Educational Technology – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Laurie Allen Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 18:55:18 +0000

In the fall of 2017, Philadelphia was the site of 20 temporary monuments created by local and international artists across 10 public parks as part of a citywide art and history project curated by Paul Farber and Ken Lum, and produced in partnership with Mural Arts Philadelphia. These included an afro pick embedded on the Municipal Services Plaza, a performance in a public park, a mirrored box surrounding an old monument such that it simultaneously disappeared into its surroundings and reflected the people in the park and many others. In each of 10 public squares and parks, a small, temporary lab was staffed at least 4 days a week to invite Philadelphians and visitors to reflect on our city’s monuments. They were handed a clipboard and asked to engage with the central guiding question of Monument Lab: What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia? Nearly 5000 people offered proposals in answer to that question, and each of their answers has been transcribed, analyzed, including a drawing or description, proposers’ home zip codes, proposers’ ages, and the place in the city where they’d like to see their imagined monuments. This dataset, comprising an imagined version of the city’s monumental landscape will be focus of a conversation about the intersections between the stories that are told in our public monuments and in our data, and the individual stories that are lost and hidden.

See below for a Sutori recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Allen during her talk.

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Alexandrina Agloro Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 07 Nov 2017 17:00:25 +0000

How can interactive media supplement and support justice-related social movements? Alexandrina Agloro, media artist and assistant professor, will discuss the landscape of design and digital humanities projects geared toward social change, and share some of her current projects. Each of these projects incorporate pieces of reimagining archives, culturally relevant education, game development, and tools for reproductive justice. These projects were developed through a participatory design methodology and model how we think about organizing and implementing activism. The second part of this talk will turn to community-engaged game development and discuss two games, The Resisters, an alternate reality game about social movement history, and Vukuzenzele, a videogame about reblocking informal settlements in South Africa. These games are examples of the opportunities and challenges in applied game design and how game mechanics can be utilized as instruments for engagement and action.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Agloro during her talk.

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Recap: MITH’s April events on Humanities and Computing Collaborations with Andy van Dam

MITH — Thu, 12 May 2016 20:52:58 +0000

This spring, MITH worked with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) to bring renowned technology scholar Andy van Dam to campus for two successful events.

The first, on Monday April 25th, was a screening of a recently-unearthed 1974 documentary made at the end of an NEH-funded grant project van Dam and his team completed to use hypertext to aid in the teaching of poetry. The documentary was discovered after Brett Bobley and Ann Sneesby-Koch from the NEH completed a large-scale project to document all of NEH’s funding history. During that project they uncovered a punch card with details on the grant, which included a reference to a documentary film. Bobley contacted van Dam to enquire about the film, which was recovered and digitally transferred. MITH volunteered to coordinate a panel discussion and screening with van Dam, NEH staff, and UMD faculty members with relevant subject expertise.

MITH Director Neil Fraistat welcomes a packed crowd at the Monday April 25th panel and screening

The film is now available on the Internet Archive for viewing here.

A recording of the panel discussion and screening is available on our website here.

A second event was held the following Tuesday, April 26, and was cosponsored by the HCIL. In this talk, van Dam discussed modern day collaborations between computing and the humanities in terms of new and old hypermedia projects over the course of five decades. Van Dam’s talk was preceded by a warm welcome by longtime scholarly collaborator and UMD Computer Science professor Ben Shneiderman, and was followed by a lively Q&A session.

Ben Shneiderman introduces van Dam at the April 26th Digital Dialogue

A recording of Andy’s talk is available here.

Lastly, Jennifer Howard interviewed van Dam after his talk, and published a fantastic piece on his work and the 1974 grant project in Humanities Magazine. Click here to access the piece.

