Tuesday, September 20th kicked-off our Digital Dialogues for the 2011-12 academic year. We had an excellent turnout for our talk given by Aditi Muralidharan, doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley, who spoke on the methods and challenges of text-analysis in the digital humanities. Listen to the podcast and follow Aditi’s slides here if you missed it. As always, the full schedule of upcoming dialogues is viewable on our Digital Dialogues page.
MITH is stretching its legs across the pond…
Director Neil Fraistat is heading to London to give a lecture entitled “Digital Humanities Centers and the New Humanities” at King’s College on October 5th. Neil will address the ways and the circumstances under which digital humanities centers might be seen as crucial or deleterious to the field, especially in terms of the centerNet initiative, which seeks to create a truly global network of local digital humanities centers.
Grant Dickie, Web Programmer at MITH, is traveling to Würzburg University on October 7th for InterEdition’s Development Bootcamp. Interedition is raising awareness of the significance of interoperability as a major driver for sustainability for tools and data in the field of digital scholarship. Grant attends as a Domain Expert on behalf of his work for the Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE). During the bootcamp, stay tuned to the MITH blog, as Grant will be live-blogging on his work refactoring ideas for TILE. Following InterEdition, Grant will attend the coinciding TEI-Workshop “An Introduction to TextGridLab” also held at Würzburg University, October 12-14th, in order to attend a tutorial on TextGrid.
We’re keeping things interesting back on the home front…
MITH is pleased to welcome two new Research Associates to our staff as part of the work on the Shelley-Godwin Archive. David Brookshire, Lecturer and Research Associate in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, is serving as Manuscripts Transcription Editor. David is the editor, and a contributor, for Percy Shelley and the De-limitation of the Gothic, a forthcoming volume of essays in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series. Joining David is senior undergraduate in English at Maryland, Wenfei Zhou, who is assisting in transcribing the history contained within Shelley’s manuscripts.
As part of our role in Project Bamboo, MITH hosted a workshop on September 15-16th for project members to discuss the next stage of planning for Phase II. In this workshop, partners took significant steps toward solidifying Phase II goals, mapping out a work plan, and preparing the proposal that will be submitted to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Phase II is concentrated on two things: first, building a focused infrastructure for the exploration and curation of digital texts in the HathiTrust Research Center, Perseus Digital Library and the Text Creation Partnership repositories, and second, reaching a wider audience, ranging from the professional humanist to the citizen scholar.
Be sure to return to our blog throughout the Fall, as our three resident faculty fellows will be blogging about their on-going work as they commence their new digital projects. You’ll learn the challenges that Dr. Hayim Lapin encounters as he creates a digital edition of the Mishnah; Dr. Peter Mallios’ understanding of the significance of foreign authored literature in the United States; and Dr. Carla Peterson’s research behind the social and cultural history of New York City’s black elite from about 1810 to 1895.