Dr. Aleia Brown has been appointed as the new Assistant Director for the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) initiative. Aleia is our first appointment following the award this summer of a three-year $2 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the growth of AADHum. Most recently, Aleia served as Program Manager at Humanities Action Lab and a Mellon/American Council of Learned Society Public Fellow at Rutgers University—Newark. In that role she oversaw Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice, an international initiative that engages students, faculty, and advocates in 23 cities to produce a traveling exhibition, programming, and digital platform. Prior to this, Aleia served as Visiting Curator of African and African American History and Culture at the Michigan State University Museum where she worked on a multi-year acquisition project and curated the Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi-Women of Color Quilters Network collection. Her current research project draws on oral history, material culture analysis, and undercommons as archives—traveling through the segregated south to urban cultural hubs to examine the life and work of Black women creating on the fringes of the Black arts movement.

As AADHum’s Assistant Director, Aleia will serve as a member of the AADHum leadership team and contribute to strategic planning, leadership, and administration of AADHum with a particular focus AADHum’s pedagogical agenda.

Dr. Susan Wiesner has been appointed as Principal Faculty Specialist for the Performing Arts. Susan comes to MITH following an appointment at the University of Maryland Libraries as Digital Humanist in Residence at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. Her ongoing project, ARTeFACT, has been presented at several academic conferences (both Dance and Digital Humanities), been awarded an NEH Start-up Grant, and has been featured in book chapters and journal articles. She has conducted research into metadata and the development of ontologies for the performing arts using digital humanities methodologies and has developed a database of dance publications. A choreographer and dancer, Susan has presented her work in both the US and the UK, written as a dance critic, and taught at several universities. Her current research focuses on movement and notation systems as a means of machine learning and transfer of data between artistic forms.

At MITH, Susan will develop and manage projects focusing on the performing arts and teach a course on the digital humanities and embodied knowledge.

T’Sey-Haye Preaster is already a core member of the MITH team in her role as Graduate Assistant and Project Coordinator for the Documenting the Now project. We’re delighted that T’Sey-Haye will now join MITH in a full-time capacity. Her new appointment as Project Manager, Research Initiatives encompasses both her work on Documenting the Now, which will continue, and significant responsibilities as the Program Manager for AADHum. A PhD Candidate in the Department of American Studies, T’Sey-Haye examines the histories and lived experiences of Black women working strategically to (re)define the meaning and mission of philanthropy (e.g., gifts of time, talent, treasure and testimony) for/by Black communities in the United States. Prior to graduate school, T’Sey-Haye served for nearly a decade in community philanthropy as a program assistant for The Rhode Island Community Foundation where she worked on statewide grant-making initiatives and community advocacy campaigns for affordable housing, women and girls, LGBTQ equity, nonprofit excellence and Black philanthropy.

MITH is tremendously excited to welcome these scholars to the team!

The post New Team Members at AADHum and MITH appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Prior to joining MITH, T’Sey-Haye was key in making sure that the “Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black” conference hosted by the AADHum initiative in October of this year came off so successfully. At that time, she was a member of the Marketing and Communications Office in the College of Arts and Humanities.

Check out her biography, follow her on Twitter, and look for her byline here talking about the exciting things happening on the Documenting the Now project.

Welcome T’Sey-Haye!

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• Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, Librarian III (Associate Professor), University of Maryland Libraries
• Jason Farman, Associate Professor of American Studies, College of Arts and Humanities
• Katrina Fenlon, Assistant Professor, College of Information Studies
• Matthew Kirschenbaum, Professor of English, College of Arts and Humanities
• Alexis Lothian, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies/LGBT Studies, College of Arts and Humanities
• Matthew Miller, Assistant Professor of Persian Literature and Digital Humanities, College of Arts and Humanities
• Ricardo Punzalan, Assistant Professor of Archives and Digital Curation, College of Information Studies
• Catherine Knight Steele, Assistant Professor of Communication, College of Arts and Humanities
• Daryle Williams, Associate Professor of History, College of Arts and Humanities

Our goal with these affiliate appointments is to make visible the amazing partners and interlocutors who enrich and inform our work as well as to make the contours of our DH community at Maryland more visible overall.

Congratulations to these amazing scholars! We are grateful to have their partnership in the future of MITH.

