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Mechanizing the Humanities

James Smith
James Smith
Software ArchitectMITHUniversity of MarylandWebsiteRead Bio

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?

James Smith is a Software Architect at MITH. James holds a M.A. in English and an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Physics from Texas A&M University. Before joining MITH, he was the Digital Humanities Lead Developer for the Digital Humanities Program in the Texas A&M University College of Liberal Arts where he was responsible for building and deploying infrastructure to support the digital humanities. As part of his professional work at Texas A&M, James developed a digital humanities platform that is serving as a foundational element in a course he will be teaching at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2011 on “Data Discovery, Management, and Presentation.

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A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues page.

Unable to attend the events in person? Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions. Viewers can watch the live stream as well.

All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: MITH (mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 301.405.8927).