History of Computing – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

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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Matthew Kirschenbaum Digital Dialogue (and book launch)

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 09:30:31 +0000

This Digital Dialogue is also a launch event for Matthew Kirschenbaum’s new book Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, sponsored by the English department’s Center for Literary and Comparative Studies. Neil Fraistat will be on hand to host, and discuss the book with Matt. Copies will be available!

About the Book:

The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that littered the floor of Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine. During the period of the pivotal growth and widespread adoption of word processing as a writing technology, some authors embraced it as a marvel while others decried it as the death of literature. The product of years of archival research and numerous interviews conducted by the author, Track Changes is the first literary history of word processing.

Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how the interests and ideals of creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the first adopters? What kind of anxieties did they share? Was word processing perceived as just a better typewriter or something more? How did it change our understanding of writing?

Track Changes balances the stories of individual writers with a consideration of how the seemingly ineffable act of writing is always grounded in particular instruments and media, from quills to keyboards. Along the way, we discover the candidates for the first novel written on a word processor, explore the surprisingly varied reasons why writers of both popular and serious literature adopted the technology, trace the spread of new metaphors and ideas from word processing in fiction and poetry, and consider the fate of literary scholarship and memory in an era when the final remnants of authorship may consist of folders on a hard drive or documents in the cloud.

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Thomas Haigh and Mark Priestley Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 01:30:38 +0000

Books and shows about the history of information technology have usually focused on great inventors and technical breakthroughs, from Charles Babbage and Alan Turing to Steve Jobs and the World Wide Web. Computer operations work has been written out of the story, but without it no computer would be useful. Information historians Thomas Haigh and Mark Priestley are writing it back in. This talk focused on ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic computer, based on research for their book ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer, published by MIT Press in January, 2016. They will explain that the women now celebrated as the “first computer programmers” were actually hired as computer operators and worked hands-on with the machine around the clock. Then they will look at business data processing work from the 1950s onward, exploring the growth of operations and facilities work during the mainframe era. Concluding comments will relate this historical material to the human work and physical infrastructure today vanishing from public view into the “cloud.”

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

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Elizabeth Losh Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 13:00:28 +0000

The study of computational media still has far to go when it comes to contradicting the solo white male inventor myths that are often reified in mainstream culture, although recent work in media archaeology that emphasizes the manual labor of participants with the apparatus is changing the narrative about the rise of software culture. It is perhaps useful to make comparisons to film studies, where scholarship about the role of labor, organizational communication, institutional rhetoric, domestic politics, systems of credit, and “below the line” production activities has long challenged the model of the lone auteur. Just as women were critical actors in the Hollywood saga in intensely collaborative roles such as casting and editing, pioneering work in computer graphics, virtual reality, interactive entertainment, and multimedia publishing reflected a collective production culture and its associated conflicts. Media studies could still do much more to recover social histories currently stored in informal archives, often in obsolete file formats, to support feminist scholarship, as part of the larger theoretical project of acknowledging the material, embodied, affective, situated, and labor-intensive character of technology. This talk focuses specifically on manual labor in the supply chain of digital media and how many hands don’t make light work.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue (now migrated to Sutori), including links to resources and projects that Losh referenced during her talk.

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The Internet Archive and the Digital Humanities

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 05:00:25 +0000

The Internet Archive was founded eleven years ago by Brewster Kahle to build the world’s first ‘Internet Library.’ Since 1996, the Archive has been collecting bi-monthly snapshots of the World Wide Web–the entire Web–resulting in a cumulative collection of approximately 100 billion Web pages. This cumulative historical record can be browsed and viewed using the Wayback Machine, an access interface developed by the Internet Archive (www.archive.org.) The Archive has since expanded its activities to include book scanning, audio collections, video and still image collections and Open Education Resources (videotaped lectures for entire college-level courses and the supporting materials.) These collections comprise over two petabytes of data, stored in the Archive’s Digital Repository in San Francisco. The Internet Archive is active in the open-source software community and has developed several widely used tools for web harvesting, search, and management of clustered storage environments. The Archive is dedicated to open source principles; accordingly all software used and developed by the Internet Archive is open source and open access. As an active technology partner in the academic, library and research communities, the Archive has become both a storage partner and content source for educators and researchers. Its role as a unifier of open access content sources is growing through collaborative projects in book scanning and access, large collections of imagery and other content formats, as well as its roles as administrator of the Open Content Alliance (www.opencontentalliance.org) and as a co-founder of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (www.iipc.org.)