The post MITH Appoints Affiliate Faculty appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

We are planning two upcoming engagements around this research agenda. The first is a working meeting for invited participants, which will take place on Thursday, October 18, 2018, on the University of Maryland campus in College Park, MD, as a pre-conference event for AADHum’s Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black conference. The second, the idea for which we have gratefully borrowed from the Collections as Data team, is open to all.

We invite the broader community to engage with us online. Please consider sharing a brief statement to help us shape our face-to-face meeting. This is a great way to get your concerns, questions, and provocations on the table as well as to share your background. Please add your thoughts here: https://go.umd.edu/umbra-preconf-statements

By convening a group of librarians, archivists, curators, digital humanists, students, technologists, grant-makers, and other stakeholders interested in the preservation, discovery, and access of African American materials in a digital context we intend to advance conversations about representation, agency, and value that are vital to the future of public life and scholarship. We are particularly interested, through this meeting and through follow on activities, in topics such as broadening the constituencies for black digital collections, ownership and agency in shared collections, as well as beginning and sustaining collaborations.

We will include these position statements in our public reporting on the meeting (with the permission of contributors).

The post Help Shape a Conversation About Black Digital Collections at #AADHum2018 appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Eight students will work with us this summer—four from the Lakeland community and four from local schools and universities. The students are receiving 8 hours of training introducing them to the history of Lakeland and the LCHP and learning oral history methods they will use to conduct interviews. The project will follow a template that Project Director Dr. Mary Corbin Sies has previously used with classes as part of her long-term investment in working with the Lakeland community. In addition to Sies, Ms. Violetta Sharps Jones, a local historian and LCHP board member, MITH’s Stephanie Sapienza, Dr. Asim Ali, a Lecturer and ethnographer from the Department of American Studies, and Ashleigh Coren, Special Collections Librarian for Teaching and Learning, at the University of Maryland Libraries are all contributing their expertise.

Members of the Summer 2018 Lakeland Oral Histories team

At our first session, Ms. Sharps Jones shared stories about Lakeland’s early history with the students. She explained Lakeland’s central geographic location among a group of small, interconnected African American communities along U.S. Route One in Prince George’s County, MD. Because it was the location of the main African American high school in the county prior to 1950 and its easy access to train and trolley transportation, Lakeland became a natural gathering place for African American social and recreational activities.

The mission of the LCHP, a decade-old local historical society, is to preserve and share the history and heritage of Lakeland, which thrived until its self-contained cultural traditions and sense of place were undermined by social change and a devastating urban renewal program. Dr. Sies and the Department of American Studies have collaborated with LCHP since 2009, establishing an ongoing community-engaged project whose primary achievement is creation of The Lakeland Digital Archive. The partnership provides LCHP—an all-volunteer historical society—with student and faculty labor to help document and archive Lakeland’s history while training students in an ethical and equitable practice of collaborative heritage research in which students assist Lakelanders to produce historical knowledge in their own voices.

MITH joined the project in 2017 when we offered our experience with digital preservation and agreed to house and secure the Lakeland Digital Archive on MITH’s servers. Our role now is to help make available the results of years of research by community members and UMD students documenting an historic African American community before and after segregation. Over the course of the past several months, MITH faculty Sapienza, Ed Summers, and Trevor Muñoz have worked with Sies and LCHP President Ms. Maxine Gross to inventory, organize, and augment metadata for objects already in the digital collection. We have organized two events with Lakelanders to crowdsource identification of subjects among the many photos in the collection.

In collaboration with members of the Lakeland community, MITH is facilitating a multi-year effort to redesign the archive website to make available the history of Lakeland in forms accessible to the community. The new oral histories that student researchers collect this summer will join the thousands of other items in this important digital resource.

The post Summer Interns Contribute Research to the Lakeland Digital Archive appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The importance of stewarding digital scholarship will only grow and the work will need to be shared by the entire digital humanities community. Founded sixteen years ago in 1999, MITH is proud of the way it has faced and continues to face these challenges. We would like to take this opportunity to document our practices in a series of blog posts, beginning with this one, in the hope of providing a clear and potentially useful record of our principles for digital stewardship, the issues we’ve faced, and our practices for dealing with them.

In this initial post, we’ll provide an overview of the actions MITH has taken to steward the variety of digital humanities work created here. In doing so, we’ll articulate the underlying principles that have guided our decisions and present some key lessons we’ve learned. Finally, we’ll point out some areas where further work is needed by stakeholders across the wider digital humanities community.

