MITH is thrilled to announce the Spring 2020 Digital Dialogue line-up. This eclectic season covers a range of interesting DH topics including oral histories, music encoding, movement and technology, poetry and algorithms, and community data curation. From 25 February to the 31 March six speakers will present on Tuesdays at 12:30 pm.  Digital Dialogues are open to the public and all are welcome, so please join us in the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities Conference Room, 0301 Hornbake Library North. We look forward to seeing you there to share in the discussion.

Spring 2020 Digital Dialogues

2/25   Anna Kijas
Music Librarian, Head of Lilly Music Library  |  Tufts University
MEI for All! or Lowering the Barrier to Music Encoding through Digital Pedagogy

3/3   Heather Hart
Black Lunch Table  |  Co-founder
Visiting Lecturer  |  Rutgers University Mason Gross School of Art

Jina Valentine
Black Lunch Table  |  Co-founder
Associate Professor of Printmedia  |  School of the Art Institute of Chicago

The Black Lunch Table Archive: A Radical Reimagining of Digital Authorship
Co-sponsored by African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum)

3/10   Leonardo Flores
Professor and Chair of English  |  Appalachian State University
President  |  Electronic Literature Organization
Distant Writing
Co-sponsored by Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities (DSAH)

SPRING BREAK

3/24   Jennifer Garcon
Bollinger Fellow in Public and Community Data Curation  |  University of Pennsylvania
Building a Community Data Curation Practice: Digital Archiving through Partnership and Resource Sharing

3/31   Kristin Carlson
Assistant Professor, Creative Technologies Program  |  Illinois State University
Tracking the Invisible: Following Movement Beyond Space and Time Markers
Co-Sponsored by Immersive Media Design (IMDM) at the University of Maryland

Digital Dialogues is MITH’s signature events program, held during the academic year, and is an occasion for discussion, presentation, and intellectual exchange that you can build into your schedule. For more information see Digital Dialogues schedule page, which will be updated with more information about each talk as it becomes available.

The post Announcing the Spring 2020 Digital Dialogues Line Up appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

In February of 2018, MITH spent dedicated time talking about sustainability of digital projects with a team from the University of Pittsburgh’s Visual Media Workshop (VMW) as part of a focused user testing session for The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap. The research project that produced the Roadmap was led by Alison Langmead, with Project Managers Aisling Quigley (2016-17) and Chelsea Gunn (2017-18). The final goal of that project was to create a digital sustainability roadmap for developers and curators of digital projects to follow. The work was initially based on what the project team discovered during its NEH-funded project, “Sustaining MedArt.” In this blog post, which is a late entry in MITH’s Digital Stewardship Series from 2016, I’m going to talk a bit about what I discovered during the process of using the roadmap for one of MITH’s projects, how I synthesized our discoveries in the form of a concrete tool for MITH to utilize the roadmap afterward, and how this has changed some of my conceptions about digital sustainability practices.

The process of walking a future digital project through the roadmap can be completed either in a full eight-hour day session, or two four-hour sessions. During  the process, you work through three sections, each with different modules pertaining to aspects of a project’s future sustainability prospects. We chose the latter, with each attending member focusing on a different MITH project they were developing or working on. I opted to use a project for which we were awaiting funding at the time, Unlocking the Airwaves: Revitalizing an Early Public and Educational Radio Collection. Although significant time and effort went into developing the grant proposal for Airwaves, which included a section on sustainability, the Roadmap process cemented how much more concretely we could have been thinking through these issues, and how better planning for those components from the start would lead to better management of the project. In fact, one finding that Langmead and her team had discovered as they developed and tested the roadmap, is that thinking through the project management aspects of a digital project was a necessary first component to even being able to effectively get through the remaining sections of roadmap exercises. So as they went along, they added several elements and exercises to Sections A and B which force users to pinpoint the structural elements of their project. These include elements such as access points, deliverables, workflows, intellectual goals, data flow, and anticipated digital lifespan. This kind of work is essentially an extension of a project charter, which often includes a lot of these same basic concepts. In fact, Module B1 of the roadmap encourages users to create or reference existing charters, and stresses that using the roadmap in conjunction with a charter enhances the usefulness of both tools.

