A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, November 18, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“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).

Applications for MITH’s Spring 2009 Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellowship are now being accepted.

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.

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, November 4, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“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).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, October 28, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library

“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).