Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities https://mith.umd.edu Thu, 08 Oct 2020 19:59:07 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.1 Tracking the Invisible: Following Movement Beyond Space and Time Markers (CANCELED) https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd-spring-2020-kristin-carlson/ Tue, 24 Mar 2020 12:00:35 +0000 https://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=20853 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 [...]

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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.

Currently, there are many options to track human movement with technology (i.e. capturing body position, number of steps taken, range of motion, how long one has been sitting vs. moving, etc). While these methods tell us a story about our movement, there is more to our experience than technology can tell us yet based on measurements of time and space. My work investigates methods that use technology to reveal what can be known as more “invisible” aspects of movement, which are present but less measurable. These invisible aspects can include qualities of effort, intention, and follow through. Our motivation to move is complex, relying on our self-developed identities, and experiences within the world. We don’t isolate movement from our needs and goals, the way technology needs to. Hence, it is difficult to deconstruct our movement without accounting for the invisible. By using strategies such as defamiliarization and documenting motivation and shifts in creative process, we can start to see new aspects that inform movement knowledge. These approaches can imagine ways that technology can develop to better support our experiences.

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Building a Community Data Curation Practice: Digital Archiving through Partnership and Resource Sharing (CANCELED) https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd-spring-2020-jennifer-garcon/ Tue, 17 Mar 2020 12:00:00 +0000 https://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=20849 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 [...]

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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 https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd-spring-2020-leonardo-flores/ Tue, 03 Mar 2020 13:00:41 +0000 https://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=20844 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 [...]

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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 https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd-spring-2020-jina-valentine-heather-hart/ Tue, 25 Feb 2020 13:00:23 +0000 https://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=20840       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 [...]

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Jina Valentine     Heather Hart

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 https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd-spring-2020-anna-kijas/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 13:00:30 +0000 https://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=20835 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 [...]

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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 https://mith.umd.edu/announcing-the-spring-2020-digital-dialogues-line-up/ Mon, 10 Feb 2020 15:29:03 +0000 https://mith.umd.edu/?p=20857 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 [...]

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Digital Dialogues

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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Jessica Lu & Caitlin Pollock Digital Dialogue https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd-fall-2019-jessical-h-lu-caitlin-pollock/ Tue, 29 Oct 2019 12:00:19 +0000 https://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=20739 The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a standard of extensible markup language (XML) that prides itself upon the ability to adapt and evolve to the ever-changing needs of its users, who rely on the guidelines for scholarly modeling, analysis, and digital collections. Now in its fifth major iteration (P5), the TEI guidelines are a productive [...]

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Jessica H. Lu Caitlin Pollock

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a standard of extensible markup language (XML) that prides itself upon the ability to adapt and evolve to the ever-changing needs of its users, who rely on the guidelines for scholarly modeling, analysis, and digital collections. Now in its fifth major iteration (P5), the TEI guidelines are a productive building block for Black digital humanities work. However, close attention to TEI tags, elements, and “best practices” expose how the guidelines relegate Black DH to the margins, as an addendum to or variation on scholarly markup. In this talk, we will share a framework that addresses challenges and tensions Black DH researchers—including librarians, graduate students, and independent scholars—encounter in TEI standards. This framework of critical care and codework grapples with the complexities of transforming historically de-centered voices into data, the politics of labeling the Black body using tags, and the role of encoders in interpreting and annotating Black voices. It also enkindles the design and development of a Black DH Schema for TEI.

The Black DH Schema is an anti-racist and anti-colonial effort to reimagine the uses and users of the TEI guidelines and move toward encoding that presumes Blackness and Black people as central to engaging text—whether in discovery, access, analysis, collection, and/or preservation. This talk will share the early progress of this project and a preliminary draft of the tag set. We will further emphasize and discuss the values and principles guiding this project in both process and product, including limning and cultivating collaboration, workflows and timelines, the importance of feminist timekeeping, and critical kindness—from design to comprehensive documentation.

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Kimberly Bain Digital Dialogue https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd-fall-2019-kimberly-bain/ Tue, 22 Oct 2019 12:00:45 +0000 https://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=20737 This talk undertakes a partial genealogy of breath as it has been racialized within the project of modernity. I argue that Eric Garner’s “I can’t breathe” sits amongst the larger and longer singularity of Black breath being circumscribed and suffocated, while concomitantly highlighting the struggle to resist and exist within this project. I offer up [...]

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This talk undertakes a partial genealogy of breath as it has been racialized within the project of modernity. I argue that Eric Garner’s “I can’t breathe” sits amongst the larger and longer singularity of Black breath being circumscribed and suffocated, while concomitantly highlighting the struggle to resist and exist within this project. I offer up the term Black breath as a lexicon through which we can thread together new histories, theories, and philosophies of the biopolitical project of modernity in order to expand the critical grammars of the contemporary moment. Hold:Space is a criticopoetic digital project that tenders constellations between Blackness and, as, and with breathing.

Vulnerability to loss of breath has been a formative figure in the Black performative, literary, and lived tradition, one that provides if not a praxis of liberation, then a kind of radical sociality, a kind of quantum entanglement. Sojourning with that cramped suffocating cavity of the hold and the endless possibilities that breathing space conjures, I explore these two spaces as co-constitutive: Hold contends with the resonant tides of the Middle Passage and the lost breath below the kala pani; Space is a moment to tumble into possible futurities—fall into what space to breathe fully might look like.

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Sylvia Fernandez Digital Dialogue https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd-fall-2019-sylvia-fernandez/ Tue, 15 Oct 2019 12:00:33 +0000 https://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=20735 In Roopika Risam’s recent book New Digital Worlds (2019), she proposes that “those of us who are equipped with the capacity for humanities inquiry [and are committed to social justice] have a responsibility to intervene” in the legacies of colonialism by “creating projects to challenge the exclusions in the record of digital knowledge” (139-140).  It [...]

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In Roopika Risam’s recent book New Digital Worlds (2019), she proposes that “those of us who are equipped with the capacity for humanities inquiry [and are committed to social justice] have a responsibility to intervene” in the legacies of colonialism by “creating projects to challenge the exclusions in the record of digital knowledge” (139-140).  It is imperative to bring this call to action to the abundant legacy of colonialist production in regards to border and borderlands representations. It is crucial to reclaim the humanity of communities, such as the ones along the Mexico-U.S. border, by critically contextualizing and reshaping knowledge production through the use of digital methods and tools, as well as collaborative practices. Nevertheless, as a member of the border community, it is necessary to question and consider alternative ways to work with and without the institution- and university-based initiatives, that own, control and direct the material, structure and meaning of DH projects connected to personal representations and/or critical issues. Based on my experience, as cofounder of Borderlands Archive Cartography and team member of United Fronteras, I will discuss the importance of tracing, recompiling and documenting the cultural, literary and digital record of the binational-transnational area of the U.S.-Mexico border, in order to bring to the forefront the various ways in which historical realities, past and present socio-political conditions, and local experiences of this region are being imagined, showcased, studied and interpreted.

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Nominations Open, Spring 2020 Digital Dialogues https://mith.umd.edu/nominations-open-spring-2020-digital-dialogues/ Mon, 14 Oct 2019 13:32:45 +0000 https://mith.umd.edu/?p=20808 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 [...]

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Digital Dialogues

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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