The lifespan questions in Section A were eye-opening, because although the need to ask them seems obvious – How long do you want your project to last? Why have you chosen this lifespan? – I think we as stewards of digital information feel compelled to predict unrealistically long lifespans, which Langmead and her collaborators define as “BookTime:”

“BookTime” is a term we have coined to denote a project lifespan equivalent to, “As long as a paper-based codex would last in the controlled, professional conditions of a library.” It may often be assumed that this is coterminous with “Forever,” but that belief relies heavily on a number of latent expectations about the nature of libraries, the inherent affordances of paper and glue, and other infrastructural dependencies.

The module asks us to acknowledge that not every digital project can realistically span decades into the future, and that sometimes this honesty is better for both the project and your team. The module also leverages concepts such as ‘graceful degradation,’ and ‘Bloom-and-Fade,’ both of which, in moments of dark humor, felt similar to planning for a project’s  hospice care or estate. “It’s okay, everything dies, let’s just be open in talking about it and how we’ll get through it together.” Humor aside, it was a useful exercise for me to acknowledge that time, change, and entropy will stand in the way of a project achieving BookTime, and that that IS, in fact, okay.

The other two sections and exercises that I felt were the most useful and that provided the core, structural materials on which to base a sustainability plan were Sustainability Priorities (Section A4) and Technological Infrastructure (Sections B2 and B3). In the former, we were asked to list out the core structural components of a project “without which your project simply would not be your project,” and to list them in order of priority. This could include things such as, but not limited to, authority records, curated access points, facets, geo-spatial data, or digitized materials. We were also asked to define the communities that each property served. In the latter, we were asked to list out every single technological component of the project, from Google Drive, to Trello, to IIIF servers, to the university’s digital repository, define the function(s) of each, and assign project team members that are responsible for each. Then we were asked to realistically assess how long each technology was guaranteed to be funded, as well as “how the duration of the funding for members of your project team compares with the duration of the funding for technologies they maintain, keeping in mind that funding discrepancies may require special considerations and/or contingency plans to ensure uninterrupted attention.” Again, at first glance, much of this may seem very logical and obvious, but actually doing these exercises is illuminating (and sometimes sobering).

After Sections A and B force you to have a reckoning with the deep dark potential (good and bad) of your project, Section C focuses on applying the the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA)’s Levels of Preservation to your identified structural components. The Levels of Preservation are a set of recommendations that align the entire the digital preservation spectrum in six core areas: Access, Backing up Work, Permissions, Metadata, File Formats, and Data Integrity. For each of these areas, the roadmap defines four ‘levels’ of commitment to each of these areas, and what each of those levels really mean. For example, Level 1 for Data Integrity involves designating which project members have credentials for certain accounts and services, and who has read/write/move/delete authorization. Levels 2-3 requires the ability to repair data and create fixity information for stable files, and Level 4 specifies the checking of that fixity data specifically in response to specific events or activities. After defining your current and anticipated levels in each area, you’re asked to define concrete actions your team would need to undertake in order to achieve your desired level. Once again, these exercises encourage expectation management, with comments like “Please note! Reaching Level 4 sustainability practices is not the goal. Your work here is to balance what your project needs with the resources (both in terms of technology and staff) that you have.” It also notes that it is “absolutely okay” to decide that your project will choose Level 0 for any one of these areas, choosing consciously not to engage with that area, using the resources you have to focus on what your team wants to prioritize.