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Andy Van Dam Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 20:54:22 +0000

Since 1967, when my students and I, collaborating with Theodor Nelson, built the Hypertext Editing System on an IBM /360 mainframe, I’ve been involved with building a succession of hypermedia systems primarily but not exclusively for the humanities. I will begin this talk with a brief description of the history of this work at Brown, including the NEH-sponsored project to create an on-line scholarly community for a poetry course in 1976, and the ways in which a recent system, Touch Art Gallery, is being used by courses at Brown, the Nobel Foundation and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Then I will shift to the main focus, a live demo of an early version of the latest multi-format hypermedia system my group is building to support information gathering, sense-making (including organizing, annotating, relationship-building through linking, grouping and visualizations), and ultimately presenting multimedia information. We are especially interested in supporting small workgroup collaboration and the use of pen- and touch-computing on tablets and large interactive whiteboards.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Van Dam during his talk.

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The Open Source Professor: Teaching, Research, and Transparency

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:00:46 +0000

What happens when the scholarship of teaching meets Web 2.0? Professor Sample argues the ideal result is the open source professor, a teacher and scholar who applies the tenets of the open source software community to his or her own professional life. This means sharing, conversation, collaboration, and reflection at every step in the teaching and research process, not just with the final product. Technology plays a key role in making open source professing possible, and Professor Sample will discuss the philosophical and practical implications of such a transparent approach to pedagogy and scholarship, as well as possible pitfalls for untenured faculty.

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Identifying Web 2.0: Remixing Institutional Identities

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 04:00:18 +0000

Established e-portfolio and CMS systems such as Blackboard and WebCT are based on storing, commenting on, and chatting about documents. They are closed to integration with other administrative, scholarly, and social networking systems on the web. These systems lack the ability to develop identities in relation to various systems, texts, and institutions. As new systems such as Zotero (GMU) and Digital Notebook (Georgetown) are being developed to take advantage of Web 2.0 capabilities such as citing, tagging, and cross referencing content across systems, the issue of identity is still in flux. On the one hand, Gregory Ulmer’s work provides the theoretical grounds and pedagogical model for seeing identity formation as the basis of research. On the other hand, Hardt and Negri recognize that the modernist institutions that produce identities are breaking down. The newer CMS systems are centered on the production of a university or scholarly identity. This paper will examine the possibility of accepting the personal and subcultural identities that will inevitably emerge with the development of Web 2.0 research tools.

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Zotero and the Promise of Social Computing in Academia

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 04:00:02 +0000

The Library of Congress contains over a million dissertations. Each of these works represents an average of four years of work by a specialist who has diligently and intelligently scanned, sorted, read, categorized, assessed, and annotated hundreds or thousands of primary and secondary sources. The staggering scale of this work–literally billions of person-hours in dissertation work alone, not to mention the research that went into the millions of other books those dissertations share shelf space with–should be matched by the regret academia should feel since almost all of this research is buried in filing cabinets or boxes or worse: soon-to-be obsolete digital media such as a floppy disk or the tacit knowledge of a researcher’s mind. Often the most we can expect to see from all of this work, aside from the book or article it informed, is the bibliography that is buried at the end of the printed text.

But what if we could use digital methods to recapture that enormous amount of scholarly work, the 90% of research that, like an iceberg, is hidden beneath the 10% of the final product? The Zotero project (which I co-direct) has released software that allows users to build, tag, and annotate their own research collections, with a high level of integration with online texts and databases; the next phase of the project will add a server through which users and groups can exchange, aggregate, and recommend digital texts and resources. If humanities researchers–professors, students, and others–widely adopted such digital tools, many parts of the scholarly process could be recaptured, and, more important, networked together. See www.zotero.org for more downloads and more information.

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Applying Web 2.0 Tools to Instruction: Collaborative Website Development with Wikis and Managing Information Overload with RSS Feeds

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 05:00:03 +0000

Web 2.0 is a phrase that refers to a generation of Web-based tools that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. Web 2.0 applications tend to be centered around the user by making the experience easy, allowing for flexibility and providing opportunities for the user to customize their access to information. The collaborative nature and ease of use of many of Web 2.0 tools have been embraced by faculty in the College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU).

This session will introduce the basics of wiki software and share examples of its pedagogical applications. In addition, applications integrating RSS feeds to organize and share content such as audio, text and bookmarks will be introduced. These technologies have satisfied important objectives for ARHU faculty. Further discussion through this Digitial Dialogue will provide the opportunity to identify additional uses and contexts for these tools.

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