The Cleaners (2018)

Please join us in MITH on October 30, 2019 (All Hallows’ Eve Eve) from 6-8pm for a screening of The Cleaners, a documentary which provides an in depth look at the hidden labor of content moderation that makes today’s social media platforms possible. Once the dream of Silicon Valley tech startups, the democratization of web publishing has brought huge challenges to the mega-corporations that run today’s social media platforms, as they struggle to prevent the viral spread of online hate, violence and abuse.

Key to these moderation systems are large numbers of human moderators, who interpret community guidelines, and sometimes clandestine content rules, in order to decide what content will remain online. As Sarah Roberts details in her book Behind the Screen (a recent Digital Studies Colloquium pick) commercial content moderators work behind the scenes, in remote locations and precarious working conditions, where they are often subjected to a barrage of unsettling material that can leave lasting psychological and social impacts.

A brief discussion will follow the screening. Popcorn and soda pop will be available, but feel free to bring some take-out or some pre-Halloween candy.

The post The Cleaners: Movie Night (Oct 30) appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Natural historians create the frameworks, calendars and infrastructures that allow us to understand and grapple with “deep time” — but they do so within their own temporally complex scholarly settings: the infrastructures and data collections that house the specimens and datasets used in their analyses. Though natural history collections are meant to last for generations, the records they contain last only years (at best) without careful maintenance and curation. Digital collections are particularly fragile, prone to bit rot and obsolescence, and must consequently be upgraded and migrated frequently. In this talk, Thomer will consider the temporal rhythms of natural history data collections, their management, and and their migration, and how that impacts the creation and management of systems of understanding – and making – “deep time.”

Andrea Thomer is an assistant professor of information at the University of Michigan School of Information. She conducts research in the areas of data curation, museum informatics, earth science and biodiversity informatics, information organization, and computer supported cooperative work.  She is especially interested in how people use and create data and metadata standards; the impact of information organization on information use; issues of data provenance, reproducibility, and integration; and long-term data curation and infrastructure sustainability — on the scale of decades rather than years.  She is studying a number of these issues through the “Migrating Research Data Collections” project – a recently awarded Laura Bush 21st Century Librarianship Early Career Research Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Dr. Thomer received her doctorate in Library and Information Science from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign in 2017.

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Measuring Impact of Digital Repositories

Simon Tanner will offer a sneak peek at the Balanced Value Impact Model 2.0 (BVI Model). Tanner will introduce the Digital Humanities at King’s College London, and link this to his open and collaborative research practices to tell the story of the intellectual development of the BVI Model. He will detail the BVI Model 2.0 to highlight what’s new and how it works. Tanner will relate these changes to his collaboration with Europeana to develop their Impact Playbook and look to the future of that tool.

The session will include time for questions and discussion.

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Simon Tanner is Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. He is a Digital Humanities scholar with a wide-ranging interest in cross-disciplinary thinking and collaborative approaches that reflect a fascination with interactions between memory organization collections (libraries, museum, archives, media and publishing) and the digital domain.

As an information professional, consultant, digitization expert and academic he works with major cultural institutions across the world to assist them in transforming their impact, collections and online presence. He has consulted for or managed over 500 digital projects, including digitization of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and has built strategy with a wide range of organizations. These include the US National Gallery of Art and many other museums and national libraries in Europe, Africa, America and the Middle East. Tanner has had work commissioned by UNESCO, the Danish government, the Arcadia Fund and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  He founded the Digital Futures Academy that has run in the UK, Australia, South Africa and Ghana with participants from over 40 countries.

Research into image use and sales in American art museums by Simon Tanner has had a significant effect on opening up collections access and OpenGLAM in the museum sector. Tanner is a strong advocate for Open Access, open research and the digital humanities. Tanner was chair of the Web Archiving sub-committee as an independent member of the UK Government-appointed Legal Deposit Advisory Panel. He is a member of the Europeana Impact Taskforce which developed the Impact Playbook based upon his Balanced Value Impact Model. He is part of the AHRC funded Academic Book of the Future research team.

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From the dust jacket:

Old Futures explores the social, political, and cultural forces feminists, queer people, and people of color invoke when they dream up alternative futures as a way to imagine transforming the present. Lothian shows how queer possibilities emerge when we practice the art of speculation: of imagining things otherwise than they are and creating stories from that impulse. Queer theory offers creative ways to think about time, breaking with straight and narrow paths toward the future laid out for the reproductive family, the law-abiding citizen, and the believer in markets. Yet so far it has rarely considered the possibility that, instead of a queer present reshaping the ways we relate to past and future, the futures imagined in the past can lead us to queer the present.

Narratives of possible futures provide frameworks through which we understand our present, but the discourse of “the” future has never been a singular one. Imagined futures have often been central to the creation and maintenance of imperial domination and technological modernity; Old Futures offers a counterhistory of works that have sought––with varying degrees of success––to speculate otherwise. Examining speculative texts from the 1890s to the 2010s, from Samuel R. Delany to Sense8, Lothian considers the ways in which early feminist utopias and dystopias, Afrofuturist fiction, and queer science fiction media have insisted that the future can and must deviate from dominant narratives of global annihilation or highly restrictive hopes for redemption.

Each chapter chronicles some of the means by which the production and destruction of futures both real and imagined takes place: through eugenics, utopia, empire, fascism, dystopia, race, capitalism, femininity, masculinity, and many kinds of queerness, reproduction, and sex. Gathering stories of and by populations who have been marked as futureless or left out by dominant imaginaries, Lothian offers new insights into what we can learn from imaginatively redistributing the future now.

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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.

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Raffaele Viglianti (MITH) and Stephen Henry (Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library) hosted the Music Encoding Conference last week (22 – 25 May 2018).