Module A3 in written form

After the two four-hour meetings, my brain was full and I was full of new ideas about my project that probably should have already occurred to me, but that only coalesced in any meaningful way by walking through the roadmap process. I’ve also been around long enough to know that the giddy enthusiasm that comes after a meeting like this can die on the vine if those ideas aren’t transformed into actionable items and documented somewhere. I did have the printed roadmap modules and exercises with my written answers on them, and Langmead and her team were clear that if we wanted to merely file (or scan) those written documents and stop there, that was fine. But written in the final module of the roadmap is the recommendation that after its completion, “make sure that you store the documentation for this, and all other, STSR modules in one of your reliable sites of project documentation.” So after several months of contemplation, I finally determined that MITH’s most reliable current site of project documentation is Airtable, which we’ve been using more and more to track aspects of different projects.

Airtable is an online relational database application that looks and functions like a spreadsheet in its default ‘Grid’ UI, but which also has more robust relational functions allowing you to meaningfully connect data between different tables/worksheets. As opposed to merely entering my answers to each module/exercise, I opted to begin by actually moving references and links to all the roadmap’s sections and modules into two tables in Airtable, so that the full text of each module was easily at hand for reference. I also included base, table, and

column descriptions at all levels (this would be the rough equivalent of Excel comments), which explain how information should be entered or that gave sample entries. The base description also provides an overview to this whole exercise, and gives attribution to the project in the format requested by Langmead and her team.

There are descriptions throughout with details on how to utilize each table or field. Click on the ‘i’ Info button to display them.

There were actual spreadsheets provided by the Roadmap’s project team for certain exercises, and I uploaded those as new tables in Airtable, and modified them as needed to connect/link with other tables. For example, the Technological Infrastructure table (which includes all the various technologies used by your project), the ‘Project Member Responsible’ column is linked to the Project Team table. So after you’ve entered the data for each, you can go back to the Project Team table and see all the tech components each member is responsible for, rolled up in a linked record field. There’s also a reference table listing out the definitions of Levels 1-4 for each of the six NDSA areas, so when you’re deciding what to enter in the Sustainability Levels table, you can instantly reference that table and choose an appropriate level for each area. After crafting the ‘template,’ I tested its usability by entering all the data from Unlocking the Airwaves that I’d written down. By doing that I realized where there were a few tweaks and bottlenecks that needed ironing out, and went back and modified the template. See below for a few more screenshots of the completed template.

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So now we’ve got the roadmap data for Unlocking the Airwaves saved in a reliable site of project documentation. MITH team members are now encouraged (but not required) to use the template as we develop new projects, and it’s available to anyone else who’d like to request a blank duplicated copy. Dr. Langmead also provided a gentle but useful reminder that there is inherent risk in picking and using any such technology for this purpose, since platforms like Airtable may not always remain available. She suggested that we include a mention along the lines of “The inclusion of Airtable in your project’s suite of technologies should be considered carefully (in line with the work done in Modules A5 and B2)” in the intro description text for the base, which we did.

In a way this was also a sense-making exercise wherein, by taking all the roadmap data and turning it into structured data, I’d not only be able to sync up all these components in my head and turn them into actionable tasks, I’d also better retain the information. Anyone who has transformed, mapped, or structured previously unstructured data knows that by doing these tasks, you become much more intimately connected to your data. But what I think really appeals to me about the roadmap process is the mindfulness aspect. It encourages participants to think beyond the theoretical concepts of sustainability and actually apply them, write them down, look at them, consider their implications, and be honest about project expectations as aligned with available resources. In a world of overtapped resources and academic and bureaucratic hurdles, that’s an incredibly valuable skill to have.

The post Reckoning with Digital Projects: MITH Makes a Roadmap appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Eligible graduate students must be enrolled in an appropriate terminal degree program (Ph.D. or M.F.A) at the University of Maryland and must agree not to accept any other form of financial support from the University or other fellowships of $2,000 or more during the term for which this fellowship is awarded. Winnemore Fellows are provided  a stipend of $9,929 and a $1,509 contribution toward health insurance fees. Fellows are also provided with work space at MITH, consultation with MITH staff about their project, and technical support (including server space) where applicable.