What are we stewarding?

To document digital stewardship practices effectively, we need to be as clear as possible about what we are stewarding. In MITH’s case, we are concerned with actions taken to care for and manage over time the digital humanities work publicly shared by staff, students, faculty, librarians and others who have been affiliated with MITH. Given the era of MITH’s founding, the World Wide Web has been the chief means for making such work public. So as to have a compact way of referring to “digital humanities work made publicly available via the technologies of the web”, we will use the term “website” throughout this initial discussion of MITH’s stewardship activities. However, we purposefully understand the referents of “website” to encompass things ranging from collections of a few hyperlinked documents to complex applications and virtual worlds. In other contexts, these things might also be discussed as “databases”, “digital archives”, “tools”, or “projects”. (In other words, the use of the term “website” is a convenience based on the fact that most of the digital work we’re interested in was delivered using the web.) We acknowledge, furthermore, that the “websites” we are stewarding may represent or document the bulk of the intellectual, emotional, and technical labor of a person or a project, or they may represent very little of that labor—like the varying portions of icebergs buoyant enough to rise above the water line.

At one level, then, the digital humanities work we’re discussing comprises aggregations of computer files: documents and data in various formats, layers of interlocking software, and so on. At another level, this work comprises tacit knowledge of its creators—including knowledge located in the interrelationships between people. This work also comprises elements of how it has been received since it was made public—its position in networks of (hyper-) links and citations, for example. In discussing stewardship we mean the process of assessing, accounting for, and making decisions about how to represent all of these elements of the digital work people affiliated with MITH have created, within the constraints of available resources and from whatever situated vantage point each of us inevitably occupies.

Principle: active records and archival records

One important principle for MITH’s stewardship activities is acknowledging that we manage digital materials of two different major types. To borrow from the parlance of archives and records management, we care for digital humanities websites as both “active records” and “archival records”. By active records, we mean websites that are still in regular use by creators or their successors to do digital humanities work. Such use could involve adding additional data, sharing with students in an ongoing course, or incorporating a site into a new project or publication. By archival records, we generally mean websites that are no longer the active project of the scholars who created them—for instance, if they are no longer being updated with new data—but which have ongoing value and interest from elements of the community beyond the original scholar or team. The actual age of a particular resource is not significant in this distinction: older work is not automatically “archival,” just as recent work can be active briefly and become “archival” in a short amount of time (work related to events like conferences is a good example).

One important implication that follows from our decision to think of MITH’s digital materials as records with active and archival modes is that this principle makes explicit the balance that a digital humanities center must strike. Websites have a lifecycle. Different choices and actions are appropriate at different stages of that lifecycle. On the one hand, for websites as active records, we want to maintain working systems in place to enable digital humanities work by specific members of our community with whom we have ongoing collaborative relationships. For websites as archival records, on the other hand, our aim may be less to manage active systems as it is to see that representations of earlier work are preserved in some form as evidence of people’s scholarship and of MITH’s own history.

MITH’s stewardship in practice

The rubric of stewardship that MITH has outlined for itself encompasses both active management and digital preservation. The locus of this discussion of specific stewardship actions will be the MITH servers—as institutional spaces into which, over time, digital materials were transferred so as to be made public as part of digital humanities work.

Systems Administration and “Backups”

MITH has, for many years, as part of our active management, “backed up” the contents of our running server machines to guard against sudden data loss. At present, MITH pays for a service hosted by the University of Maryland Division of Information Technology for this purpose. These backups guard against data loss from a short-term failure of the servers—so that the latest copy of the full system can be restored to a recent running state. This backup service also ensures that copies of the data on MITH’s machines are duplicated at an additional location on the University of Maryland campus and to magnetic tape for storage at a geographically remote location from the campus (as current best practice suggests).

