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 [...]
Popular understanding of the Internet’s physical reality has changed dramatically in the past half-decade, with consequences for privacy and security. Drawing on the research in his book, “Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet,” journalist and author Andrew Blum will argue for a continued emphasis on the Internet's real-world geography.
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 [...]
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 [...]
This screening features Brown University's Andy van Dam and his 1974 documentary about an NEH-funded project to "support an experimental program to teach a college-level English poetry course, utilizing a new form of computer based 'manuscript,' called a hypertext." The screening is followed by a panel discussion and Q&A, moderated by MITH's Matt Kirschenbaum.
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 [...]
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 [...]
The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies was an online, not-for-profit organization whose purpose was to research, teach, support, and create diverse and dynamic elements of cyberculture. Collaborative in nature, RCCS sought to support ongoing conversations about the emerging field, to foster a community of students, teachers, scholars, explorers, and builders of cyberculture, and to showcase various models, works-in-progress, and on-line projects. As of 2002, the site contained a collection of scholarly resources, including university-level courses in cyberculture, events and conferences, an extensive annotated bibliography, and two full-length book reviews each month. RCCS was originally founded by David Silver in 1996 at UMD, and became part of a MITH Networked Associate Fellowship awarded to Silver in 2000-2001.
Flare Productions is a not-for-profit filmmaking organization. Professor John Fuegi (with partner Jo Francis), completed a 2001 MITH Faculty Fellowship for which they produced a film as part of the Women of Power series of films, a series of thirteen films which showcase the accomplishments of women over the last 150 years. They completed one film in the series, entitled They Dreamed Tomorrow, chronicling the contributions of Ada, Countess Lovelace (1815-1852), Lord Byron’s daughter, and Charles Babbage (1791-1871) to the early history of computing. Fuegi and Francis also produced a website and DVD to complement the film.
MITH's Vintage Computers is a website devoted to MITH's sizable (and growing) collection of vintage computers, retro software, and other artifacts from the early era of personal computing. The centerpiece of the site is a considered metadata and modeling approach to computing hardware, whereby individual components of the vintage machines are documented, contextualized within their relation to the system as a whole, and expressed using Dublin Core. The site gathers links to other recent MITH projects in born-digital cultural heritage, and serves as a clearing house for our expanding portfolio in this area. It also includes newly written non-specialist’s documentation for the FC5025 Floppy Disk Controller, a device used to retrieve data off of obsolescent media formats.