Fellows are expected to be in-residence throughout the duration of their fellowship.  They are encouraged to attend MITH events such as Digital Dialogues, contribute to the intellectual community of MITH, share their work on the MITH blog, participate in professional development opportunities, and be engaged with the digital humanities more broadly.

Interested applicants should submit:

• a cover letter that includes your name, program/department, college, email, phone, title of dissertation, and advisor’s name, phone, and email. The cover letter should also include the date that you completed coursework and any other degree requirements, the date that you passed your prospectus/proposal examination, the date you advanced to candidacy, and the proposed date for your dissertation defense. All dates should include month and year;
• a current short CV;
• a 250-word abstract written for a general audience including your name and the title of your dissertation or project.
• the proposal itself, which should be no longer than three pages and which should specifically address the following points:
  • the project that you will work on if awarded the fellowship;
  • how the use of advanced technology would help achieve your research goals and contribute to the intellectual outcome
  • a statement of work completed to date;
  • a detailed timetable or work plan for duration of the fellowship including the projected date of completion.
• two confidential letters of recommendation, including one from your dissertation director that outlines how the applicant’s advisor will support the student’s effort for the duration of the fellowship in addition to the merit of the applicant.

A committee composed of digital humanities faculty and staff will review applications. Proposals should specify how a Winnemore Fellowship would be crucial to the dissertation or equivalent project’s development. The committee will place emphasis on projects that center the perspectives of underrepresented or oppressed groups and such proposals are highly encouraged. Also encouraged are projects addressing complex ethical issues inherent to engagement with new media, cultural heritage data, and the digital humanities.

We encourage applicants to consult with MITH regarding their applications. All application materials should be sent in PDF format to Purdom Lindblad, by 11:59 PM Friday, November 2, 2018. Announcement of the Winnemore Fellow will be made by Monday, November 19, 2018.

The post 2019 Winnemore Dissertation Fellowship Call for Applications appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency created in 1965. It is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. The Endowment awards grants to top-rated proposals examined by panels of independent, external reviewers.These grants are highly competitive and involve a rigorous peer-review process to ensure that the projects represent the highest level of humanities quality and public engagement.

The $217,000 grant will fund the creation of a comprehensive online collection of early educational public radio content from the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB). The forerunner of CPB and its arms, NPR and PBS, the NAEB served as the primary organizer, developer, and distributor for noncommercial broadcast production and analysis between 1925 and 1981. These broadcasts, mostly stemming from university and public school-run radio stations, provide an in-depth look at the engagements and events of American history, as they were broadcast to and received by the general public in the twentieth century. According to the project’s Lead Advisor, Josh Shepperd of Catholic University and Director of the Radio Preservation Task Force,

“The National Association of Educational Broadcasters recordings provide valuable context into cultural, political, and less-studied, educational discourses going back to the New Deal, and associated documents help media scholars to trace the origin of script development, audience research, and genres that we associate with both public media and cable television – science, travel, food, history, and journalism programming.”

The NAEB systematically preserved its history across over a hundred boxes of documents and 5,000 reels of tape, but the organization split its archive, depositing its papers in Wisconsin and the recordings in Maryland. Archival audiovisual media has been collected and maintained separately from other kinds of (primarily textual) archival sources, and these ‘split’ collections mean that researchers must often discover and manually reunite audiovisual collections and their related materials if they want to understand a broadcast not just as an audiovisual object, but as a medium that relays information within a set of historical contexts (time, place, related events, etc.). Unlocking the Airwaves will reunite the split NAEB collections, develop an open and comprehensive web portal for them, and tell the story of early educational and public broadcasting.

By coordinating the expertise of archivists, humanities researchers, and digital humanists, Unlocking the Airwaves will deliver enhanced access to important, mostly hidden, archival audiovisual materials by linking split hybrid paper/audiovisual collections together, and providing a search engine for the linked collections, enabling users to simultaneously search both the documents and sounds of the NAEB. The resulting resource will finally realize the potential of the collections of the NAEB for exploration and study by educators, scholars, journalists, documentarians, genealogists, and the broader public.