Active management to support digital materials necessarily involves change—for one thing, physical machines wear out and become obsolete. The longer a website’s life, the more certain it is that those digital materials will need to be migrated from one system to another in response to the obsolescence of the underlying physical machines. Over its sixteen year history, MITH has used a succession of physical machines as servers. As machines approached their end of life, MITH would migrate the content of servers—the digital materials over which MITH exercised stewardship—to new hardware. As an example of this process and in the interest of precision, we’ll discuss actions undertaken on two generations of such systems: machines that hosted MITH’s projects from 2006 to 2009, and those that have hosted MITH’s projects since 2009. The two physical servers that hosted MITH projects from 2006 to 2009 also contain data representing an older generation of machines—copies of MITH’s digital work back to 2003. Given that the outgoing and the successor machines have run versions of the same operating system, migration refers to copying those parts of the system where users (rather than system utilities) have stored data. These include file directories associated with the accounts of people who were granted access to MITH machines, file directories utilized by the web server (containing the HTML and related documents and source code for various websites), as well as databases, and configuration files. The copying—migration—of these key files was part of the management of the MITH servers as active systems. The goal was to replicate functionality from one generation of physical hardware to the next. As part of server migrations, MITH also created disk images, that is complete copies, of the servers’ hard drives, and took other actions (about which we’ll say more below) to help ensure preservation of data.

For the majority of the digital work created at MITH, this represents the complete story. Basic active management has kept these websites, some quite old, online.

Security

The life stories of digital materials can become more complex for a number of reasons. Security problems are one complication that face stewards of digital materials. In the case of digital humanities websites, the most common security problems involve SQL injection attacks in which interactive components of a site can be compromised to run malicious software code often for the purpose of sending spam messages or disrupting regular network traffic. MITH has direct experience with these challenges. At the request of the University of Maryland’s network administrators and with assistance from staff of the Division of Information Technology and paid external computer security consultants, MITH conducted a thorough review of all its projects in 2009 after several years of progressively increasing instability due to security problems. This review was conducted as part of migrating to new, clean systems and some sites were deemed too insecure to return to full, online availability. Compressed archives of projects, even those with security vulnerabilities, were copied to new machines and external storage media. No files were ever deleted but the process of responding to security concerns nonetheless created a category of projects that could not simply be reproduced online following the server migrations. These projects have needed to be managed in alternative ways. By evaluating some sites as archival records not solely as active projects, MITH staff decided to re-mount static resources—HTML pages, images, and so on—without the accompanying databases to lessen future security risk while preserving evidence of these projects. The 2008 Digital Diasporas Symposium is one example of this approach. A database had been part of the original site for the purpose of accepting registration information but no longer needed to be online after the end of the conference. In other cases, addressing security or other problems would require making choices or potentially altering features of sites. Where a site was no longer the active project of the scholar who created it (she/he has “completed” it and moved on), MITH has decided not to make substantial changes unilaterally.

Migrations and Transfers

Digital materials have also sometimes been migrated to other systems not managed by MITH, for example because a project director moved to another institution and wanted to transfer stewardship of the project. As a principle of stewardship, we believe that it is acceptable—even necessary—for the responsibility for digital work to change over time. This principle entails sharing copies of data with project creators and potentially others. At MITH, we consider sharing complete copies of digital materials (including the databases and all the other components) part of our stewardship in three specific ways: first, so that project creators have additional backup copies of their own, to manage as they see fit; second, so that those who request access can view materials from sites with security vulnerabilities offline; and third, so that stewardship of a site can be transferred to a new institution. MITH has made a practice of offering copies of digital material for personal backups when a funding period (for externally-supported projects), or a fellowship (for internally-funded projects), ends. Also, in 2007, those who had produced digital work at MITH up to that time were offered copies of their data to take for their own personal use. In these cases, project creators are provided with compressed archives of files copied from the MITH servers and MITH also retains copies. In the second case, of materials from sites that are offline due to security vulnerabilities, we have provided copies of files in response to specific requests on an ad hoc basis. When project directors or others choose to take over responsibility for a particular website, thereby ending MITH’s involvement in its active and ongoing management, MITH will link to or redirect traffic to the new versions of a digital project while also retaining copies of the earlier data created at MITH for preservation.

Collaborative Work

MITH’s experience with providing access copies of digital projects suggests issues that the community as a whole needs to grapple with further. As a principle, project creators should have access to their own work to use or build upon. Yet, almost all digital humanities projects are works of collaborative authorship and represent the efforts of not only project directors but staff members, graduate students, and others. Best practices for project charters probably need to indicate who can make decisions over the long-term. It is unwieldy to ask, long afterwards, all the graduate students who have worked on a project, for example, how to handle providing copies of materials but, at the same time, MITH takes seriously principles of respect for all contributors, as expressed in initiatives like the Collaborators’ Bill of Rights. When third parties, not the original creators, want complete copies of a site the prospects become more complex yet. Solutions to many of these kind of conundrums involve using open licenses for content and source code. Other conundrums may be trickier—if materials are being transferred to someone other than the original creator should project files be reviewed, as is the process in many analog archives, so that personal information (if any) or database credentials could be removed or reset?

