New research suggests there is more to this story that the limited viewpoint provided in the Supreme Court’s opinion. Francis Scott Key, for one, was involved in many such petitions, and his uncle Philip Barton Key represented an earlier generation of Queens. The lone dissenting justice on the Supreme Court, Gabriel Duvall, came from a prominent Maryland slaveholding family, and as a lawyer he had joined Philip Barton Key representing the Queens. Numerous other Maryland African American families filed similar petitions in the newly created District of Columbia circuit court of appeals beginning in the early 1800s.

The O Say Can You See: Early Washington D.C. Law and Family Project has received a two-year $200,000 Collaborative Research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize and make available the case files of the D.C. circuit court and to uncover the social networks of early Washington, D.C.

Scholars from the University of Maryland and the University of Nebraska will collaborate on research to understand the web of litigants, jurists, and other participants in D.C., and to place these multigenerational family networks in the foreground of the story of the founding of the nation’s capital.

“The O Say Can You See Project offers the opportunity to extend our use of digital tools and technologies to legal history,” said Jennifer Guiliano, Assistant Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and one of the co-principal investigators of the project. “We want to not just make these underutilized records visible to the public, but also to imagine new ways for historians and genealogists to navigate the complex records that document families in early Washington and Maryland—whether these records are material, cultural, or legal.”

The case of Mima Queen will serve as one focal point for this investigation of family, law, and slavery. Claiming that she and her child should be emancipated from slavery because she was descended from Mary Queen, a free woman, Mima Queen leveraged an increasingly common legal tactic utilized by and on behalf of African Americans in the early American republic to argue for their freedom. But her case hinged on a larger transition for Maryland and Virginia–from colonies to states in a post-Revolutionary United States. Mima Queen v. Hepburn (11 U.S. 290) was one of the first landmark Supreme Court cases in the new nation to pit human rights against property rights.

William G. Thomas, co-principal investigator, is writing a new book on the Queen case and the contests over freedom and slavery in the aftermath of the American Revolution. “The history of slavery and freedom whether on the local or the national scale is also the history of families and the law,” said Thomas, “We can’t understand one without the other.”

The O Say Can You See Project will also use the case files of the D.C. court to recover and make visible the names of African American family members from in D.C. who mainly came from Maryland and Virginia. These family names and relationships are found on court affidavits and other documents.

The O Say Can You See Project is a partnership between the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, the Department of History at the University of Nebraska, and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska. This collaboration will produce a series of virtual seminars to focus scholarly attention on the broader questions surrounding family networks as well as articles focusing on the challenges of data curation and digitization of petitions and civil cases in Prince George’s County and Washington, D.C.

The participation of experts in data curation from the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities is a key part of the project’s emphasis on opening up this dimension of historical research to wider participation and re-use. “The close working partnership of historians and data curators will generate new insights on how fragile and often fragmentary historical records can be made useful to future generations of scholars and genealogists,” said Trevor Muñoz, Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and Assistant Dean for Digital Humanities Research at the University of Maryland Libraries.

The post O Say Can You See: A Legal and Cultural History of the 19th Century appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Our goal for the project was to design, develop, and deploy a WordPress‐based accessibility tool to create Braille content for end-users who are blind or have low vision. Over the last several decades, scholars have developed standards for how best to create, organize, present, and preserve digital information so that future generations of teachers, students, scholars, and librarians may still use it. What has remained neglected for the most part, however, are the needs of people with disabilities. As a result, many of the otherwise most valuable digital resources are useless for people who are blind or have low vision with assistive devices like screen readers and refreshable Braille displays. Our premise was “is there a way to directly manipulate WordPress text into Braille without having to go through a separate device?”

So we set out to create a free and easy‐to‐use plugin for WordPress that creates Braille texts from WordPress posts, allowing any WordPress site to share the products of their text‐based projects with this often‐neglected audience of readers. Originally, we planned to extend the use of Anthologize—a free and open source plugin for WordPress that currently translates any RSS text into PDF, ePub, HTML, or TEI—to include the conversion of text to Braille. Yet, as we began our work, it became apparent that it would be far more efficient to begin by creating a direct WordPress plugin that could be included in core application releases that could be supplemented by the Anthologize-enabled plugin.

