issues and the methods of representing these in TEI markup.

Intended for people who are already involved in a text encoding project or are in the process of planning one, the seminar will be focused on the detailed challenges of encoding manuscript materials, including editorial, transcriptional, and interpretive issues and the methods of representing these in TEI markup. It will include a mix of presentations, discussion, case studies using participants’ projects, hands-on practice, and individual consultation. It will also be strongly project-based: participants will present their projects to the group, discuss specific challenges and encoding strategies, develop encoding specifications and documentation, and create encoded sample documents and templates.

Project teams and collaborative groups are encouraged to apply, although individuals are also welcome. A basic knowledge of the TEI Guidelines and some prior experience with text encoding (e.g. an introductory workshop, job experience, etc.) will be assumed.

Travel funding is available of up to $500 per participant.

The application deadline is August 10.

For information on how to apply, and for more detailed information on the seminar program, please visit http://www.wwp.brown.edu/encoding/seminars.

New Grant Funds Tools & Research to Support the Sharing of Digital Annotations

Ann Arbor, MI, Brisbane QLD (Australia), College Park, MD, Fairfax, VA, Los Alamos, NM, and Urbana, IL ― The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (New York) has awarded $362,000 to the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) for Phase I of a project to build new digital annotation tools and define and demonstrate a framework for sharing annotations of digital content across the World Wide Web. The OAC includes humanities scholars, librarians, and information scientists from four universities — George Mason University, the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland, and the University of Queensland (Australia) — from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, and from the Office of Advanced Technology Research at JSTOR, an integrated online archive of over five million items digitized from scholarly journals and primary source archives.

Annotating is a method by which scholars across disciplines organize existing knowledge and facilitate the creation and sharing of new knowledge. It is used by individual scholars when reading as an aid to memory, to add commentary, and to classify. It can facilitate shared editing, scholarly collaboration, and pedagogy. Over time annotations can have scholarly value in their own right as a compelling form of evidence for historians and others studying the evolution of scholarly thinking. The OAC effort will focus on annotation interoperability, creating data models, standards, and tools that allow scholars working in disparate locations to share and leverage annotations of digital resources across the boundaries of individual annotation applications and content collections.

As part of the OAC Phase I work funded by the Mellon Foundation, a new annotation tool, leveraging ongoing work at the Maryland Institute for the Humanities (MITH) that was initiated previously with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, will be integrated into the popular Zotero Firefox Web browser extension. Created by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, Zotero helps users collect, manage, and cite research sources found on the World Wide Web.

In parallel with this work, researchers at the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the eResearch Lab of the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE) at The University of Queensland in Australia will examine the breadth and diversity of current annotation models and system architectures in the context of scholarly practices and scholarly-focused use cases involving annotations in both online and traditional settings.

This research, in combination with what is learned in adding new annotation functionality to Zotero, will inform the development of a shared model of scholarly annotation that supports interoperable annotations, is adaptable by existing systems, and is rooted in traditional scholarly practice. The effort to define and describe this data model and the rules for sharing and exchanging annotations will be led by researchers at the Research Library of Los Alamos National Laboratory with contributions from other members of the OAC and from the broader community involved in scholarly communications. To ensure community input, the work of the OAC will be guided by a Project Advisory Board composed of community leaders, a broad-based committee of Web technology experts, and feedback openly solicited from scholars and the scholarly communications community at large over the course of the Project.

The co-Principal Investigators for the OAC Phase I project are Timothy W. Cole of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Neil Fraistat of the University of Maryland, Jane Hunter of the University of Queensland, and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

All work produced as part of the OAC Phase I project will be made available under open source license for the free use and exploitation by other scholars and non-profit educational, scholarly and charitable institutions.

For additional information contact t-cole3 at illinois dot edu or consult the OAC Website at http://www.openannotation.org/

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland is pleased to announce the receipt of an $81,000 award from the Scholarly Communications program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The award will support research for and the writing of a report entitled Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, to be published in fall 2010 by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR); the award will also fund a symposium on the same topic at the University of Maryland in May 2010, at which experts from the cultural heritage sector and computer and information science, as well as practitioners in government, industry, and defense will convene to comment on the report and explore shared interests and practices.

Maryland’s work on the report and symposium will be lead by principal investigator Matthew Kirschenbaum (Associate Director of MITH and Associate Professor of English); he will be joined by co-authors Richard Ovenden (Keeper of Special Collections and Associate Director, Bodleian Library, Oxford) and Gabriela Redwine, an archivist and electronic records specialist at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

MITH’s director Neil Fraistat comments, “Matt Kirschenbaum’s leadership in bibliography, digital forensics, and digital preservation has helped position MITH at the forefront of crucial new work that is reconfiguring archival studies and practices. One of two recent grants from the Mellon Foundation on which MITH will be working in the coming year, _Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections_ allows us to continue fruitful partnerships with the Bodleian Library and the Ransom Center and promises to be a major leap forward for the field.”

See you all next week! (Can you spot the swag?)

Registration for the premier international conference in the field, which MITH hosts June 22-25, closes in just three days on June 14.

UMD’s research newsletter Between the Columns covers MITH the university’s rising profile in digital humanities.

The white paper (12,000 words) from this Level 1 NEH Start Up project is now available.

MITH is very pleased to welcome Amanda Visconti as an intern working on MITH’s Deena Larsen Collection. A graduate student at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, she specializes in human-computer interaction. She holds an undergraduate degree in English; her interests combine web design, programming, and literature. She recently spent a term beginning an online digital text of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Amanda’s internship is sponsored by the IMLS-funded Model Internship program, directed by Dr. Kari Kraus in Maryland’s iSchool. She’ll be with is through the DH09 conference in June.

The detailed conference program for Digital Humanities 2009, with the schedule of papers and authors, is now available!