WHEN: Tuesday, September 18, 2018
WHEN: 3:00 PM
WHERE: MITH, 0301 Hornbake Library North

We’ll provide a little information about the process of starting an official student organization and the support that MITH will provide to the DH/DS student group. However, most of the time will be reserved for interested students to talk to each other about what they would like to see happen. All are welcome—just bring questions, ideas, and enthusiasm!

Notes will be shared with those who cannot attend at this date/time.

We look forward to seeing everyone!

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If you are a UMD student, we want to hear from you! Please take our brief survey.

This survey is intended to help us gauge interest in the creation of a student organization for those both curious about or active in the digital humanities. This group would be run by students and could be a forum through which they might network and build connections, stay informed about DH on campus, and also elect representatives to participate in the shared governance of DH organizations on campus, such as MITH.

The post Assessing Interest in a DH/DS Student Organization appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

We are excited to have Roopika Risam on campus to kick off a weekend of digital humanities events between March 8 and 10th. Risam’s work focuses on the intersections between postcolonial, African American, and US ethnic studies, and the role of digital humanities in mediating between them.

Please join us Thursday, March 8th at 3:00 pm for Risam’s talk, Visualizing Du Bois: The Politics of Literary Recovery. This talk, drawn from her current book project, examines W.E.B. Du Bois’s influence on knowledge infrastructures in the humanities. This event will be held at the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH), 0301 Hornbake Library North.

Roopika Risam is Assistant Professor of English, Coordinator of the Digital Studies Graduate Certificate Program, Digital Humanities Coordinator, and Chair of the Program Area for Content Educators at Salem State University. She is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Northwestern University Press, 2018). Her current book project examines W.E.B. Du Bois’s influence on knowledge infrastructures in the humanities. Follow her on Twitter @roopikarisam.

Edit-a-thon events are sponsored by  Fembot, Department of Women’s Studies, UMD-CP, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities,  African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) Initiative, LGBT Equity Center, The College of Arts and Humanities, Department of Communication, UMD-CP, Department of English, UMD-CP, University of Maryland Libraries, Digital Systems and Stewardship, UMD Libraries, Feminist Majority Foundation, and Ms. magazine

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MITH Graduate Assistant, Call for Applications

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is seeking applications for a Graduate Assistant position for the Spring 2018 semester. This is an approximately 10-hour per week position starting in January 2018 and ending in May 2018, with a possibility of renewal.

The Graduate Assistant will support the MITH staff as an active participant in many aspects of the operations of a busy digital humanities center including creating communications and reports, helping to develop research proposals for internal and external funding, staffing and facilitating events, basic website maintenance, support for MITH’s flagship speaker series Digital Dialogues, and other administrative tasks as assigned.

While this position is primarily operational, all MITH staff cultivate and maintain a plan of research integrating some aspect of digital humanities or digital studies and contribute to the intellectual life of the institute. This position includes optional support and mentoring from MITH staff for the successful candidate to develop or expand a focus on the digital within her/his current field or research agenda.

Minimum Qualifications. This position is open to current graduate students at the University of Maryland.

Additional Qualifications. Candidates must be highly organized and deadline oriented. We are seeking interdisciplinary thinkers, who are self- motivated and -directed and extremely comfortable with project management. Excellent communication skills and demonstrated experience with professional writing are pluses.

To Apply: Interested applicants should submit a resume/CV and application letter by email at mith@umd.edu. Applications will be considered until the position is filled, but for best consideration please apply by Monday, January 15 at 6:00pm. Your application letter should also include links to samples of research or creative activity. Applicants may be asked to provide the names and contact information for two references as part of the selection process.

The post MITH is Hiring a Graduate Assistant for Spring 2018! appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Winter Term 2018: Jan 2 – 22 (click here to enroll)
In-class meeting: Tuesdays / Thursdays 1 – 4:30 PM in 0301A Hornbake (MITH offices)
Online or Team Time: Mondays / Wednesdays unless indicated by *

Instructors:

Purdom Lindblad
Stephanie Sapienza
Ed Summers
Raff Viglianti

This course will frame and support collaboration on digital research with emphasis on introducing digital humanities workflows and research practices. The goal is to provide ‘small bites’ of each stage of digital work, from a survey of common theoretical and practical methodologies, to learning about project management, writing literature reviews and grant applications. By the end of the course, you will have the ability to scope, design, pitch, and participate in a digital project.

For students who are part of the DSAH or are seeking a MITH Internship, this course will provide a strong foundation from which to approach the practicum requirement.

Module 1: Survey of common DH Methodologies

Tuesday January 2 (in-class meeting)
*Wednesday January 3 is an in-class meeting

This module will introduce common methodologies in the Digital Humanities, such as archives, text encoding, and spatial humanities. We will survey theoretical papers, practical examples, and common critiques to DH.