The WordPress plugin consists of two components: 1) the plugin itself which works natively with any WordPress installation with the plugin activated and 2) extending the current Anthologize plugin to provide SimBraille and embossable forms of Braille translations as well as the pre-existing document types available via anthologize (PDF, ePUB, TEI). We can do this via a simple RESTful service providing the English to Braille translation utilizing the LibLouis open source software that provides a Braille translation library. To make it as useable as possible, the plugin can be configured to use either a locally installed version of the LibLouis software or a remote server that can be made available from the cloud. We’ve constructed an Amazon Machine Image for use by anyone who wishes to have a remote server loaded with LibLouis up and running for their project in a low-cost option. This will be particularly useful for teachers who can’t load software in their computer labs, users who might be using different machines to develop their site that do not all have access to the local installation, and instructors who travel between schools and classes.

The RESTful service is written in Ruby as a Sinatra application (http://www.sinatrarb.com/). Because Sinatra is built on Rack (http://rack.github.io/), any of the available Rack middleware can be used to provide authentication, authorization, or other services. What this means is that a school district or institution could open up a cloud service for all its teachers without much effort. They’d only need to provide their login credentials on the machine they are using and the service would be up and running in minutes. In our test deployment, we added a caching web server between the WordPress site and the Sinatra service to make it easier for users to load and interact with the service.

These two components fulfil the goals of the grant: providing a plugin that can create Braille translations of texts organized through Anthologize. Long term though, I’ve got some ideas about what is going to come next.

We’ve already started on the most preliminary development. We’ve just recently launched a private beta version of a curriculum for Braille training in partnership with Tina Herzberg and her colleague Penny Rosenblum at the University of Arizona. When we were working on Making the Digital Humanities More Open, Tina talked about how great it would be to be able to extend our digital Braille work to classrooms. They’d just started a grant to create large scale curricular materials to train people in Braille literacy. That project, Braille RISE, began a few months ago. We’ve deployed a Moodle instance (an open source content management service for teaching and learning) and created a Braille Short Code filter that allows Tina and Penny to render Braille in the Moodle instance. For example, by using [SimBraille] and [/SimBraille] pair, we can transform 34 into the appropriate Braille cells.

What this means is that they don’t have to  insert pictures or use video to show the correct Braille layout. Nor, by the way, do they have to use the six-key keyboard entry system that most Braille users use to render the cells. It all works in plain-text.

Our next stage will, we hope, allow us to round trip the Braille. Right now, for students to answer the questions correctly in Braille, we give them multiple choice answers. We’d like to create an input option where students could directly enter Braille using six key or even a refreshable Braille display to enter long form answers. That would then translate to plain text for the instructors so that they could have automated answer corrections.

Along the way, we are also hoping to round out one more area of this project that is tied to our other group project, Accessible Future. When we were building the WordPress plugin and the Moodle filter, it was readily apparent that there is a need for simple WordPress themes that are entirely accessible on both the front end (the theme) and the backend (the dashboard). Our plan for spring is to begin working on a custom set of themes that would natively integrate accessibility plugins. This would shortcut so many steps for users who right now have to sort through the various plugins, install, activate, and configure their settings. We are hoping to have plugins like the Braille plugin, Access Keys, WP-Accessibility and others embedded within the themes. And once we’ve conquered that, we want to take on the backend so that it is fully accessible for blind, low-vision, cognitive, and auditorily disabled users.

Accessibility fundamentally enables us all and our hope is that these project products and future deliverables will enable more digital humanists to not just meet accessibility standards but innovate new technologies that are fully accessible to all users.

