Digital Dialogues – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Building a Community Data Curation Practice: Digital Archiving through Partnership and Resource Sharing (CANCELED)

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 12:00:00 +0000

MITH wants everyone in our community to stay healthy and the best way to do that right now is to avoid meetings or gatherings. With sadness, we canceled the final two Digital Dialogues of the Spring 2020 season. We will work with Jennifer Garcon and Kristin Carlson on a plan to speak at a later date.

In support of the Re/Member Black Philadelphia project, Garcon launched a community data curation pilot in partnership with the Free Library of Philadelphia. The goal of the community-rooted digitization project was to create access pathways to historical records from under-documented communities by producing digital surrogates and offering consultation to expand the life of materials held within the communities of color. As Philadelphia gentrifies at a faster rate than San Francisco, well-resourced institutions need to develop inclusive practices that support on-going community archival efforts. This talk discusses the experience of building an institutional practice that foregrounds partnership and resource sharing in developing digital archives.

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Distant Writing

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 13:00:41 +0000

How does a poet end up thinking in terms of algorithms, programming languages, and datasets? This talk explores the work of writers of electronic literature who, instead of writing sequences of words directly, create a computer program or modify an existing one to generate their intended texts. The practice of creating and repurposing “engines” encourage the development of born-digital poetic forms, such as Nick Montfort’s poem, “Taroko Gorge” which has been remixed hundreds of times since its publication in early 2009. In this talk I will provide a brief history of computational literature and related genres, discuss key characteristics and practices, analyze tools and strategies used for its creation, and identify communities that practice it. The goal of this exploration is to formulate a poetics of distant writing with attention given to how this practice is shaping public tastes and literary aesthetics.

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The Black Lunch Table Archive: A Radical Reimagining of Digital Authorship

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 13:00:23 +0000

Black Lunch Table (BLT) is an oral history project that mobilizes a democratic writing of cultural history through a radical reimagining of strategies for digital authorship and archiving. BLT engages in the production of discursive spaces wherein artists and community members engage in dialogue on a variety of critical issues. BLT roundtable events provide physical and digital infrastructure for community discourse, which is recorded and archived on the BLT website. Parallel to its creation of physical spaces that foster community and generate critical dialogue, BLT is creating a digital space for a Linked Open Data (LOD) approach to Black studies and social justice issues. BLT’s use of network analysis, as an organizing principle for its archive, is an innovative application of DH methods that disrupts traditional archiving practices.

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MEI for All! or Lowering the Barrier to Music Encoding through Digital Pedagogy

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 13:00:30 +0000

Over approximately the last decade, the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), has become a recognized international community-driven effort that has developed and maintains the MEI schema, standards, and shared documentation. The potential of machine-readable music data that can be reused, rendered, shared, or analyzed using a computer, is quite appealing, however the reality is that various barriers exist for people who may be interested in creating or using encoded music data for the first time.

One approach to lowering barriers is through digital pedagogy, in which the focus is “specifically on the use of technology to break down learning barriers and enhance students’ learning experiences.”(1) In addition to teaching MEI via online tutorials or workshops, students and scholars* should consider approaching the MEI through the lens of digital pedagogy or more specifically critical pedagogy, which emphasizes and overlaps with many of the tenets that make up the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.(2) Critical pedagogy encourages questions around authority and power structures, for instance: why was MEI created and for whom, whose music is being encoded, who has access to the data, when/why should we use MEI, what type of infrastructure is necessary for MEI work, and so on. Encouraging and engaging in conversations with students and scholars about the affordances of MEI is equally valuable as is the act of creating encoded music data or full-on MEI projects.

In this talk, I will explore some of the barriers that students and scholars new to the MEI often experience and discuss models related to some of my own work as a librarian and digital humanities practitioner; focusing in particular on the “Introduction to the Music Encoding Initiative,” co-written with Raffaele Viglianti and recently published in the DLFteach Toolkit, (https://dlfteach.pubpub.org/toolkit), in which we aim to present music encoding through a low-barrier approach that utilizes open source tools.(3) I will also present examples (such as minimal computing efforts) from the broader digital humanities community that we might borrow from, which embrace the ethos and approaches of critical and digital pedagogy.(4)

Notes
(1) Reed Garber-Pearson and Robin Chin Roemer,: “Keeping up with digital pedagogy”
(2) ACRL, “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education”
(3) See also Rebalancing the Music Canon
(4) TEI By Example; Minimal computing; Programming Historian.
*By scholar, I mean any person engaged in research or scholarly activity. It is not limited to faculty.

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Announcing the Spring 2020 Digital Dialogues Line Up

Digital Dialogues — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 15:29:03 +0000

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.

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Nominations Open, Spring 2020 Digital Dialogues

Purdom Lindblad — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 13:32:45 +0000

We are delighted to open nominations for spring 2020 Digital Dialogue speakers. Digital Dialogues is MITH’s signature events program, held almost every week while the academic semester is in session. Digital Dialogues is an occasion for discussion, presentation, and intellectual exchange that you can build into your weekly schedule.