Repositories and Archives

In addition to managing digital materials as part of active servers, MITH has taken steps to document projects created here as part of a broader stewardship strategy that also includes digital preservation activities. In 2012, MITH staff deposited a collection of materials with the institutional repository for the University of Maryland and we continue to make this a part of our project process. At around the same time, MITH moved its physical offices. In the course of the move, staff deposited boxes of physical materials documenting MITH’s activities with the University Archives. Also in 2012, MITH staff worked with the University of Maryland Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives to ensure that internet addresses where most MITH projects are found would be regularly crawled by a web archiving tool (Archive-It) paid for through the Libraries’ collection budget. By adding an active partnership with the Libraries to MITH’s strategy we could be confident that our specific content would be collected and that collection would occur more regularly than could be expected from waiting for archiving software operated by the Internet Archive and other organizations to visit MITH sites.

To be sure, web archive versions of sites are not always identical to the original ones but we think they represent an important element of digital stewardship planning. Maintaining a live website, keeping it online and accessible at its original location with its complete original functionality, is not digital preservation but active management. A stewardship strategy predicated entirely on active management is unsustainable. For one, such a strategy is too expensive and labor-intensive given the limited resources of a digital humanities center such as MITH. Larger memory organizations such as libraries should aim to collect widely and reflect the diversity of practice of digital humanities work. The economies of collecting and preserving such work at scale also militate against stewardship strategies that depend on managing each digital humanities website (only) as an active system. Finally, active management of digital humanities websites, where they are embedded in a working web server, exposes them to ongoing risk of corruption and human error. We cannot ignore, for the convenience of present use, the aspect of preservation that involves removing materials from their original situation and relocating them where actions can be taken for their long term survival even if this entails changing the experience of using them. A serious discussion of digital stewardship must incorporate consideration of how best to sunset projects as active sites. For all these reasons, the role of web archives as they relate to the future use and preservation of digital humanities work is an area where there is much work still to do—and may be the subject of a future post.

Additional Digital Preservation Strategies

Finally, as we mentioned above, MITH has collaborated on a number of important digital preservation research projects that have affected how we preserve MITH’s own outputs. First, this research agenda has helped us recruit staff, students, and faculty interested in digital preservation challenges. MITH faculty and staff have authored books, articles, conference papers and reports, convened summit meetings, organized conferences, led training institutes, built tools, disseminated resources, and spoken widely on the importance of digital preservation and data curation. Second, by working on these digital preservation research projects, people at MITH have gained certain technical skills and conceptual approaches to problems. We’ll offer just one brief example of how this has played out. Though the physical machines that immediately preceded our current generation of servers were decommissioned about 6 years ago, MITH has retained this physical hardware, as well as various other internal and external hard drives of machines MITH staff and faculty have used. Credit this decision to the habits of thought and practice that MITH’s engagement with digital preservation has cultivated. Our work on digital preservation has caused us to consider the physical nature even of things like websites and to consider further how original hardware may represent a crucial element for preservation. A few months ago, MITH asked Porter Olsen, former Community Lead of the BitCurator project and a Graduate Assistant at MITH, to apply some of the skills he learned from his work here to help us evaluate whether new tools and capabilities could be applied to curating and preserving digital humanities materials from systems like MITH’s old web servers. We know from our research and our experience that no matter how thoughtfully we’ve crafted policies and procedures and no matter how carefully we’ve acted, digital stewardship is a complex and challenging endeavor that requires us to keep learning and trying to improve.

In the next post in the series, Porter will describe in more detail how he was able to use the BitCurator tools, which MITH helped develop, to collect and preserve additional information. In other future posts, Stephanie Sapienza, MITH’s Project Manager, will discuss work she’s been leading to revamp the section of our website where we document all of MITH’s work in order to make it easier to find information about previous projects. MITH’s Lead Developer Ed Summers will post some lessons learned about best practices for migrating complex and dynamic websites. And, since preserving computing hardware as well as software figures in the story of MITH’s digital stewardship practices thus far, we’ll also consider the preservation implications of the increasing move to “cloud” computing.