The post The Future of Accessibility with BrailleSC.org and BrailleRISE appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Date: Wednesday, April 10- Friday, April 12, 2013
Location: University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland USA

Applications Due: December 15, 2012 (please note the revised deadline)

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), working in cooperation with the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes for Health, and the Research Councils UK, will host a two-day symposium to: (1) address questions about collaboration, research methodologies, and the interpretation of evidence arising from the interdisciplinary opportunities in this burgeoning area of biomedical-driven humanities scholarship; (2) to investigate the current state of the field; and (3) to facilitate future research collaborations between the humanities and biomedical sciences.

Awarded via a National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman’s Cooperative Agreement, Shared Horizons: Data, BioMedicine, and the Digital Humanities will explore collaboration, research methodologies, and the interpretation of evidence arising from the interdisciplinary opportunities in this burgeoning area of biomedical-driven humanities scholarship.

Shared Horizons will create opportunities for disciplinary cross-fertilization through a mix of formal and informal presentations combined with breakout sessions, all designed to promote a rich exchange of ideas about how large-scale quantitative methods can lead to new understandings of human culture. Bringing together researchers from the digital humanities and bioinformatics communities, the symposium will  explore ways in which these two communities might fruitfully collaborate on projects that bridge the humanities and medicine around the topics of sequence alignment and network analysis, two modes of analysis that intersect with “big data.”

The organizers encourage applications from faculty, staff, and graduate students in the humanities and biomedicine fields, as well as other academics and the general public with a serious interest in sequence alignment, network analysis, and “big data”. Applicants would commit to the submission of a paper for inclusion in the Shared Horizons Resources section in addition to a 15 minute presentation related to their paper on one of these modes of analysis within your research.

Applications to attend the Shared Horizons Symposium will be accepted from November 1-December 15, 2012. Applications should include an statement of research interests in these areas, a 500-1000 word abstract for their paper/presentation, and a current curriculum vitae. Selected papers would be distributed to symposium attendees prior to the event as well as posted online. Applicants should be current residents of the U.S.

Participants will be selected by the Advisory Board in consultation with the Shared Horizons Staff and Sponsors based on the following criteria with each area being weighted equally.

1. scholarly engagement with sequence alignment and/or network analysis
2. quality of proposed paper
3. collaborative potential

Notification of selection will be made by January 10, 2013.

The post Announcing the Shared Horizons CFP appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

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The meeting itself is a great example of the innovative leadership the Office of Digital Humanities is demonstrating in its grant programs: providing a public platform for project directors to talk about their projects and meet one another presents opportunities for collaboration and information exchange that likely wouldn’t take place otherwise.  I was delighted to be asked to present on publicizing your digital humanities project as part of a roundtable with Paula Wesley (NEH Office of Communications), Natalie Houston (University of Houston), and Sheila Brennan (CHNM @George Mason University). Here are a couple of quick lessons on how to promote your project:

1.) Pre-Planning is your best friend. The first task we undertake on a project when it gets started is to grab all the various team members (scholars, developers, design team, etc) to discuss the project goals and what message we want to send about a project. We distill this into a couple of verbal bullet-points that allow us to address our audience. Who is your audience? What language do they use? What types of medium are they most comfortable with? Each of these needs to be answered to extend your project to those communities. Once everyone is clear on the project, the message, and the audience, we then spin up our publicity machine.

• Logo: select a logo that visually represents your projects interests and goals. nothing too elaborate and nothing that can’t be inverted into black-white or other colors.
• Tweet handle or hashtag: digital humanities is a community that likes its social media. Establish a twitter handle (or preferably a hashtag) that will allow you to monitor, gather, and contribute to the online community. It should conform to your brand. For example, our topic modeling workshop uses #dhtopic as its tag….the field of study (DH) coupled with the tech method (topic modeling). Make it short and sweet since you’ll only have 144 characters everytime someone tweets.

Once we’ve established those two things, we move onto our  MITH Project Page (http://mith.umd.edu/research/current-projects/ ). A project page is hosted by MITH (forever) and basically captures our role in any given project (be it an event, conference, project, etc). We include:

a. project description

b. participating staff

c. project contact

d. blog roll and recent tweets

e. share functions (tweet, facebook, email, g+)

f. project website link and Git repository

The project page updates itself once it has been set up. We automatically pull any tweet with the project tag to that page and automatically link as posts that have been tagged with the project tag. We then update the static portions annually to reflect what may have changed in terms of project goals and staffing.