For the first time, the conference had a theme: “Encoding and Performance,” which was well represented throughout the program. We are especially grateful to John Rink for his keynote lecture-recital “(Not) Beyond the Score: Decoding Musical Performance,” which highlighted the challenges of encoding/decoding music notation through the lens of performance research and practice.

We are also particularly grateful to Anna Kijas who, in her keynote speech, “What does the data tell us?: Representation, Canon, and Music Encoding,” highlighted critical topics that are too often neglected in the music encoding community. Her talk made the fundamental point that our acts of building digital representations of notated music can (and currently do) reinforce traditional canons of music history that overlook contributions by women and people of color. In establishing a “digital canon” we have an unprecedented opportunity to change this. Read the full text of her keynote on Medium.

We closed MEC with a productive unconference day in the MITH offices and we are happy to already see some activity on the Music Encoding Initiative community as a result!

Many thanks were given throughout the conference days; however, we would be remiss not to acknowledge again the support provided by the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities and the MEI Board for sponsored bursaries for students. This was especially important to allow students to attend the conference in a place that is currently geographically distant from the core constituencies of the MEI community. We are also thankful to Tido for sponsoring the Wednesday reception and particularly to soprano Tory Wood and Tido’s founder and director Brad Cohen for a wonderful live performance.

We enjoyed hosting our attendees at the beautiful Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center and are grateful to the wonderful team there: Leighann Yarwood, Amanda Lee Barber, Kara Warton, and their technical staff. Special thanks also to Lori Owen from the College of Arts and Humanities. We are also thankful for the students from the Performing Arts Library who manned the registration desk and helped with all odds and ends of the conference. They are: Jennifer Bonilla, Peter Franklin, Will Gray, Kimia Hesabi, Amarti Tasissa, Zachary Tumlin, Terriq White, and Barrett Wilbur.

Finally, we are thankful to all who submitted contributions to the conference and to the Program Committee: Karen Desmond (chair), Johanna Devaney, David Fiala, Andrew Hankinson, and Maja Hartwig.

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The symposium aims to gather a diverse group of voices who are working in these areas to foster dialogue and connections. Sessions will focus on: supporting digital work by students, pedagogy, social justice, and facilitating regional collaboration. Conversations between small groups from four institutions (MITH, Scholars’ Lab, Washington & Lee, and the University of Richmond) suggested a shared desire for greater collaboration and exchange. The aspiration for this meeting is to get people together to share strategies, concerns, as well as seed ideas for future collaborations with the ultimate goal of fostering a larger network of collaborators across the Virginia, D.C., Maryland region.

The Regional DH Symposium website may be found at http://symposium.scholarslab.org/ and the schedule at: http://symposium.scholarslab.org/schedule/. Events will take place on Friday, March 9, 2018, from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM.

Logistics information is located at http://symposium.scholarslab.org/logistics/

Please contact Purdom Lindblad (mith@umd.edu) with any questions. If you are interested in participating or in sharing your work on issues of social justice or pedagogy (or both!), please fill out the form at https://goo.gl/forms/riXessSSyuk9192m2

A limited number of bursaries up to $75 may be available to support travel. Apply for funding or to present by March 1, 2018. We will continue taking expressions of interest in attending until 11 PM Wednesday, March 7, 2018.

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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!

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More than most fields in the humanities, DH is collaborative, and I have gained so much in knowledge and by way of friendships during these twelve years of working with the widespread community of scholars, students, and staff, both on campus and beyond, who have engaged with MITH projects, programs, fellowships, training, and courses.

My gratitude extends to the able administrators and their staffs who have provided staunch support for MITH, especially Deans of the College of Arts and Humanities, Jim Harris and Bonnie Thornton Dill; Deans of the Libraries, Charles Lowry, Pat Steele, and Babak Hamidzadeh; and former longtime Dean of the iSchool, Jenny Preece. Without doing a long roll call, I’d also like to thank the superb program officers of the NEH, IMLS, and Mellon Foundation, without whose support the Digital Humanities never could have flourished. They often asked telling questions that led good projects to be re-conceptualized into excellent ones.

Those who know me well probably expect a quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley somewhere in this farewell. But I’m turning instead to the inimitable Casey Stengel, one-time manager of both the New York Yankees and the New York Mets, who has said, “Managing is getting paid for home runs that someone else hits.” I’m proud of all the home runs MITH’s extraordinarily talented staff has hit during my tenure, and I cherish the long-lasting friendships I’ve made here over the years. To MITH’s current staff–Trevor, Grace, Purdom, Stephanie, Kirsten, Raff, and Ed—I want to say what a great pleasure it has been working with you: I’ve enjoyed every single day at the office and will miss your constant company.

My deepest debt is to my brilliant colleague and friend Matt Kirschenbaum, who has been with me for the whole journey. He began as MITH’s Associate Director on the same day as I began as Director, and he acted in that capacity until recently becoming the founding Director of our Graduate Certificate Program in Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities. Much of MITH’s success can be attributed to Matt’s vision, acuity, and intellectual breadth. Carl Stahmer, who joined Matt and me as an Associate Director during our first year, and Doug Reside who followed Carl, were instrumental in getting us off to a fast and sure-footed start, along with designer par excellence Greg Lord.

Ah! But Shelley is never far behind, whether or not I quote him. As I cycle off of MITH on July 1 and return to the English Department, I will begin an extended research leave dedicated to his works and those of Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Godwin—a thrilling prospect! In saying farewell, I know that I couldn’t possibly leave MITH in better hands than those of the remarkable Trevor Muñoz, who I know will lead MITH steadily along an ever-ascending trajectory.

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