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

Nominations should be submitted by 11:59pm Thursday, November 7, 2018. Let us know who you would like to present!

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Mark your calendars! Fall 2019 Digital Dialogues Line Up

Purdom Lindblad — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 14:47:52 +0000

We are delighted to announce the lineup for the Fall 2019 Digital Dialogue series. We will host eight speakers for six incredible sessions. All Digital Dialogues will be held Tuesdays, at 12:30 pm in the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities Conference Room, 0301 Hornbake Library North beginning October 1, 2019.

Digital Dialogues are open to the public and all are welcome.

Fall 2019 Digital Dialogues

Tuesday, October 01: Setsuko Yokoyama, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English (University of Maryland)
The Sound of Public Humanities and its Oscillatory Accessibility

Tuesday, October 08: Jen Guiliano, Associate Professor in the Department of History and affiliated faculty in both Native American and Indigenous Studies and American Studies (IUPUI, Indianapolis, Indiana).
Difficult Heritage: Indigenous Collections in Digital Humanities

Tuesday, October 15: Kelsey Corlett-Rivera: Head of the Research Commons (University of Maryland Libraries) and Nathan Dize: Ph.D. Candidate (Vanderbilt University)
A Colony in Crisis after Five Years: Digital Konbit in Practice

Tuesday, October 22: Sylvia Fernandez Ph.D Candidate (University of Houston)
Behind the Line: Digitally Rethinking and Restructuring Geopolitical Borders and its Surroundings

Tuesday, October 29: Kimberly Bain, Ph.D. Candidate (Princeton University)
Hold:Space

Tuesday, November 05: Jessica H. Lu, Associate Director, Design Cultures & Creativity, (University of Maryland Honors College) and Caitlin Pollock, MLIS, MA; Associate Librarian & Digital Scholarship Specialist (University of Michigan Library)
Design, Development, and Documentation: Hacking TEI for Black Digital Humanities

For more information see Digital Dialogues schedule page, which will be updated with more information about each talk as it becomes available.

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.

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Kyle Bickoff Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 06:00:31 +0000

Containers may be used to store information—their structures bundle together our data in discrete, lightweight, and economical units. We know that physical containers like paper Hollinger boxes fill the shelves of our libraries and archives, but digital containers used by these institutions remain far less historicized. Containers are a type of logistical media (a term coined by John Durham Peters), which help us organize and orient, and to arrange people and property. In Kyle Bickoff’s presentation, he will present a history of digital storage containers—he begins with an early programmable storage medium: the punch card, following the unit’s acceleration as it is wrapped around cylindrical punch card drums to expedite the work of a human key punch operator. He then turns to the spinning surfaces of magnetic media, such as hard drives, which map new topologies onto their surfaces to arrange information efficiently and to lower latency. His argument circles to containers used in digital preservation, including the Library of Congress BagIt file structure and the open-source Matroska Multimedia Container. Finally, he addresses containers at scale, like Docker, used in the logistical movement and storage of information. In tracing this history, Kyle Bickoff follows the acceleration of containers in information systems and their role as logistical media technologies, speculating on the enduring legacy of containers in libraries and archives, and across our 21^st century globally distributed networks of information communication and storage.

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Christina Boyles Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 06:00:57 +0000

Due to its unique geography, Puerto Rico is at the forefront of climate catastrophe. In theory, Puerto Rico’s devastating experiences should provide nations around the world with insight into impending climate fluctuations. But as my presentation reveals, the global disaster-response methods being used by governments and contractors tend to be underpinned by power, greed, and discrimination. Most troubling, they reinforce racism and sexism—propping up the powerful, exploiting the vulnerable, and enacting state-sanctioned violence. As I will argue, governments and recovery organizations need to develop ethical responses that address the concerns of their most vulnerable citizens, rather than profiting from disaster capitalism. Based on interviews with Puerto Rican survivors of Hurricane San Felipe (1928) and Hurricane María (2017) and on archival research, this presentation highlights the devaluation of life and the increase in violence, particularly violence against women, that has wracked the island in the wake of the hurricane. Building upon the activist practices of the environmental justice movement, which seeks ethical treatment for all living beings, I offer compelling solutions to these inequities, such as the formation of disaster-specific mental health services and communally owned energy infrastructure. These mechanisms, paired with ongoing climate activism, provide opportunities for addressing post-disaster spikes in violence against the vulnerable and the marginalized.

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Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 06:00:29 +0000

We will present initial results on two computational projects on Medieval Hebrew manuscripts. The first, Sofer Mahir, applies an HTR (handwritten text recognition) pipeline constructed at Scripta-PSL to the major manuscripts of the classical compositions of the tannaitic period of Rabbinic Judaism. In the frame of the second project, Tikkoun Sofrim, which applies the pipeline to manuscripts of early Medieval Tanhuma-Yelamdenu Midrashim, we have developed a crowdsourcing platform that permits citizen scientists to suggest corrections to the automatic transcription.

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