“Enhancing the Bibliosphere: Bringing Historical Libraries to Life at LibraryThing” by JEREMY DIBBELL

I will discuss the Libraries of Early America project, an effort to digitize and make widely available the library collections of American readers from the early colonial period through 1825. Using the online book-cataloging site LibraryThing.com, scholars and volunteers from institutions around the country – including Monticello, the Boston Public Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Athenaeum, the American Antiquarian Society and others – have begun the process of creating an extensive online database of early American libraries. Current subjects include Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Lady Jean Skipwith, James and Mary Murray, and other early American readers (some well-known, others obscure).

Unlike standalone institutional databases or online library catalogs, the Libraries of Early America collections through LibraryThing allow users to quickly and easily make comparisons between libraries (what books did John Adams and Benjamin Franklin have in common, for example, or what books were most commonly shared among all the Signers of the Declaration of Independence?), and to search collections which may not exist today in physical form or which are spread across multiple institutions and private collections. A reconstruction of the
multi-generational Mather Family library makes those titles widely available for the first time. Further, LibraryThing’s capabilities allow significant data about each book to be added to the record where known: transcriptions of marginalia, information about acquisition of
the title, the binding, correspondence about a given book, or even a link to a digital scan of the volumes (as with the John Adams collection at the Boston Public Library).

So far, data on more than 1,250 early American libraries has been added, with more information constantly being collected and included. I’ll discuss the origins of the project, sources and methods, and future plans and enhancements.

This talk will be held in the MITH Conference Room.

Jeremy Dibbell is the Librarian for Social Media and Rare Books at LibraryThing. He received his B.A. from Union College and M.A./M.L.S. degrees in History and Library Science from Simmons College. In the summers, he can generally be found at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, assisting with the school’s weeklong courses. Along with the Libraries of Early America project, Jeremy’s at work on a history of books and printing in Bermuda, writes regular columns for “Fine Books & Collections” magazine, and blogs about books and reading
at PhiloBiblos (philobiblos.blogspot.com). He can be found on Twitter at @JBD1.

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

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.

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

Contact: Emma Millon, Community Lead, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-9887).

The post 4/24 MITH Digital Dialogue: Jeremy Dibbell, “Enhancing the Bibliosphere: Bringing Historical Libraries to Life at LibraryThing” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, Black Gotham is Carla Peterson’s riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and business associates, she brings to the forefront the rarely acknowledged achievements of nineteenth-century African Americans and a vital yet forgotten part of American history and culture.

“The New York Society Library’s New York City Book Awards, established in 1996, honor books of literary quality or historical importance that, in the opinion of the selection committee, evoke the spirit or enhance appreciation of New York City. It is not necessary that the city be the major subject of the book, but it must play an essential, invigorating role beyond that of the setting.” The New York Society Library, the oldest in the city, was founded in 1754 by the New York Society. It is located at East 79th Street. For more information please visit nysoclib.org.

The post Carla Peterson Wins 2011 NYC Book Award for Black Gotham appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“Building the Digital Public Library of America” by JEFFREY SCHNAPP

I will be speaking about extraMUROS/Zeega, metaLAB’s effort to allow anyone to easily explore, visualize and curate collections from public APIs and then use this media to collaboratively create multimedia projects that are accessible online, on mobile devices and in physical spaces. While books (in material and digital form alike) are vital to the future of libraries, I believe that in an increasingly audiovisual world of public knowledge and discourse, it is essential that libraries play a major role in preserving, making available and providing innovative tools for interpreting society’s audiovisual past, present and future across media.

This talk will be held in the Special Events Room of McKeldin Library.

Before moving to Harvard in 2011, Jeffrey T. Schnapp occupied the Pierotti Chair of Italian Studies at Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000.

A cultural historian with research interests extending from antiquity to the present, his most recent books are Speed Limits and The Electric Information Age Book (a collaboration with the designer Adam Michaels of Project Projects (Princeton Architectural Press, January 2012). Also forthcoming in 2012 are Digital_Humanities (MIT Press), a book co-written with Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, and Todd Presner; Modernitalia (Peter Lang), a collection of essays on 20th century Italian cultural history being edited by Francesca Santovetti, and Italiamerica (Il Saggiatore), vol. 2, co-edited with Emanuela Scarpellini.

