At MITH, Raffaele Viglianti will focus on modeling the textual data in TEI format and produce software to export the project data into a number of formats.

The post OpenITI AOCP: The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The goal of the project is to create a comprehensive online collection of early educational public radio content from the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB). The forerunner of CPB and its arms, NPR and PBS, the NAEB served as the primary organizer, developer, and distributor for noncommercial broadcast production and analysis between 1925 and 1981. These broadcasts, mostly stemming from university and public school-run radio stations, provide an in-depth look at the engagements and events of American history, as they were broadcast to and received by the general public in the twentieth century. According to the project’s Lead Advisor, Josh Shepperd of Catholic University and Director of the Radio Preservation Task Force:

“The National Association of Educational Broadcasters recordings provide valuable context into cultural, political, and less-studied, educational discourses going back to the New Deal, and associated documents help media scholars to trace the origin of script development, audience research, and genres that we associate with both public media and cable television—science, travel, food, history, and journalism programming.”

The NAEB systematically preserved its history across over a hundred boxes of documents and 5,000 reels of tape, but the organization split its archive, depositing its papers in Wisconsin and the recordings in Maryland. Archival audiovisual media has been collected and maintained separately from other kinds of (primarily textual) archival sources, and these ‘split’ collections mean that researchers must often discover and manually reunite audiovisual collections and their related materials if they want to understand a broadcast not just as an audiovisual object, but as a medium that relays information within a set of historical contexts (time, place, related events, etc.). Unlocking the Airwaves will reunite the split NAEB collections, develop an open and comprehensive web portal for them, and tell the story of early educational and public broadcasting.

By coordinating the expertise of archivists, humanities researchers, and digital humanists, Unlocking the Airwaves will deliver enhanced access to important, mostly hidden, archival audiovisual materials by linking split hybrid paper/audiovisual collections together, and providing a search engine for the linked collections, enabling users to simultaneously search both the documents and sounds of the NAEB. The resulting resource will finally realize the potential of the collections of the NAEB for exploration and study by educators, scholars, journalists, documentarians, genealogists, and the broader public.

The post Unlocking the Airwaves appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The post Umbra Search and the Future of Black Digital Platforms Pre-Conference appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Music encoding is a critical component of the emerging fields of digital musicology, digital editions, symbolic music information retrieval, and others. At the centre of these fields, the Music Encoding Conference has emerged as an important cross-disciplinary venue for theorists, musicologists, librarians, and technologists to meet and discuss new advances in their fields.

The post Music Encoding Conference appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Call for Papers (due March 6, 2017)  CFP Closed

The post Textual Embodiments: 2017 Society for Textual Scholarship Conference appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Lakeland is an historic African American community established in 1890 and located in College Park, MD, adjacent to the University of Maryland campus. Lakeland thrived until its self-contained uniqueness was undermined by social change and a devastating urban renewal program which used eminent domain to “take” two thirds of Lakeland’s territory and relocate roughly sixty-five households elsewhere in Prince George’s County. Promised improved housing for Lakelanders never materialized, and the housing eventually built was not made available to displaced residents.

In 2009 the Department of American Studies began a collaboration with the Lakeland Community Heritage Project, establishing an ongoing community-engaged project whose primary achievement is creation of The Lakeland Digital Archive. The partnership provides LCHP – an all-volunteer historical society – with student and faculty labor to help document and archive Lakeland’s history, while training students in an ethical and equitable practice of collaborative heritage research wherein Lakelanders produce historical knowledge using their own voices. The Archive contains photographs, land records, census data, newspaper clippings, maps, dozens of oral history sound files, archival records, and video recordings.

MITH is directing a multiple-year effort to redesign the archive website in collaboration with members of the Lakeland community, and to explore other platforms for making Lakeland’s heritage accessible to different populations: current and former Lakelanders, community elders, community young people, residents of Prince George’s County, MD, and scholars interested in the history of African American communities and urban renewal and its ongoing consequences.

The post Lakeland Community Heritage Project Digital Archive appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Partnering with University of Maryland Libraries, MITH hosted a roundtable to illuminate threats as well as ethical questions and best practices for working with endangered cultural heritage data. A hands-on workshop followed the panel, highlighting specific tools and approaches for preserving data.

The post Endangered Data Week appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

To commemorate the bicentennial of the novel and also to harness its power to generate and inspire communities of readers, the Keats-Shelley Association of America in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities is launching “Frankenreads”: a “Bloomsday”-style, national/international public reading of Frankenstein on October 31, 2018. We hope to:

• engage an international community, including but not limited to North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific in related activities centering on the novel;
• to make this community visible globally as a community through shared branding and social media;
• to livestream a public reading of Frankenstein to be held at NEH headquarters for those around the world who are unable to attend one in person;
• to facilitate bringing regional experts of the novel to such events as lectures, discussions, and film showings held at local libraries and community centers;
• to hold in the days leading up to Frankenreads an international “Week of Frankenstein,” during which students, teachers, and the public could hold Frankenstein related events and contribute their thoughts, images, and short videos about Frankenstein to a collective blog.

We invite you to discover already planned events near you, or to join our growing list of partners by proposing your own!

The post Frankenreads appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The post Using the Digital to Engage Archival Radio Collections: A Panel and Workshop appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The fact is that nearly all printed books now begin—and for many practical purposes end—their lifecycles as digital files that are produced and managed by designers, editors, publishers, packagers, and printers. The printed book that we hold in our hands is just one of the outputs that can be derived from these digital assets, which are also used to produce ebooks and Web-ready texts. In particular, the role of Adobe InDesign and other software tools is not well understood outside of the industry. And yet, this is where the book stops being a manuscript and starts becoming a book, by way of its transformation into a prescribed set of digital assets which in addition to the text may include stylesheets, fonts, metadata, images, and other design elements.

Led by principal investigator Matthew Kirschenbaum, this project represents the first organized attempt to put ambassadors from the scholarly communities traditionally invested in safeguarding and studying the material history of bookmaking into contact and conversation with thought leaders and influencers from the contemporary publishing world. The centerpiece of the project will be a convening to bring those figures together in New York City in early 2018;  Kirschenbaum’s efforts will also be supported by site visits to observe the bookmaking process as it unfolds across different settings, and interviews with industry experts. Findings for scholars, archivists, and publishers will be presented in a white paper made publicly available in late 2018.

Inquiries about Books.Files may be sent to Matthew Kirschenbaum.

The post Books.Files: Assessing Digital Assets in the Book Industry for Scholarly Use appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.