Now, you are asking what about building some snazzy project website? At MITH, we discuss what the scholarly goals of the project are. Where possible we deploy custom-themed CMS systems (WordPress or Drupal) to be as efficient as possible with our time and resources (financial and staffing). More significantly, we know that projects evolve, primary investigators change or leave universities, and/or the project completes its work. By seperating the project page from the project site, we provide project staff more flexibility in updating without having to rely on MITH staff updating or limiting what technologies a project site might use.

So, you’ve got social media and a web profile under control. Now gather your thoughts to launch the publicity.

At MITH, we announce any significant issue for a project as well as regular development updates. They get posted to the MITH blog, tweeted via link, and sent out via listerv. We run google analytics to identify what are high traffic times for digital humanities and visitors to our site. For MITH, we get a little over 1,000 unique hits a month…most are concentrated in late mornings monday through thursday. We then launch our regular project announcements to post around 10 am with special announcements taking place around lunch time. This way, we catch the east coasters with regular announcements and the west coasters as they are getting into work. Plus, we catch our project partners across the pond so we aren’t tweeting and posting while it is the dead of night.

All of our announcements include the funder twitter handle, a project URL, and our twitter handle.  Giving props to your funder is very important as your project wouldn’t exist without their support. Because there is power in numbers, we also give our own staff a heads up on really significant announcements so they can deploy their re-tweeting and postings. One final note about tweeting/posting. MITH has branded a special hashtag #mithleaks to tease the public about our projects and on-going work. It allows us to flag people that something is coming and have a bit of fun at the same time.

Since most of these things create a tweet/blog/post windfall, we also make sure to loop in our local stakeholders on projects. We send special notes to our campus constituents highlighting the projects that intersect with our University priorities. This is pivotal because we use these to generate interest from our local supporters: the College of Arts and Humanities, the University of Maryland Libraries, and the Office of the Vice President for Research. We also tap their promotional and publishing networks. By sharing information with them, they can help us identify appropriate media outlets. Plus, we get them interested in featuring our projects on UMD sites.

Now that your project is getting out there, don’t forget that you’ve got to report on its products. At MITH, we post (when possible) midterm and final reports. We also post a project completion blog that highlights what we’ve learned. We like these to coincide with major conferences and events of the constituent communities and audiences. It allows us to reach committed scholars while simultaneously providing the project team with the opportunity for feedback.

When the project is completed, we crawl and archive the project website, gather the tweets and blogs, and package that as a digital file for our archives. Project members get a copy for their files and then we conduct an internal review. We return to our project goals, message, and audiences. Did we complete our goals, communicate our message, and reach the audience we intended? We then note what we need to change for next time.

This all seems like a lot (and it is) but you should also know we don’t do this all on a daily basis. Tweets are scheduled via tweet scheduling, mail via mail chimp, blogs via regularly scheduled contributions where every team member takes a turn, and project updates on a quarterly basis. We set the schedules at the beginning of the semester for every project and then divide up responsibilities. Projects generally get awarded quarterly which means we are able to plan out months in advance and estimate when we will have major announcements.

Whether you follow the process above or create one of your own, the principal remains the same: unless you promote your project, how will others know how cool it is?

The post NEH Project Director’s Meeting: Lessons for Promoting your Project appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Please join us for this very special occasion by viewing our Reception Invitation. RSVP to mith@umd.edu by the 20th of August to join us.

The post Please Join Us! The dedication of the new MITH home appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Working in cooperation with the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities (ODH); the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) of the National Institutes for Health, Department of Health and Human Services; and the Research Councils UK (RCUK), Shared Horizons will be a unique forum through which participants and their institutions will be able to address questions about collaboration, research methodologies, and the interpretation of evidence arising from the interdisciplinary opportunities in this burgeoning area of biomedical-driven humanities scholarship.