His pioneering work in the domains of digital humanities and digitally augmented approaches to cultural programming includes curatorial collaborations with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Canadian Center for Architecture. His Trento Tunnels project — a 6000 sq. meter pair of highway tunnels in Northern Italy repurposed as a history museum– was featured in the Italian pavilion of the 2010 Venice Biennale and is currently on exhibit at the MAXXI in Rome in RE-CYCLE. Strategie per la casa la città e il pianeta (fall 2011).

Faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, he is Professor of Romance Languages & Literature and also on the teaching faculty in the Department of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Dr. Schnapp is the faculty director of metaLAB at Harvard.

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

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.

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

Contact: Emma Millon, Community Lead, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-9887).

The post 4/17 MITH Digital Dialogue: Jeffrey Schnapp, “Building the Digital Public Library of America” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Black Gotham is a riveting account of Peterson’s quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and business associates, she illuminates the wider history of African-American elites in New York City.

During her current MITH faculty fellowship, Peterson is creating the Black Gotham Digital Archive, a dynamic website based upon her book. The site chronicles the visual and textual history of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and links this information to interactive maps in order to create a deeper understanding of nineteenth-century black New Yorkers. Follow the project on Twitter @bgarchive.

About the Show:
Brian Lehrer’s local Emmy-nominated New York TV show focuses on community and society and is broadcast on Wednesdays on CUNY TV at 7:30pm. Brian also hosts a Peabody Award-winning New York radio show, the Brian Lehrer Show, broadcast weekdays at 10:00am on WNYC. CUNY TV, channel 75, is a cable channel serving the five boroughs of New York City with educational, cultural, and public affairs programs.

The post Carla Peterson Interviewed by Brian Lehrer appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“Making Topics More Human(e)” by JORDAN BOYD-GRABER

Imagine you need to get the gist of what’s going on in a large text dataset such as all tweets that mention Obama, all e-mails sent within a company, or all newspaper articles published by The New York Times in the 1990s. Topic models, which automatically discover the themes which permeate a corpus, are a popular tool for discovering what’s being discussed. However, topic models aren’t perfect; errors hamper adoption of the model, performance in downstream computational tasks, and human understanding of the data. However, humans can easily diagnose and fix these errors. We present a statistically sound model to incorporate hints and suggestions from humans to iteratively refine topic models to better model large datasets.

We also examine how topic models can be used to understand topic control in debates and discussions. We demonstrate a technique that can identify when speakers are “controlling” the topic of a conversation, which can identify events such as when participants in a debate don’t answer a question, when pundits steer a conversation toward talking points, or when a moderator exerts her influence on a discourse.

This talk will be held in the MITH Conference Room, in the basement of McKeldin Library.

Jordan Boyd-Graber is an assistant professor in Maryland’s iSchool and UMIACS, and a member of the Cloud Computing Center and the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Lab. His research applies statistical models to natural language problems in ways that interact with humans, learn from humans, or help researchers understand humans. Jordan is an expert in the application of topic models, completely automatic tools that can discover structure and meaning in large, multilingual datasets. He is a contributor to the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), a popular tool used in natural language education research. Jordan received his PhD from Princeton University in 2010, advised by Dave Blei, and has bachelors degrees in history and computer science from the California Institute of Technology. He received a best student paper honorable mention at NIPS 2009 and a Computing Innovation Fellowship (declined). His current work is supported by NSF, IARPA, and ARL.

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

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.

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

Contact: Emma Millon, Community Lead, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-9887).

The post 4/10 MITH Digital Dialogue: Jordan Boyd-Graber, “Making Topics More Human(e)” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“Historical Interactive Visualization: Coaxing Data to Tell Stories” by BILL FERSTER
This talk will take an informal look at interactive visualization projects done at the University of Virginia’s Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) and the Sciences, Arts, & Humanities Network of Technology Initiatives (SHANTI) digital humanities centers. The projects were built using an NEH-funded visualization authoring tool, VisualEyes, developed at UVa.

VisualEyes enables scholars to present selected primary source materials and research findings while encouraging active inquiry and hands-on learning among general and targeted audiences. It communicates through the use of dynamic displays that organize and present meaningful information in both traditional and multimedia formats, such as audio-video, animation, charts, maps, data, and interactive timelines.