Module 2: Project Management Part I (DH Workflows)

Thursday, January 4 (in-class meeting)
Monday, January 8 (online/team time)
Tuesday, January 9 (in-class meeting)

This module will introduce the fundamentals of digital project management and establishing your project’s workflow, and methods for collaboration. We will discuss how to structure your project data, create a team charter, and use selected project management tools. Project proposals resulting from work in this module will articulate the purpose and approach of your project, while the team charter states how things such as shared credit will work across the project’s lifecycle.

Module 3: Project Management Part II (Version Control)

Wednesday, January 10 (online/team time)

Digital work relies on collaboration and version control. Version control enables you to keep track of your many revisions, the various contributions to the project by team members, and repair mistakes. This module will introduce Git and GitHub as well as best practices for collaborating on a shared digital project.

Module 4: Writing DH Literature Reviews and Environmental Scans

Thursday, January 11 (in-class meeting)

DH research typically incorporates or creates digital resources; how should those be discussed and integrated into literature reviews for academic writing? In this module we will look at relevant examples, including journals focusing on the review of digital resources such as Scholarly Editing and American Quarterly. You will also work on your own DH literature review for your final project.

Module 5: Prototyping + Assessment

Tuesday, January 16 (in-class meeting)
Wednesday, January 17 (online/team time)

One challenge working with digital approaches is to anticipate the look and feel of the finished project. We will draw from design concepts and practices to produce many possible versions of a digital project, exposing the constraints and opportunities of each version. In this module, your team will produce paper and digital prototypes.

Module 6: Grants, Budgeting, Professional & Social Networking

Thursday,  January 18 (in-class meeting)
*Monday January 22 is an in-class meeting, presentations

In this module we’ll discuss how to talk about and persuade others to buy into your project by workshopping a quick elevator pitch, a conference presentation, and a grant proposal. We will cover how to think through the financial aspects of your project and create a project budget. Finally, we will discuss the social and political aspects of working within digital humanities communities of practice. We will cover alternative academic careers, building social networks, and modes of research.

The post MITH Winter Term Course: Anatomy of DH Research appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Fall 2017 Digital Dialogues speakers. Left to right, top to bottom: Kevin Hamilton, September 26; Nicole Cooke, October 3; Sarah Florini, October 10; Elisa Beshero-Bondar, October 24; Alexandrina Agloro, October 31; and Walter Forsberg, November 7.

MITH has wrapped up another fantastic Digital Dialogues season! This semester we got to hear about groundbreaking scholarly work on the history of segregation in the field of Library & Information Science (Nicole Cooke, October 3); research on how online social networks function to foster community discourse on race and representation (Sarah Florini, October 10); a discussion on the interdisciplinary benefits the arts can offer humanities in terms of materiality in research (Kevin Hamilton, September 26); a preview of new work in digital textual scholarship revealing new insights about the evolution of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein over several editions (Elisa Beshero-Bondar, October 24); inspiring stories of working with art, media and game design to help students of color understand and thrive in their world – AND conduct hands-on archival research (Alexandrina Agloro, October 31); and lastly, how the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture is doing truly innovative collaborative archival work building public digitization labs to encourage community engagement and build its audiovisual collections (Walter Forsberg, November 7).

All talks were live streamed, recorded, live tweets were captured and collated in Storify, and slides for most talks made available on the speakers’ talk pages. So if you missed any of these, you’ve still got means to experience them through the MITH site. Click here to access links for all Fall 2017 talks.

Now … it’s time to plan for the Spring. Each semester we open up nominations for anyone to propose a speaker for MITH to add to our lineup. Click here to access the nomination form and submit your selections. Nominations are due next Friday, November 17th.

Finally, MARK YOUR CALENDARS for Tuesday, December 5th at 12:30! MITH will host a coffee hour here at our offices with students, faculty or staff who want to come in and wind down the end of the semester, talk about the progress of your projects, get our input or suggestions, or just talk about whatever is on your mind. We’d love to see you here to wrap up this semester!

The post MITH Coffee Hour December 5! Plus, Spring 2018 Digital Dialogues: Who Do You Want to See? appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Photo by brewbooks.

The fact is that nearly all printed books now begin—and for many practical purposes end—their lifecycles as digital files that are produced and managed by designers, editors, publishers, packagers, and printers. The printed book that we hold in our hands is just one of the outputs that can be derived from these digital assets, which are also used to produce ebooks and Web-ready texts. In particular, the role of Adobe InDesign and other software tools is not well understood outside of the industry. And yet, this is where the book stops being a manuscript and starts becoming a book, by way of its transformation into a prescribed set of digital assets which in addition to the text may include stylesheets, fonts, metadata, images, and other design elements.

Led by principal investigator Matthew Kirschenbaum, this project represents the first organized attempt to put ambassadors from the scholarly communities traditionally invested in safeguarding and studying the material history of bookmaking into contact and conversation with thought leaders and influencers from the contemporary publishing world. The centerpiece of the project will be a convening to bring those figures together in New York City in early 2018;  Kirschenbaum’s efforts will also be supported by site visits to observe the bookmaking process as it unfolds across different settings, and interviews with industry experts. Findings for scholars, archivists, and publishers will be presented in a white paper made publicly available in late 2018.