(Provisional) conclusions

There are no ready-made solutions, no repositories ready to accept many of the kinds of complex objects digital humanists produce so every stewardship strategy falls somewhere along a spectrum of benefits and tradeoffs. Complex work carried out by multiple people over long spans of time during which our collective knowledge of best practices was itself evolving is difficult to judge according to a binary of success or failure, presence or erasure. Attempting to do so likely vitiates the value of the open and detailed discussion of this work for the community genuinely interested in preserving the fullest history of digital humanities work. It also runs counter to the conclusions generated by MITH’s own active research in digital preservation, and the theoretical and methodological writings of several of its staff and administration.

We would not claim that this process of caring for the range of MITH’s digital humanities websites has been flawlessly executed at every step. During server migrations, in particular, sites have sometimes gone offline due to a misconfiguration of one kind or another. When we discover these errors or when they have been pointed out to us, we’ve investigated and restored the online availability of materials where possible. Where this has not been possible because earlier work would need new investment to fix security vulnerabilities or make other substantial changes, we have documented projects and retained data—and even hardware. One thing the history of MITH’s digital work should suggest is that there are important distinctions between preserving data, maintaining or sustaining specific computing systems, and providing varying levels of access (online vs. offline, original vs. migrated).

The expectations of access for archival material differ from those for active material. Just as with analog collections, it may be necessary to find archival “websites” in different locations than their active counterparts; archival websites might take slightly different forms; additional requests or effort might be necessary to access these things. We at MITH recognize that it is a frustrating experience to find that digital work that was once available on the web is offline or that the experience of working with it has changed. As a community, our expectation of digital work has been that, in many cases, it’s present online or it’s gone. At MITH, where we have digital work that is preserved but not online this ingrained expectation is a challenge. For more and more digital work, we think that there must be a middle, archival way—how do we begin to incorporate this into our practices in satisfying ways? Most researchers have encountered analog collections that are unprocessed or materials that are out for repair and preservation. At the moment, this is perhaps the best comparison for the state of some few of MITH’s digital outputs, yet we are continuously working to develop and improve our own practices of curation and preservation.

At MITH, we have chosen a stewardship strategy that entails both actively managing systems that still run a variety of websites and also taking actions to preserve copies and alternate representations of these sites including through retention of compressed offline archives of project data, through web archiving, and through deposit of supplementary materials and documentation with both our (digital) institutional repository and our (analog) university archives.

We value the tradition of work that has been accomplished at MITH over the last 16 years. Digital humanities has a history and indeed multiple histories, not just in terms of the intellectual pedigree of the phrase or the concept, but in the legacy of material work that has been performed in its name. MITH’s research has addressed itself to issues of gender and diversity among other core humanist concerns. MITH has also attracted and recruited people interested in digital preservation, and has actively collaborated on a range of digital preservation projects and initiatives in its research. These intertwined aspects of our work have particular resonance now, given that digital humanities practitioners are placing increased emphasis on recovering narratives and origin stories for the field that are more diverse than some stakeholders seem interested in acknowledging. Stewarding the collective history of work at MITH thus helps make visible the diverse history of the digital humanities.

Click here to access subsequent posts in our series on this topic.

The post Stewarding Digital Humanities Work on the Web at MITH appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The Lead Developer will design, write, test, document, and deploy code. The Lead Developer will also establish development milestones, help provide technical management and oversight, and identify emergent technologies and best practices. We envision the person in this position as someone with a strong commitment to research and development who is focused on and excited about building high-quality software that demonstrates new possibilities for humanities research applications.

This position will report to the Associate Director and duties will be split into roughly four categories: Software Development (60%); Management of Development Processes (20%); Systems Architecture (10%); and Engagement with Open Source Software Projects (10%).

MITH both relies on and believes in the value of open source software. We hope that the Lead Developer will participate in supporting third-party projects and libraries that MITH uses. Engagement with open source technology is intentionally construed broadly to include all of the activities that might go into supporting projects. Contributions might be but are not limited to writing code or documentation, doing outreach, organizing groups or events, and conducting code review. Time spent on open source development is part of paid time and the Lead Developer will have full discretion to participate in open source communities to the extent they uphold the same standards of professionalism, respect, and safety expected in other University work environments.

