“Diggable Data, Scalable Reading, and New Humanities Scholarship” by NEIL FRAISTAT & SETH DENBO

In his 2005 book, Franco Moretti aims to open “a new front of discussion” by calling for a “distant reading” of texts in the pursuit of literary history. Abstraction in the form of the Graphs, Maps and Trees of the book’s title, he argues, reduces the number of elements in focus, providing a “sharper sense of their overall interconnection.” Moretti’s call is being been taken up by scholars working in a digital milieu, though not without controversy.

With mass digitization of print culture the potential for new types of investigation into the human condition is enormous, but just as scholars have always required a network of libraries and archives to support their use of books, manuscripts and other textual resources, digital resources require an infrastructure for discovery, study, and maintenance. Partnerships between research libraries, IT departments, and digital humanities centers have developed to support digitally enhanced scholarship in the arts and humanities. Internationally, in recent years several large-scale projects have been funded within the humanities and social sciences, to provide infrastructure to support the new digital scholarship. The University of Maryland is currently partnering with 9 other universities on one such international effort: the Mellon-funded Project Bamboo, which is attempting to answer the question: “How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?”

In this presentation and the ensuing discussion, we aim to present and contextualize our work on Project Bamboo in light of new modes of humanities digital scholarship and reading, including text mining and corpora analysis. Utilizing the high profile Google Books Ngram Viewer project and reactions to the “culturomics” approach as examples of the benefits and pitfalls of textual analysis at scale, we will argue for a scalable approach to humanities research, simultaneously distant and close, where for each step of abstraction away, the scholar can step back into the detail of the text.

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.

SETH DENBO is Project Coordinator for Bamboo Corpora Space at MITH. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom and is a cultural historian of eighteenth-century England. Before coming to MITH he has worked on projects in digital history, the AHRC ICT Programme in Arts and Humanities and been Research Associate at King’s College London where he was involved in strategic planning for a major European digital research infrastructure. He is also convenor of a new seminar in digital history at the Institute for Historical Research.

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! Refreshments are often provided but attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

The post 4/26 MITH Digital Dialogue: Neil Fraistat and Seth Denbo, “Diggable Data, Scalable Reading, and New Humanities Scholarship” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“Player Piano: Mechanizing the Humanities” by JAMES SMITH

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.

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! Refreshments are often provided but attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

The post 4/19 MITH Digital Dialogue: James Smith, “Player Piano: Mechanizing the Humanities” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Press release from University of Maryland (College Park, Md.) ARHU

Matt’s reflection on being named a Guggenheim fellow

More information about the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

The post Matthew Kirschenbaum awarded Guggenheim Fellowship appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“Communities Incarnate: Virtual Intimacies of Body and Place” by MARIA VELAZQUEZ

In this talk, Maria Velazquez investigates the creative processes through which citizens are made, with particular attention to the role that technologies like blogging, virtual reality, and electronic activism foster the use of “imaginative embodiment” in creating stories of citizenship, selfhood, and action. “Imaginative embodiment” suggests the ways in which performing citizenship involves a mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual investment in incarnating particular political and social ideals. Velazquez’s examines three areas, the Go Mamasita! Dance Studio, a site envisioned as a place where women of color, particularly African- American women, can reconnect with dance ancestry, a nexus to North African dance traditions, filtered through the lens of digital diaspora; Red Light Center (RLC), an adults-only virtual world, similar in design to World of Warcraft or SecondLife, to discuss the role pre-structuring technology takes in creating erotic virtual cityscapes; and the blogosphere, particularly blogs that grapple with anti-racist discourse, fandom, and popular culture. Through an investigation of these spaces, Velazquez describes the ways individuals engage in virtual and “real-world” activism. Actions and behaviors that highlight the ways in which the language of friendship, holism, and community is mobilized in conversations about citizenship, the body, and desire. While a dance studio, a pornographic virtual world, and segments of the blogosphere may seem like a disparate collection of sites for investigation, all three share an abiding interest in the body and its potential as site of pleasure.

MARIA VELAZQUEZ is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland (College Park, Md.) in American Studies, and MITH Winnemore Dissertation Fellow. Her research interests include constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in contemporary media, as well as community building and technology. She serves on the board of Lifting Voices, a District of Columbia-based nonprofit that helps young people in DC discover the power of creative writing. She blogs for The Hathor Legacy (www.thehathorlegacy.com), a feminist pop culture blog, and recently received the Winnemore Dissertation Fellowship from the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). She has also received a fellowship from the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity’s Interdisciplinary Scholars Program. Her dissertation project examines the use of the body as a component in community building, paying particular attention to the Bellydancers of Color Association, the anti-racist blogosphere, and Red Light Center, an adults’ only virtual world. Maria is also a Ron Brown Scholar and an alumna of Smith College.