Shared Horizons will create opportunities for disciplinary cross-fertilization through a mix of formal and informal presentations combined with breakout sessions, all designed to promote a rich exchange of ideas about how large-scale quantitative methods can lead to new understandings of human culture. Bringing together researchers from the digital humanities and bioinformatics communities, the symposium will  explore ways in which these two communities might fruitfully collaborate on projects that bridge the humanities and medicine around the topics of sequence alignment and network analysis, two modes of analysis that intersect with “big data.” The workshop will be held April 10-12, 2012 in Washington, D.C. and College Park, MD.

For more information including the call for attendees, please visit the workshop website.

The post MITH Announces an NEH Chairman’s Cooperative Agreement for Shared Horizons appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Continuing our efforts to capture trends, innovative research agendas, and just plain DH fun for those who can’t always attend every event they want, here are a few quick thoughts on the conference.

From an U.S. centered-perspective, the week was a celebration of the funding efforts of the Office of Digital Humanities and the tremendous work they have done to increase the disciplinary, methodological, and humanistic questions being funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. From the work of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture’s Scalar (still in beta) to Scholar’s Labs recently released Neatline through our own Topic Modeling Workshop, the ODH proved that even small amount of federal funding can have transformative powers in Humanities research. I only wish that NEH administrators and our Congress could have been in the room for these presentations: the question of the value of the NEH and the impact of ODH more specifically was soundly recognized by the international audience and proved that there is a value in humanities within the globally-engaged world.

More internationally-speaking, the conference was a continuing salvo in the rapid spread of digital humanities, both to individuals but also to entirely new professional and institutional organizations. The Japanese Digital Humanities Organization joined the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, our national umbrella organization (with our own Neil Fraistat as its incoming Chair of the Steering Committee), while the Germans celebrated the solidification of their own national organization.

For all of these trumpets and well-deserved fanfare, DH2012 continued its existing efforts to grapple with diversity. While the gender balance visually appears to be improving, the event itself continues to struggle with garnering the attention and attendance of digital humanists in Latin America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Africa (to name just a few). The Mexican Network of Digital Humanists (Red de Humanistas Digitales, RedHD) held the First Meeting (or Conference) of Digital Humanists at the Vasconcelos Library, Mexico City earlier this year and presented a bit on their efforts but, by and large, the conference was dominated by attendees from the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe. There are digital humanities efforts in other nations. How can we do better to support their attendance at our international event?

Related to, but divergent from, the issue of national diversity is the issue of diversity in Digital Humanities more generally. Brought to attention in a number of presentations but especially that of Amy Earhart (see the video), I was troubled by the definition of what constituted/constitutes diversity and where those methodologies, pedagogies, and theories seemed to have disappeared to. With clear exception of Earhart and a handful of others, it seemed diversity beyond nationality was a gesture in name only (read: I’ve included women within my data, or women are part of the project, or this project concerns nationality X). There was extraordinarily little attention to diversity as construction, where race, class, ability, sexuality, and on modify, constrain, construct, and influence the data, methodology, pedagogy, theory, and research practices within digital humanities. I am reminded of a friend who, in a discussion of metholodogical developments in my own dissertation work on early 20th century white middle-class male production of Native American masculinity through halftime mascotry/performance, once remarked to me about a thesis I’d written: “all of the work you’ve done is great, but you’ve missed the obvious point: until you address the white, the middle-class, the male, the production, the masculinity, the identity politics, AND the performance aspects that exclude others from those categories and sources/data, you haven’t done a responsible analysis.” Put more simply, a responsible humanistic analysis recognizes divergent data, theory, methodology, pedagogy and practice. As a historian, I’m not permitted to gesture at subaltern theorists, outlying sources, or isolationist research practice just because I am focused on achieving a methodological goal. I must instead confront, rectify, and engage with these things or else leave myself open to critique. Just because we discuss the technical methodologies more blantently and frequently within our gathering and focus on our products, does not mean we should discard our obligations as humanists: to produce sound scholarly inquiries that answer humanities questions.

