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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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.

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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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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).

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This presentation traces the arc of Museums Respond to Ferguson and #BlkTwitterstorians–two born digital projects that emerged at the height of the Movement for Black Lives. The chats started with queries that then influenced deeper dialogue on how scholars and activists together could use history to inform a world specifically void of policing and incarceration. Both projects hinged on collective engagement with a few questions (and critiques) to incubate new ideas on how to present and preserve Black history with Black futures in mind. While both projects happened online, low-tech methodologies deeply informed project decisions. Phone calls, in-person meetings and printed chats played an important role in shaping the project. There was a heavy emphasis on the public, but the projects influenced the personal in ways that ultimately led to Museums Respond to Ferguson’s end and #BlkTwitterstorians refocus.

This presentation will also include a demonstration, inviting participants to walk through constructing a dialogue on Twitter: preparation, rules for engagement, reflecting, and planning for archiving and dissemination.

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