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! Refreshments are often provided but attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

The post 4/12 MITH Digital Dialogue: Maria Velazquez, “Communities Incarnate: Virtual Intimacies of Body and Place” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“The Future of 21st Century Studies” by RICHARD GRUSIN

What is 21st century studies? The practice of interdisciplinary research as it is pursued in the 21st century? The study of issues of pressing concern in the 21st century? The reconceptualization of historical studies in light of these concerns? The deployment of 21st century modes of research, analysis, and presentation? Richard Grusin, the new director of the Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, will argue that C21 is in a unique position to define the future of 21st century studies. As the only center of its kind, C21 should take as its mission the development of 21st century studies as an interdisciplinary field. Doing so will allow C21 to set the terms of the debate about the future of 21st century studies for the decades ahead as well as to open the door for collaborations with other individuals and institutions interested in defining the future of 21st century studies.

RICHARD GRUSIN is Professor of English and Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Previously he was a professor at the College of William and Mary, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Wayne State University. He served as department chair from 1996-99 at Georgia Tech and from 2001-2008 at Wayne State. Grusin received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. He has published numerous chapters and articles and written four books.  He is best known for his foundational work in new media studies. With Jay David Bolter he is the author of Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999), which sketches out a genealogy of new media, beginning with the contradictory visual logics underlying contemporary digital media. His most recent book, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010), argues that in an era of heightened securitization, socially networked US and global media work to pre-mediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear.

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! Refreshments are often provided but attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

The post 4/8 MITH Digital Dialogue: Richard Grusin, “The Future of 21st Century Studies” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“Teaching Machines to Read Milton: Natural Language Processing Challenges for Literary and Historical Texts” by TRAVIS BROWN

Many popular natural language processing techniques and tools rely on annotated training corpora to learn models that can be used to process new data from a similar domain. We can train a parser on Wall Street Journal text from the Penn Treebank, for example, and expect it to perform reasonably well on recent blog posts or movie reviews, but not necessarily on eighteenth-century conduct manuals. Unfortunately it’s often hard to find or create appropriate training data for specific literary genres or historical periods, even in English. In this talk Travis Brown, Research & Development Software Developer at MITH, will look at some examples of semi-supervised and unsupervised methods that can be used to explore large text collections in domains with little or no available training data.

TRAVIS BROWN is a Research & Development Software Developer at MITH. He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Texas at Austin and is beginning a dissertation on the use of digital tools and methods in literary studies. While at the University of Texas he worked as an editor for the Walt Whitman Archive and was the lead developer of eComma, a web application for collaborative textual annotation. He also participated in a range of projects in UT’s Computational Linguistics Lab, where he developed tools for dependency parsing, semantic role labeling, and toponym resolution. He is particularly interested in using techniques from computational linguistics to aid in the exploration and visualization of large collections of literary and historical texts.

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! Refreshments are often provided but attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

The post 3/29 MITH Digital Dialogue: Travis Brown, “Teaching Machines to Read Milton: Natural Language Processing Challenges for Literary and Historical Texts” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“The International Amateur Scanning League, Unlocking the Federal Archives One Work at a Time” by THOMAS GIDEON

The federal government has produced and continues to produce a staggering amount of material, most of which is released directly into the public domain. The policies and processes for providing broad access in the age of the internet are still catching up both to that volume and new technologies. Experiments in public-private partnerships have been tried with varying degrees of success. Even the most successful are burdened with odd limitations and restrictions. A small group of volunteers working directly with the National Archives are trying to change that.

THOMAS GIDEON  (@cmdln) is an advocate for free software and free culture. He blogs and podcasts about those experiments in digital commons along with technology policy in general, hacktivism, the experience of being an inveterate technology enthusiast and professional, and much more at The Command Line. (http://thecommandline.net)

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! Refreshments are often provided but attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

The post 3/15 MITH Digital Dialogue: Thomas Gideon, “The International Amateur Scanning League, Unlocking the Federal Archives One Work at a Time” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“Playworlds: rule systems & relational art” by MARY FLANAGAN

In this talk, Dr. Mary Flanagan presents games and artworks that function to create emergent values among both designers and players. Arguing that agency is a key concept to designing play systems, Flanagan explores games, values, and the conceptual concerns inherent in the rule systems that constitute contemporary play, especially focusing on the implications of the ‘gamification’ of everyday life.