I don’t mean to suggest that there are not shining examples of projects, individuals, and institutions that are confronting these issues…but until exchange between digital humanists addresses not just the digital methodological questions but also the humanistic methodological questions, I fear we will continue to suffer from stymied efforts to address diversity in meaningful ways. I find myself wanting to shout: Where my Cultural Theorists At?

I lay no blame for this on the program committee, nor the professional organization as a whole, but instead suggest that it is our obligation as individual scholars to recruit the attendance and presentation of promising scholars from fields that offer potential to transform digital humanities. In my conference-addled brain, I hope for a digital humanities future where we see the emergence of scholars who can easily merge method, theory, and practice in meaningful ways that truly interrogate our assumptions, dependencies, and conclusions.

The post DH Internationally: Dispatches from Hamburg appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Please stay tuned for forthcoming invitation to our space dedication in September.

The post We are moving to our new campus home appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The Research Programmer will work with senior MITH staff to develop new methods and tools for the exploration and curation of digital materials. The successful candidate will be responsible for research, development, deployment, support and management of software for enabling the analysis of cultural heritage collections on a large scale, and for the integration, implementation, and maintenance of software for digital humanities projects under the leadership of the Assistant Director for Research and Development. Software development activities encompass all phases of software development lifecycle, including implementation of interfaces to other software systems and development of user interfaces for the tools developed by MITH.

Jointly supported by the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities and the University Libraries, MITH engages in collaborative, interdisciplinary work at the intersection of technology and humanistic inquiry. MITH specializes in text and image analytics for cultural heritage collections, data curation, digital preservation, linked data applications, and data publishing. The research programmer will be encouraged to advance a relevant research agenda of their own and to participate in MITH’s ongoing research into the areas of technology listed above.

Duties:

Coordinating and implementing software applications and services (70%)

• Define project scope, goals and deliverables. Develop project plans and associated communications documents. Build and implement software applications.
• Schedule, and monitor project timelines and milestones using appropriate project management tools.

Representing MITH’s technical interests at conferences, workshops, and meetings and in collaboration with internal stakeholders and external organizations (10%)

Personal research time used for professional development and R&D work (20%)

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Humanities, Digital Humanities, or a related field
• at least 2 years programming experience
• Experience and Knowledge of source code/version control software and open source documentation standards
• Familiarity with digital humanities trends/developments.
• Demonstrated initiative and ability to work on multiple projects simultaneously
• Excellent organizational, analytical, time management and communication (oral and written) skills
• Able to work in a team-driven design and development process but with clear ability to motivate and manage oneself
• Experience in selecting the appropriate development environment for the task

Preferred Qualifications:

• We will prefer candidates who can demonstrate engagement in open source projects, communities, and related development fora (e.g. GitHub, StackOverflow, etc.)
• Demonstrated experience working with dynamic content in template-driven web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Drupal, etc.
• Excellent knowledge of JavaScript, including frameworks and techniques
• Experience with data manipulation and analysis using tools such as Ruby, Python, Scala, R, or MATLAB
• Experience with building large-scale distributed applications and architectures using Java or JVM languages preferred
• Experience with XML technologies (validation schemes, XSLT, eXist, Cocoon, etc.)

The Research Programmer is a full-time, 12-month staff position at the University. Salary is commensurate with experience, ranging from $64,000 to $76,000. The University also offers a competitive benefits package. To apply, please upload a letter of application, CV, examples of code/projects (or URLs to accessible repositories) and contact information for three references to jobs@umd.edu. For best consideration, apply by close of business on August 12, 2012.

The University of Maryland is an equal opportunity institution with respect to both education and employment. The university does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, or handicap in admission, or access to, or treatment or employment in, its programs and activities as required by federal (Title VI, Title IX, Section 504) and state laws and regulations. Women and Minorities are strongly encouraged to apply.

The post Come work @MITH as a research programmer appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.