“Digital technologies have forever altered publishing workflows,” commented BISG executive director Brian O’Leary. “We’re looking forward to working with Professor Kirschenbaum to explore current practice and its impact on our ability to preserve content for future generations.” “This project represents an exciting extension of MITH’s long-standing interest in preserving born-digital culture,” said Trevor Muñoz, MITH interim director. “We’re delighted to partner in this effort.” Karla Nielsen, curator at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, added, “For a long time publishers’ archives weren’t collected systematically, but now scholars are very grateful for the more complete records of earlier firms that we have, such as those of Cambridge University Press. Research libraries are just beginning to collect born-digital materials produced by publishers and this initiative will help us to understand how to do that so that there is a record of this moment of profound media change.”

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities is a leading digital humanities center that pursues disciplinary innovation and institutional transformation through applied research, public programming, and educational opportunities. The Book Industry Study Group is the leading book trade association for standardized best practices, research and information, and events. Matthew Kirschenbaum is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, a past Guggenheim Fellow, and author most recently of Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Harvard UP, 2016).

Inquiries about Books.Files may be sent to Matthew Kirschenbaum.

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MITH is accepting nominations for potential speakers for our Digital Dialogues series in the Fall 2017 semester.  Digital Dialogues is MITH’s signature events program, held almost every week while the academic semester is in session. Digital Dialogues is an occasion for discussion, presentation, and intellectual exchange that you can build into your weekly schedule.

To see a list of previous speakers, see our past dialogue schedules.

Nominations should be submitted by 12:00pm on Monday, June 26, 2017.  Click here to submit your nominations.

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DSAH offers graduate students a chance to combine the critical study of new forms of digital media and identity with creative and analytical practices utilizing digital media as well as the application of computational tools and techniques to traditional areas of humanistic study. All students complete two core courses: MITH 610, Introduction to Digital Studies, the DSAH Colloquium in Digital Studies, MITH 729, as well as a “praxis” course and other electives. MITH staff, Raff, Ed, and Purdom, have worked closely with Matt to develop and co-teach modules for MITH 610. These modules draw on the day-to-day work and expertise at MITH on topics such as TEI and scholarly editing, network analysis, and data storytelling.

DSAH students, and any student interested in digital scholarship, have a myriad of opportunities to participate in the rich extra-curricular environment for digital studies at Maryland. These opportunities include the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities initiative, AADHum, which features a reading group and Incubator series, MITH’s Digital Dialogues, and special events, such as the 2017 Society for Textual Scholarship conference. Matt says, “The DSAH Certificate has already proven tremendously exciting and rewarding to direct. It represents an extremely diverse and talented intellectual community. It feels as if there’s a real cohort there, which, together with the participants in AADHum, has been truly energizing.” The current DSAH cohort come from English, Women’s Studies, American Studies, Communication, Theatre/Performing Arts, and the iSchool, enriching interdisciplinary conversations while encouraging focused digital work within each student’s home discipline.

As one of the sponsors of DSAH, MITH is committed to providing another home base on campus for students working in digital studies. This year MITH hosted DSAH students collaborating on creative and experimental research. Jeffrey Moro, Setsuko Yokoyama, Kyle Bickoff, and Andy Yeh recently presented their experimental research on 3D printing at the 2017 R-CADE symposium. Their panel, Critical Unmaking:  DRM, Proprietary Networks, and Versioning Variances in 3-D Printing Technologies, responds to a growing “blackboxing” of technology, and interrogates paths through which to productively break down and break open the 3-D printer across a variety of critical lenses and methodologies. Robert Burgard and Brittni Ballard spent the Spring semester pursuing a project titled “A Conspiracy of Fake News: Linguistic Links between Fake News and Conspiracy Theory.” The main goal is to ascertain whether a link exists between those who write fake news and those who write conspiracy theories. The project will examine rhetorical techniques found in both to determine any commonalities and will involve fieldwork and interviews with people working in various dis-information fields such as UFO sightings and Ghost Hunters. The objective is to produce a publishable paper as well as develop a tool to identify whatever linguistic links are revealed.

Beyond DSAH, Purdom is leading MITH’s expanding curricular initiatives, including MITH 388, Internship in Digital Humanities. The internship, now enrolling for Fall 2017, introduces students to the theory and practice of digital research either through a small project of their own or as contributors to existing MITH research initiatives. This year’s interns, Elliot Frank and Cooper Kidd, are contributing to DocNow. Elliot is exploring the use of Jupyter notebooks as a way to document how to collect and analyze data from the Twitter API. He is specifically looking at how to extract cliques of users within a specific individual’s social network to see if it can provide insight into a discipline such as the digital humanities. Cooper, worked through preliminary Python modules and is working on a sociological examination of learning a new technology. Cooper’s work will help MITH restructure ways of introducing students to technical skills.

We’re excited to explore how these curricular initiatives can foster new and exciting work by our local community of students and faculty.

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