MARY FLANAGAN is an innovator focused on how people create and use technology. Her groundbreaking explorations across the arts, humanities, and sciences represent a novel use of methods and tools that bind research with introspective cultural production. As an artist, her work ranges from game-inspired systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts; these works are exhibited internationally. As a scholar interested in how human values are in play across technologies and systems, Flanagan has written more than 20 critical essays and chapters on games, empathy, gender and digital representation, art and technology, and responsible design. Her three books in English include the recent Critical Play (2009) with MIT Press. Flanagan founded the Tiltfactor game research laboratory in 2003, where researchers study and make social games, urban games, and software in a rigorous theory/practice environment. She is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College. http://www.maryflanagan.com; http://www.tiltfactor.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! Refreshments are often provided but attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

The post 3/8 MITH Digital Dialogue: Mary Flanagan, “Playworlds: rule systems & relational art” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“Stop Being Polite and Start Getting Real: Professional Education for Professional Humanists” by TIM CARMODY

We’ve generally done everything we can in the humanities to ignore that a PhD is a every bit as much a professional degree as a degree in law, medicine, educational administration, information science, or business. The irony is that explicit training in the professional tools employed by professors, would actually make PhDs who end up off the tenure track, more widely employable. This presentation is intended to open up a discussion to identify professional tools that will make PhDs better professors, better alt-ac employees, and create better paths to non-academic careers. All we have to do is shake the fantasy that scholarship alone will save us, that everything practical can be absorbed through osmosis, that even admitting contingency is tantamount to failure. It’s time to get real about who we are and what we do.

TIM CARMODY has a PhD in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania (2009), where he also served as a postdoctoral fellow in 2009-2010. From 2007-2009, Tim was the graduate student representative on the MLA’s Nominating Committee, and member and co-chair of the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession. In 2010, he left the academy to become a full-time technology and culture journalist, joining Wired.com and writing for The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, Kottke.org, Lifehacker, and HiLobrow. He also blogs about ideas & journalism at Snarkmarket, pop culture at The Idler, and the history and future of reading at Bookfuturism.com. He specializes in crossover pieces — writing about cell phones or video game consoles for liberal arts audiences, or the shift from parchment to paper for e-reader enthusiasts, or what William Carlos Williams’s Paterson can teach us about cyborgs. Mostly, he likes to think really hard while talking as fast as he can.

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! Refreshments are often provided but attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

The post 3/1 MITH Digital Dialogue: Tim Carmody, “Stop Being Polite and Start Getting Real: Professional Education for Professional Humanists” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“Community, Cohesion, and Commitment: Developing and Deploying Open Source Tools in the UVa Online Library Environment” by JULIE MELONI

The University of Virginia Library is a key partner in the collaborative project known as “Hydra”; the goal of the Hydra Project is to create a comprehensive set of open source repository workflow tools that allow librarians and scholars to manage describe, deliver, reuse and preserve digital information. U.Va.’s committment to the project includes the definition of metadata standards, the creation of search and discovery interfaces, and the development and implementation of multiple Hydra “heads” such as the interface and workflow in use for the U.Va. institutional repository. This talk will provide a brief overview of the Hydra Project and the tools under development, describe some of the processes and challenges for development teams working within a library setting, discuss the value of having a Digital Humanities R&D group (the Scholars’ Lab) embedded in this same setting, and the types of “alt-ac” positions, roles, and responsibilities that can be found in this environment.

JULIE MELONI is the Chief Architect of the Online Library Environent at the University of Virginia Library. Engaged in the design and development of web-based application since 1994, the bulk of her work occured in the private sector, where her responsibilities ranged from enterprise-grade application planning, design, and development, to system administration and user interface and user experience consultation. Since 2000, she has authored more than fifteen editions of texts for Sams Publishing, covering numerous topics in web application development, applications, and programming languages. She also completed a PhD in English from Washington State University in 2010, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century American Literature and History of the Book.

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! Refreshments are often provided but attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

The post 2/22 MITH Digital Dialogue: Julie Meloni, Community, Cohesion, and Commitment: Developing and Deploying Open Source Tools in the UVa Online Library Environment appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.