A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, October 10, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135
“Social Software, or Why Would I Want to Consult an Encyclopedia that Would Have Me as a Contributor?”
by DANIEL PITTI
In the last four years, broad, collaborative authoring (for example, Wikipedia), collection building (for example, September 11 Digital Archive and Hurricane Digital Memory Bank) and organization of information (for example, folksonomies) have emerged as forms of social computing. Advocates champion the democratic nature of the collaboration. Critics decry the lack of provenance and thus trustworthiness of the information gathered in this way. Clearly, though, the technology and techniques can support both democratic collaboration and the collaboration of experts. Such technology and techniques offer an opportunity to advance the application of computing to teaching and research beyond the margins.
Daniel Pitti is Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. Before coming to IATH in 1997, Pitti was Librarian for Advanced Technologies Projects at the University of California at Berkeley Library. Since 1993, Pitti has been the chief technical architect of Encoded Archival Description (EAD), an international standard for encoding library and archival finding based on XML. Pitti has a BA in religious studies from UC Davis, MA and C.Phil. in history of religions from UCLA, and an MLIS from UC Berkeley.
Coming up @MITH Oct. 17: SUSAN SCHREIBMAN (University Libraries), “Beautiful Untrue Things: The Digital Dilemma.” View the complete Fall 2006 schedule for Digital Dialogues here: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2006.pdfFree and open to the public.
Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-5896).