As part of the University of Maryland, MITH is committed to “inclusive excellence”—the notion that in order to educate our students with excellence, in order to foster outstanding research and scholarship, and in order to be national and global leaders, we must be diverse and inclusive. Minorities and women are encouraged to apply for this position.

The University of Maryland, College Park, actively subscribes to a policy of equal employment opportunity, and will not discriminate against any employee or applicant because of race, age, sex, color, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, religion, ancestry or national origin, marital status, genetic information, political affiliation, and gender identity or expression.

We’re very excited to welcome the successful candidate as part of MITH. This position will be open until filled and we plan to review applications on a rolling basis. If this position describes you, please consider submitting an application as soon as possible.

For a full description and list of qualifications, please view the complete position description.

The post Join MITH! We’re Hiring a Lead Developer appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

MITH and the University of Maryland Libraries are delighted to participate in this program and we look forward to welcoming Margo to campus in September.

The full press release from The Library of Congress is below.

# # #
June 19, 2013

Inaugural Class of National Digital Stewardship Residents Selected
The Library of Congress, in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, has selected 10 candidates for the inaugural class of the National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) program. The nine-month program begins in September 2013.

The NDSR program offers recent master’s program graduates in specialized fields— library science, information science, museum studies, archival studies and related technology— the opportunity to gain valuable professional experience in digital preservation. Residents will attend an intensive two-week digital stewardship workshop this fall at the Library of Congress. They will then work on a specialized project at one of 10 host institutions in the Washington, D.C. area, including the Library of Congress. These projects will allow them to acquire hands-on knowledge and skills regarding collection, selection, management, long-term preservation and accessibility of digital assets.

The residents listed below were selected by an expert committee of Library of Congress and Institute of Museum and Library Services staff, with commentary from each host institution.

2013 National Digital Stewardship Residents

(Name; hometown; university; host institution; project description)

Julia Blase; Tucson, Ariz.; University of Denver; National Security Archive; to take a snapshot of all archive activities that involve the capture, preservation and publication of digital assets.

Heidi Dowding; Roseville, Mich.; Wayne State University; Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection; to identify an institutional solution for long-term digital asset management, conduct research on a variety of software systems and draft an institutional policy for the appraisal and selection of content destined for preservation.

Maureen Harlow; Clayville, N.Y.; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; National Library of Medicine; to create a collection of web content on a specific theme or topic of interest such as medicine and art or the e-patient movement.

Jaime McCurry; Seaford, N.Y.; Long Island University; Folger Shakespeare Library; to establish local routines and best practices for archiving and preserving the institution’s digital content.

Lee Nilsson; Eastpointe, Mich.; Eastern Washington University; Library of Congress, Office of Strategic Initiatives; to analyze the future risk of obsolescence to digital formats used at the Library and work with Library staff to develop an action plan to prevent the risks.

Margo Padilla; Oakland, Calif.; San Jose State University, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities; to create and share a research report for access models and collection interfaces for born-digital literary materials. She will also submit recommendations for access policies for born-digital collections.

Emily Reynolds; Pleasantville, N.Y.; University of Michigan; The World Bank Group; to facilitate and coordinate the eArchives digitization project, resulting in the creation of a digitized and cataloged historical collection of key archival materials representing more than 60 years of global development work.

Molly Schwartz; Dickerson, Md.; University of Maryland; Association of Research Libraries; to strengthen and expand a new initiative on digital accessibility in research libraries by incorporating a universal design approach to library collections and services.

Erica Titkemeyer; Cary, N.C.; New York University; Smithsonian Institution Archives; to identify the specialized digital and curatorial requirements of time-based media art and establish a benchmark of best practices to ensure that institution’s archives will stand the test of time.

Lauren Work; Rochester, N.Y.; University of Washington; Public Broadcasting Service; to develop and apply evaluation tools, define selection criteria and outline recommended workflows needed to execute a successful analog digitization initiative for the PBS moving image collection.

For more information about the National Digital Stewardship Residency program, including information about how to be a host or partner for next year’s class, visit www.loc.gov/ndsr/. Internship opportunities in digital technology are available in the Library’s Office of Strategic Initiatives (www.loc.gov/internosi/).

Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution. The Library seeks to spark imagination and creativity and to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, programs, publications and exhibitions. Many of the Library’s rich resources can be accessed through its website at www.loc.gov. For more information about internships and employment at the Library, go to www.loc.gov/hr/employment/.

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PR 13-120
06/19/13
ISSN 0731-3527

The post MITH and the University of Maryland Libraries Welcome Margo Padilla as part of inaugural class of National Digital Stewardship Residents appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

This program offers an opportunity for recent graduates of Master’s degree programs in relevant fields to complete a nine-month residency at institutions actively engaged in the acquisition, stewardship, and preservation of born-digital materials. The residency will begin in September 2013, with a two-week workshop at the Library of Congress. Prospective applicants should visit the NDSR website for application information.

MITH and the University of Maryland Libraries are proud to join such organizations as the Folger Shakespeare Library, The National Library of Medicine, and the Smithsonian Institution Archives among others as host institutions for this timely program. The survival of important collections—particularly born-digital collections—depends on their discoverability, accessibility, and usability by diverse constituencies. The interfaces and the service models that welcome interested researchers are important points of human connection between collections and communities. As more and more institutions add born-digital materials to their collections, they will need individuals capable of developing and implementing policies and access models where none existed previously. A residency at MITH will help provide the necessary background to successfully articulate issues surrounding access of born-digital archival collections and the expertise to provide solutions. In particular, the Resident will have an opportunity to engage with unique born-digital literary collections from two prominent authors at the leading edge of experimental electronic literature. At the same time, the Resident will contribute important research and be well positioned to provide leadership on issues that every library and archive will confront in the coming years.

As an NDSR Host, MITH and the Libraries will provide guidance and resources for the Resident to prototype access points to born-digital materials (including their physical carriers) to better enable researchers to discover and work with the Libraries’ born-digital collections. Matthew Kirschenbaum, Associate Director of MITH and Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, and Joanne Archer, Special Collections Librarian at the University of Maryland Libraries along with staff from MITH, the Human-Computer Interaction Lab of the University of Maryland iSchool, and the University of Maryland Libraries will work with the Resident to aid them in gaining demonstrable experience with reference models, user-centered design, and prototyping. MITH Director Neil Fraistat observes that “the NDSR is a key component of the groundbreaking partnership MITH and the Libraries initiated in 2012, to collaborate on research and services related to born-digital collections. The Resident will be embedded with this interdisciplinary, cross-divisional team, the Born-Digital Working Group.”

For more about the potential scope of an NDSR residency at MITH, see our formal host statement.

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is a leading digital humanities center that pursues disciplinary innovation and institutional transformation through applied research, public programming, and educational opportunities. MITH has been a partner and MITH directors have served as PI or co-PI for a range of projects on born-digital cultural heritage, digital forensics, digital curation, and the preservation of computer games, interactive literature, and virtual worlds.

The University of Maryland Libraries conduct a broad range of digital projects including digitization of materials from the UMD Libraries’ special collections and archives as well as digital preservation programs and planning. The Libraries take an active part in usability analysis and design activities pertaining to accessibility and findability of our digital collections and our Web content.  For a complete list of past and ongoing projects, please consult http://digital.lib.umd.edu/.

The post MITH and University of Maryland Libraries Collaboration Selected as a Host Institution for Inaugural National Digital Stewardship Residency Program appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Digital Humanities Data Curation is a series of workshops organized by MITH, the Women Writers Project (WWP) at Brown University, and the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at GSLIS. The workshop series is generously funded by an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

These three-day workshops will provide a strong introductory grounding in data curation concepts and practices, focusing on the special issues and challenges of data curation in the digital humanities. Learning will be largely case-based, supplemented by short lectures, guest presentations, and practical exercises. Digital Humanities Data Curation is aimed at humanities researchers — whether traditional faculty or alternative (alt-ac) professionals — as well as librarians, archivists, cultural heritage specialists, other information professionals, and advanced graduate students. All participants will also have access to an online resource for sharing knowledge about data curation for the humanities. This resource will build on material from the existing DH Curation Guide.

The Summer 2013 workshop is the first event in the series. Future workshops will be held at Brown University and the University of Maryland in 2013-14. More information is available at the Institute Web site. Questions should be directed to Institute Coordinator Megan Senseney at mfsense2

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