MITH's Digital Dialogues Podcast
The weekly audio archive of MITH's Signature Speaker Series
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Mobile for Museums and Cultural Heritage
Nancy Proctor / 2011-12-06
Mobile platforms have become a critical social media platform and tool for creating “network effects” by connecting communities, conversations and initiatives in the museum of the 21st century. Nancy Proctor will talk about how mobile is helping transform the museum into a distributed network, and will offer for discussion specific examples of how mobile projects at the Smithsonian are “recruiting the world” to help with the Institution’s mission of the increase and diffusion of knowledge. For further information visit http://si.edu/mobile or follow #mtogo #SIMobile on Twitter....
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It’s not a game to me: ARGs, Game Design & Secret Agents in the Schoolroom
Beth Bonsignore, Ann Fraistat, Kari Kraus, Amanda Visconti / 2011-11-28
The Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry (AGOG) is a sort of narrative wunderkammer of an alternate reality game (ARG), a “cabinet of curiosities” combining a rich and oftentimes mysteriously fragmented historical tapestry with what Rob MacDougall has called “playful historical thinking.” By incorporating counterfactuals and re-imagining the past, AGOG is designed to lead players into a newly enfranchised relationship with history, teach them STEM and information literacy skills, and help them discover the secret stories outside most history books. In the first full-fledged season of the game, middle school players raced against time to gain cryptographic, archival, cartographic, and inventor ...
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Everything is Animated: Pervasive Media and the Networked Subject
Beth Coleman / 2011-11-15
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?...
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Thoughts on the Decline of the Book as Physical Object
Peter Kay / 2011-11-08
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.... -
Learning on the Job: Data Curation by Humanists, Librarians, and the Public
Trevor Munoz / 2011-11-01
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 ...
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Networked Macrosolutions: Library Peer-Sourced Collaborative Services
Rachel Frick / 2011-10-25
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 tra...
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Practical Strategies for Digital Humanities Development: 10 Things I Wish Someone Would Have Told Me Before I Began Digital Humanities Research
Jennifer Guiliano / 2011-10-18
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....
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Criticism in the Digital Humanities
Fred Gibbs / 2011-10-11
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... -
Hardtack and Software: Topic Modeling in Civil War Newspapers
Robert K. Nelson / 2011-10-04
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 r...
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Computational Historiography in a Century of Classics Journals
David Mimno / 2011-09-27
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?...
