Preserving Virtual Worlds

Neil Fraistat is Professor of English and Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. He is a founder and general editor of the _Romantic Circles _Website, the Co-Chair of centerNet, an international network of digital humanities centers, and has published widely on the subjects of Romanticism, Textual Studies, and Digital Humanities in various articles and in the eight books he has authored or edited. He is currently seeing through the press Volume III of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship. Fraistat has been awarded the Society for Textual Scholarship’s biennial Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize, the Keats-Shelley Association Prize, honorable mention for the Modern Language Association’s biennial Distinguished Scholarly Edition Prize, and the Keats-Shelly Association’s Distinguished Scholar Award.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied thinktank for the digital humanities). He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a member of the teaching faculty at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. Kirschenbaum served as the first director of the new Digital Cultures and Creativity living/learning program in the Honors College at Maryland. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, he 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.Mechanisms has won the 2009 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS), the 2009 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), and the 16th annual Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association (MLA). Much of his work now focuses on the critical and scholarly implications of the shift to born-digital textual and cultural production. He was 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 the NDIIPP-and IMLS-funded project devoted to Preserving Virtual Worlds (2007 to present). In 2010 he co-authored (with Richard Ovenden and Gabriela Redwine) Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, a report published by the Council on Library and Information Resources and recognized with a commendation from the Society of American Archivists. He also oversees work on the Deena Larsen Collection at MITH, 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. Kirschenbaum serves on the editorial or advisory boards of a number of projects and publications, including Postmodern Culture, Text Technology, Textual Cultures, MediaCommons, and futureArch. An avid tabletop gamer, he contributes to the group blog Play the Past devoted to meaningful play and cultural heritage. His work has received coverage in the Atlantic, New York Times, National Public Radio, Wired, Boing Boing, Slashdot, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. See www.mkirschenbaum.net for more.

Kari Kraus is an Assistant Professor in the iSchool and the Department of English at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching interests focus on new media and the digital humanities, textual scholarship and print culture, digital preservation, transmedia storytelling, and game studies. Kraus is a local Co-PI on an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant for preserving virtual worlds; the PI on an IMLS Digital Humanities Internship grant; and, with Derek Hansen (iSchool), the Co-Principal Investigator of the NSF grant underwriting the design of AGOG. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship; Digital Humanities Quarterly; Digital Media: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on History, Preservation, and Ontology; The Journal of Visual Culture; and_ Studies in Romanticism_. She first became interested in ARGs when Marc Ruppel, a PhD student in the Department of English, introduced her to Cathy’s Book, billed as the first alternate reality game developed specifically for the publishing industry. In 2008, in conjunction with the University of Maryland’s Mobility Initiative, she and her graduate students designed a mobile scavenger hunt that they playtested with a group of undergraduate students who had received free iPhones and iPod Touches as part of the Provost’s pilot project. Inspired by ARGs, the on-campus hunt made use of the technological affordances of the iPhone and iTouch – e.g., camera, phone, texting, and GPS functionality – to enhance interactivity and integrate the offline and online worlds in creative ways. The narrative framework was designed to teach students about University of Maryland history, particularly the Great Fire of 1912.

Doug Reside is the Curator of the Billy Rose Theatre Division and manages all aspects of the division’s collections and public services. He joined NYPL in 2011 first as the digital curator for the performing arts before assuming his current position in 2014. Prior to joining NYPL, Reside served on the directorial staff of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. He has published and spoken on topics related to theater history, literature, and digital humanities, and has managed several large grant-funded projects on these topics. Reside is especially interested in the use of digital forensic tools to study the creative process. He received a PhD in English from the University of Kentucky.