A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, April 17, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

MITH’s next Digital Dialogue features presentations by two of its current Fellows on their ongoing digital humanities research. Please come support local colleagues by hearing them talk about their projects.

The two presentations are ANGEL DAVID NIEVES (Architecture), “Soweto ’76, A Living Digital Archive” and MERLE COLLINS (English and Comparative Literature), “In the Footsteps of the Old Heads: Saraka and Nation in the Caribbean.” Abstracts and bios follow.

“Soweto ’76, A Living Digital Archive”

The aim of Soweto ’76 is to develop an interactive immersive edutainment application and multimedia interface that allows users to experience a historically recreated urban environment with the support of primary and secondary archival materials. With the creation of a historically accurate environment as a platform, users will be able to assume the role of a character from the time period, and experience their reactions to actual events from their particular vantage point. It is hoped that users of Soweto ’76 will act as virtual witnesses to the events of June 16, 1976–events that catalyzed the massive student uprisings against the apartheid regime. Using existing oral histories, testimonies, photographs, video footage, material objects, and sound recordings in the collections of the Hector Pieterson Museum, the work seeks to redress the uneven portrayal of the lives of Black township residents in the mainstream or “official” historical record. Soweto ’76 seeks to first address the absence of accounts from those students involved in the Uprisings (1) by making these multimedia texts accessible online and (2) by providing digital tools to facilitate a comparative analysis of the competing interpretations of key events. The site undertakes the challenges of collating the experiences (or “collating the narratives”) and interpretive vantage points of the various historical and contemporary actors. The vantage point of the user changes as the various forms of multimedia data are accessed on the site. These “collated narratives” will include both spatial and temporal representations of the events occurring on 16 June.

ANGEL DAVID NIEVES, B.Arch., M.A., Ph.D is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park. In Fall 2006 he began his new role as Director of Graduate Research and Training at the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity (CRGE) and as a Resident Fellow at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). He is an affiliate faculty member in the Departments of American Studies, Women’s Studies, African American Studies, and Anthropology. He is also an affiliate member of the Center for Heritage Resource Studies and the Program in LGBT Studies. He completed his doctoral work in architectural history and Africana studies at Cornell University in 2001. He was Assistant Professor of Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and Geography in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 2001-2003. His book manuscript, ‘We Gave Our Hearts and Lives To It:’ Black Women and Nation-Building in the New South, 1877-1968, is currently being revised for publication with Duke University Press. He is also the co-editor (w/Leslie Alexander) of a forthcoming volume, ‘We Shall Independent Be:’ African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the U.S., with the University Press of Colorado to be released in early 2008. His scholarly work and activism critically engages with issues of heritage preservation, gender, and nationalism at the intersections of race and the built environment in the Global South.

“In the Footsteps of the Old Heads: Saraka and Nation in the Caribbean”

This project is an exploration of African survivals and re-creations in the Caribbean island of Grenada. Conceptualized as a multi-media project, the project aims to produce a video-recording of aspects of a harvest celebration known as the saraka, and, through research and interviews, to trace the origins of the saraka and its observation by those who feel a duty to continue it because they have inherited it from their ancestors, those whom they refer to as the “old heads”. The project aims to use current cellphone technology to disseminate information regarding various elements of the saraka as one component of its interface.

MERLE COLLINS, MITH Fellow 2006-07, teaches Caribbean Literature in the English Department. She has been published in several anthologies of both poetry and fiction. Her short story, “Shadowboxing”, was published in the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad (Seal Press, 2005). Her publications include two novels, Angel (London: The Women’s Press, 1987; Seattle: Seal Press, 1988) and The Colour of Forgetting (London: Virago Books, 1995), three poetry collections, Because the Dawn Breaks(London: Karia Press, 1985), Rotten Pomerack (London: Virago Books, 1990) and Lady in a Boat (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2003). She has also published a short story collection, Rain Darling (London: The Women’s Press, 1990). Her current project as a MITH Fellow, “In the Footsteps of the Old Heads: Saraka and Nation in the Caribbean” continues a theme started for a 1995 program researched for the BBC and entitled, “From Africa to the Caribbean: A Journey of the Oral Tradition”. Merle Collins won a Guggenheim Fellowship for the 2003-2004 academic year.

Coming up @MITH, April 24: Please join us at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab for MITH project collaborator Stan Ruecker (University of Alberta), “The Research Potential of Transferability,” 12:30, 2460 A.V. Williams Bldg.

View MITH’s complete Spring Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2007.pdf

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).