The post MITH Receives NEH Grant for “Unlocking the Airwaves” 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

The post Roopika Risam, Thursday March 8 at MITH: ‘Visualizing Du Bois: The Politics of Literary Recovery’ appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

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.

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.

The post Books.Files: New project to help scholars assess digital components of today’s bookmaking appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Thursday November 2, 2017, 1:30 – 4:30pm

MITH Conference Room
0301 Hornbake Library North
College Park, MD 20742

Please note that this event is now FULL. If you’d like to be placed on a waiting list, please email mith@umd.edu. 

Understanding the contents of institutional and digital collections and their connections to other related material can be daunting. Increasingly researchers, institutions and a broader public can work together, using crowdsourcing and linked open to meaningfully enrich and connect collections.

This panel and workshop, planned in conjunction with the 2017 Radio Preservation Task Force Conference, will focus on innovative workflows for crowdsourcing linked data to build a web of data that can bridge collective heritage. Both researchers interested in learning to access more information about radio collections and collection managers will benefit from this cross-disciplinary event.

Panelists will discuss their work and research in crowdsourcing or linked open data for radio collections. Subsequently, a two-hour workshop will introduce the core principles behind the data structure and framework for Wikidata, and demonstrate how it can be used to connect archival radio collections to a broader web-based community of knowledge.

Moderator: Stephanie Sapienza (​Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities)

Panelists:

Alex Stinson (Wikimedia Foundation) will highlight how Wikidata is being used by diverse cultural heritage organizations around the world, including by the Archive of the Finnish Public Radio organization (Yle), the Social Network of Archival Collections (SNAC), and by other heritage organizations as diverse as the Metropolitan Museum and university libraries working to make their collections better connected with the world of linked open data through Wikidata.  

Casey Davis Kaufman and Karen Cariani (WGBH Boston/American Archive for Public Broadcasting) will showcase the their IMLS-funded crowdsourcing project FIX IT, an online game that allows members of the public to help AAPB professional archivists improve the searchability and accessibility of more than 40,000 hours of digitized, historic public media content.

Eric Hoyt (University of Wisconsin-Madison) will reflect on his work developing the Media History Digital Library’s search platform, Lantern, and data mining application, Arclight. He will also discuss methods that users can use to translate their data into new queries and interpret and share the results.

Effie Kapsalis (Smithsonian Institution Archives): will share the Smithsonian Institution Archives’ (SIA) methods for enriching and sharing their collections through crowdsourcing, with a particular focus on the institutional challenges of implementing such projects. Since 2005, SIA experimented with publishing minimum metadata about little-known women in the history of science, and recruiting constituents on various platforms (blogs, institutional websites, Flickr Commons, Wikipedia, Smithsonian Transcription Center) to fill in the ‘unknowns.’ These experiments have led to rich collections records on the Smithsonian’s websites, complete Wikipedia articles, and improved digital resources on female scientists for the public. Today SIA is leading a pan-Smithsonian pilot to make a large contribution to Wikidata.

Workshop

In the workshop, we will provide a basic introduction to Wikidata and then use Wikidata to develop more robust context for an archival radio collection. We will connect Wikidata with authority records pulled from descriptive metadata about the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) collection at the University of Maryland/American Archive of Public Broadcasting. We will use that linked data to demonstrate visualizations and other potential applications of Wikidata for research, including unearthing other authority records and digital web resources about people, places, and other entities, showing network relationships between various metadata items, and asking questions to better understand the context of the collection.