The Archive is engaging in several projects that can directly serve educators and researchers in the Digital Humanities community. In this talk, LINDA FRUEH will describe the collections, projects and capabilities of the Internet Archive, and hopes to generate lively discussion in how the Archive can work to better support the conduct of Digital Humanities studies.

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Agora.Techno.Phobia.Philia: Gender (and other messy matters), Knowledge Building, and Digital Media

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 04:00:03 +0000

“The degree to which American society has embraced and absorbed computer technologies is astonishing. The degree to which the changes provoked by computers leave prevailing inequalities is troubling.” –Special Issue, “From Hard Drive to Software: Gender, Computers, and Difference,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (August 1990–yes, you read the date correctly).

In the wake of the sixties, the humanities in general and their standings in particular had suffered, according to some, from being feminized by the messy considerations of gender, race, sexuality, class. For some, humanities computing and digital humanities seemed to offer a space free from all this messiness and a return to “objective” questions of representation. In 2007, asking some obvious, basic questions seems more than in order: Are digital humanities and new media important for feminist cultural, social, and intellectual work? Concomitantly, can feminism enhance and improve the world and work of computer science, of humanities computing, of digital humanities? Questions basic to feminist critical inquiry are certainly worth asking of our digital work: How do items of knowledge, organizations, working groups come into being? Who made them? For what purposes? Whose work is visible, what is happening when only certain actors and associated achievements come into public view? What happens when social order is assumed to be an objective feature of social life (i.e., uninformed by ethnomethodology)? What counts as innovation: why are tools valorized and whose work in their development and in their application is recognized? These and other questions posed by the group will be examined in this collaborative exchange.

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From ARPANET to the Internet: How a Military Project Became a World-Wide Cultural Phenomenon, 1970-1995

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 04:00:20 +0000

The emergence of a commercialized Internet is a very recent phenomenon. Historians and other scholars have examined its early history, especially its origins in the military-sponsored project ARPANET, named after the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. At the other end of the scale, scholars, business journalists, and others have examined the rise and fall of the “dot.com” phenomenon, with studies of companies including Amazon, AOL, and Google. What is missing is a study of the transition between the two: how a network funded by taxpayers, and intended for a restricted set of users for restricted purposes, evolved into a worldwide cultural phenomenon, open to all, with almost no restrictions on its use for commercial purposes.

This paper is based on two forthcoming books by the author: one an analysis of the commercialization of the Internet, and the other on the role of northern Virginia as a locus of Internet management and governance.

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Playing with Worlds: Narrative, Fiction, and the Cultural Reception of Videogames

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 05:00:34 +0000

When even the most perceptive scholars based in traditional, typographic forms of literacy turn their attention to videogames, the results can be disconcerting. Two of the best in this line, Janet Murray and James P. Gee, both falter notably when they ask when, if, or how videogames can have cultural effects equivalent to literature. These moments do not represent failure so much as catastrophe, a collapse of interpretive method that may provide indications for more viable approaches. I suggest the key to a new agenda lies in the distinction of narrative, a main concern for my generation and our elders, from the sort of fiction Jesper Juul embraces in his theory of games: a form whose clearest illustration is not story or novel, but rather tableau. As Murray herself says: “The more we see life in terms of systems, the more we need a system-modeling medium to represent it.” But systematic or procedural systems cannot simply be interpreted or read as if they were conventionally inscribed texts. As Espen Aarseth argues, they must be played; and I would argue further that critics must also engage in the kind of fictive play from which games emerge. I suggest it is no accident that many of the most interesting new critics of the videogame, figures like Ian Bogost and Mary Flanagan, are active game developers, and argue more generally that videogames and other forms of cybertext require a more engaged, creative commitment from their critics.

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