I will also show a number of student-generated visualizations, created in the context of undergraduate project-based learning (PBL) seminars, and discuss how visualization and PBL are strong partners to promote historical inquiry. As a consequence, I have developed a new model to help scaffold the design of data-driven interactive projects called ASSERT. Ask a question; Search for evidence to answer that question; Structure the data; Envision ways to answer the question using the structured data; Represent that data in a compelling interactive manner; and finally, Tell a story using that data to answer the question.

This talk will take place in the Human Computer Interaction Lab, 2117 Hornbake Library (South).

Bill Ferster directs the VisualEyes Project at the University of Virginia with a joint faculty appointment with the Center for Technology and Teacher Education at the Curry School of Education, and with the  Sciences, Humanities & Arts Technology Initiative (SHANTI)  at the College of Arts and Sciences.

In past lives, he founded StageTools, a leading developer of digital motion control tools with its MovingPicture product; Editing Machines, EMMY award winning developer of the first digital nonlinear editing system; and West End, a pioneer in PC-based animation and presentation graphics tools.

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

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.

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

Contact: Emma Millon, Community Lead, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-9887)

The post 4/3 MITH Digital Dialogue: Bill Ferster, “Historical Interactive Visualization: Coaxing Data to Tell Stories” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“R\e\a\d/i/n/g/ as a Publishing Practice” by CRAIG SAPER

Digital Humanities research has found increased funding and job opportunities, and it has become a center piece of efforts to raise the rankings and profile of universities seeking the highest Carnegie Research status. It also has a blossoming industry that includes “text analytics” widely used in national security studies.

That type of DH research usually means digitizing massive amounts of texts, constructing databases, organizing information, and representing the patterns into meaningful conclusions. The researchers mine data in texts to make existing texts more accessible, and to discover connections and patterns difficult to decipher without computing power and information design.In the midst of building a databases for two digital humanities project, Dr. Craig Saper realized that the interfaces his team had constructed online had a more profound impact on how one read the texts than the use of the database alone.

The online interface changed how one read — even changed the essence of what one read. The futures of reading using new devices, like e-readers, will have consequences for the definition and practice of what we call reading.

Saper’s presentation for MITH’s Digital Dialogues will look at four of his major digital humanities projects – two online and two just starting – on read/i/n/g/  as a publishing practice and potential strategic alliances among the campuses on the university of Maryland system.

This talk will be held in the MITH Conference Room, in the basement of McKeldin Library.

Craig Saper (csaper<at>umbc<dot>edu) is on the faculty of the Language, Literacy, & Culture multi-disciplinary doctoral program at UMBC, and has published widely, and in multimodal formats, on the digital humanities.  He is the author of Intimate Bureaucracies (2012), Networked Art (2001) and Artificial Mythologies (1997). He has edited, and written afterwards for, Bob Brown’s Words and The Readies (both 2009), and he edited, with C. J. Freeman and W. Garrett-Petts, an anthology on Imaging Place (2009). He has guest edited special issues of Visible Language (1988) and Style (2001), and co-edited, with Ellen Berry, a special issue of Rhizomes on “Drifts” (2007), and, with R. Burt, on “posthumography” (2010). He is also the reviews editor and “Blog Report” columnist for Rhizomes. He wrote the introduction to Sharon Kivland’s A Disturbance of Memory, II (2008). His curatorial projects include exhibits on “Assemblings” (1997), “Noigandres: Concrete Poetry in Brazil” (1988), “TypeBound” (2008), and folkvine.org (2003-6). He is presently completing a biography of a poet-publisher-inventor-impresario-writer in every imaginable genre, Bob Brown, who invented a reading machine. A New York Times Books section Back Page Essay described Saper’s research and publications on Brown in the context of new iPad’s and e-readers, and called Brown the “godfather of the e-reader.” An example of Brown’s machine: http://www.readies.org.

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

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.

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

Contact: Emma Millon, Community Lead, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-9887).

The post 3/27 MITH Digital Dialogue: Craig Saper, “R\e\a\d/i/n/g/ as a Publishing Practice” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The event will be held on the 2nd floor. Refreshments will be served.