About Wikidata

A sister project of Wikipedia, Wikidata is a human and machine readable platform that allows for crowdsourcing to enrich metadata and access linked open data content from free and open vocabularies and data projects, such as the Getty vocabularies, the Social Network of Archival Content (SNAC), and others. Wikidata maintains many of the dynamics of the widely popular encyclopedia: it’s free and open, editorial decisions are made by the community participating in the project, and the content is multilingual, supporting hundreds of languages.

The post MITH Panel/Workshop Nov 2 on Linked Data & Crowdsourcing for Radio Collections! appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

** Deadline extended until November 15 11:59pm EST ** 
Submit at https://www.conftool.net/music-encoding2018

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library invite you to participate in the 2018 Music Encoding Conference with the theme: “Encoding and Performance”.

Date: 23 – 24 May 2018 (with pre-conference workshops on 22 May and an ‘un-conference’ day on 25 May)
Location: University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA
Deadline for Proposals: 15 November 2017 (11:59pm EST)
Notification of Acceptance: 4 December 2017
Keynote speakers: Anna Kijas (Boston College)
                                John Rink (University of Cambridge)

Music encoding is a critical component of the emerging fields of digital musicology, digital editions, symbolic music information retrieval, and others. At the centre of these fields, the Music Encoding Conference has emerged as an important cross-disciplinary venue for theorists, musicologists, librarians, and technologists to meet and discuss new advances in their fields.

The Music Encoding Conference is the annual focal point for the Music Encoding Initiative community (http://music-encoding.org), but members from all encoding and analysis communities are welcome to participate.

For the first time, the annual conference will have a theme: “Encoding and Performance”. We welcome in particular submissions that theorize the relationship between music encoding and performance practice, describe experiments (failed or successful) in creating digital dynamic scores, propose ways of using encoded music for pedagogical purposes related to performance, or imagine future interconnections. The conference will be held at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, and therefore, we encourage presentations that include a performance component or demonstration.

As always, other topics are welcome. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• music encoding for performance research and practice
• music encoding as a theoretical approach for research
• methodologies for encoding, music editing, description and analysis
• rendering of symbolic music data in audio and graphical forms
• relationships between symbolic music data, encoded text, and facsimile images
• capture, interchange, and re-purposing of music data and metadata
• evaluation and control of quality of music data and metadata
• ontologies, authority files, and linked data in music encoding and description
• music encoding and symbolic music information retrieval
• additional topics relevant to music encoding, editing, and description

Authors are invited to upload their submission for review to our Conftool website: https://www.conftool.net/music-encoding2018. The deadline for all submissions is 15 November 2017 (11:59pm EST).

Abstracts (in PDF format only) should be submitted through ConfTool, and the submitted PDF must anonymize the authors’ details.

Types of proposals

Paper and poster proposals. Provide an abstract of no more than 1000 words, excluding relevant bibliographic references (no more than ten). Please also include information about presentation needs, particularly if you are planning a performance demonstration.

Panel discussion proposals, describing the topic and nature of the discussion and including short biographies of the participants, must be no longer than 2000 words. Panel discussions are not expected to be a set of papers which could otherwise be submitted as individual papers.

Proposals for half- or full-day pre-conference workshops, to be held on May 22nd, should include the workshop’s proposed duration, as well as its logistical and technical requirements.

Friday May 25th is planned as an un-conference day, self-organized by the participants and open for anyone who wants to initiate a discussion on a topic mentioned above.

Additional details regarding registration, accommodation, etc. will be announced on the conference web page (http://music-encoding.org/community/conference).

If you have any questions, please e-mail conference2018@music-encoding.org.

Program Committee

• Karen Desmond, chair (Brandeis University)
• Johanna Devaney (Ohio State University)
• David Fiala (Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours)
• Andrew Hankinson (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)
• Maja Hartwig (University of Paderborn)

Organizing Committee

• Amanda Lee-Barber (The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center)
• Stephen Henry, co-chair (Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library)
• Raffaele Viglianti, co-chair (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities)
• Leighann Yarwood (The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center)

The post Announcing the Music Encoding Conference 2018 Call for Proposals appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.