The post MITH Associate Director Speaking at DC Public Library Panel Discussion on History of Reading appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“A Conversation about Compulsion, the World’s Columbia Exposition of 1893, and Virtual Reality” by LISA M. SNYDER

Is there a place for virtual reality in the digital humanities toolkit? For all of the early hype surrounding the use virtual reality for teaching and learning and the ubiquity of online options for exploring three-dimensional worlds, the challenges inherent in developing and sustaining large-scale academic reconstruction projects limit their viability and likelihood for success.

Academics considering such foolishness must contend with disciplinary skepticism, the need to articulate appropriate research questions to justify the effort required to produce tangible results, and pressure to develop methodologies for annotations and citations that are comparable to print publications. From a project management perspective, three-dimensional research is difficult because it requires a specific start-up environment, ongoing funding beyond that typically available to the humanities researcher, and a clearly defined ultimate use for the eventual product that justifies the expended effort. From a curricular perspective, virtual reality research exists only on the borders of digital humanities as it is currently defined. In order to fully integrate three-dimensional research into the curriculum, administrators need to contend with issues of scalability, the availability of software, a need for clearly defined learning objectives, and a steep learning curve that can negatively impact student projects.

Working from the conviction that virtual reality – even given these daunting challenges – does provide significant research opportunities for academics and benefits to student users, this presentation will focus on the reconstruction projects that are the hallmark of three-dimensional research at UCLA. Following a demonstration of the World’s Columbian Exposition project currently under construction, Snyder will discuss her project team’s efforts to leverage existing and new computer modeling work for pedagogical use through a new NEH-funded real-time software interface and content repository intended to provide a mechanism for exploring highly detailed three-dimensional models in educational settings.

This talk will be held at the School of Architecture (Building 145), Room 1111. The event will begin at 2:00 p.m., followed by a reception in the Dean’s Conference Room.

Dr. Lisa M. Snyder is a senior member of the Urban Simulation Team at UCLA, an associate director of the Experiential Technologies Center, and on staff with the Institute for Digital Research and Education, a division of UCLA’s Office of Information Technology. Her research is focused on the educational use of large-scale interactive computer reconstructions of historic urban environments.

Snyder is currently working on a real-time reconstruction of the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. This work is regularly showcased at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and appears in the documentary Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City. She is also a principal investigator on an NEH-funded project team that is developing a new interface to facilitate classroom use of interactive computer reconstructions. This run time software was designed to accommodate a range of student-centered activities and teacher-centered presentations within a framework that provides secondary scholars access to the historical evidence, methodologies, and interpretive choices that informed the creation of the virtual world.

Snyder was the primary modeler on the interactive computer reconstructions of the Temple Mount site that were developed jointly by the Urban Simulation Team and the Israel Antiquities for the Davidson Center in the Jerusalem Archaeological Park. The Herodian version of the model was installed in 2001. The reconstruction was based on excavations conducted under the direction of archaeologist Ronny Reich and regional archaeologist Gideon Avni, and it shows visitors how excavators believe the Temple Mount appeared prior to its destruction by Roman troops in the year 70 C.E. In 2007, an expanded version of the simulation model was unveiled that includes a reconstruction of the early Islamic structures on and around the Temple Mount based on excavations at the site conducted under the direction of Jerusalem district archaeologist Yuval Baruch. Beyond the Davidson Center, this work has been featured in installations at the Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Frankfurter Bibelgesellschaft, and the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago.

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

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.

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

Contact: Emma Millon, Community Lead, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-9887).

The post 3/13 MITH Digital Dialogue: Lisa M. Snyder, “A Conversation about Compulsion, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, and Virtual Reality” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

During the 2011-12 academic year, Dr. Peterson is completing a faculty fellowship at MITH which is allowing her to create the Black Gotham Archive, an interactive website that dives into the cultural and narrative history of the lives of nineteenth-century black New Yorkers. Throughout the course of the year, Dr. Peterson is giving book talks across the country. A complete calendar of her events is listed on the Archive.

The Speaking of Books… Conversations with Campus Authors series of author talks and signings was begun in 2005 by the University of Maryland Libraries’ Humanities Librarians to highlight new and interesting research by faculty members from all schools and colleges at the University of Maryland. These free events are open to all members of the campus community and the general public. Each author will answer questions following his or her talk and sign books, which will be available for purchase. Refreshments will be served.

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