History (US) – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities https://mith.umd.edu Thu, 08 Oct 2020 19:59:18 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.1 MITH Receives NEH Grant for “Unlocking the Airwaves” https://mith.umd.edu/mith-receives-neh-grant-for-unlocking-the-airwaves-revitalizing-an-early-public-and-educational-radio-collection/ Thu, 10 May 2018 15:17:56 +0000 http://mith.umd.edu/?p=19590 MITH is pleased to announce an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities 2017 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program for Unlocking the Airwaves: Revitalizing an Early Public and Educational Radio Collection. Unlocking the Airwaves, directed by Stephanie Sapienza with Co-PI Eric Hoyt, is a multi-institutional collaboration between MITH, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the [...]

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MITH is pleased to announce an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities 2017 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program for Unlocking the Airwaves: Revitalizing an Early Public and Educational Radio Collection. Unlocking the Airwaves, directed by Stephanie Sapienza with Co-PI Eric Hoyt, is a multi-institutional collaboration between MITH, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Wisconsin Historical Society, University Libraries at the University of Maryland, with collaborative support from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting at WGBH/Library of Congress, and the Radio Preservation Task Force.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency created in 1965. It is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. The Endowment awards grants to top-rated proposals examined by panels of independent, external reviewers.These grants are highly competitive and involve a rigorous peer-review process to ensure that the projects represent the highest level of humanities quality and public engagement.

The $217,000 grant will fund the creation of 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.

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Jim Casey and Sarah Patterson Digital Dialogue https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd-fall-2016-jim-casey-sarah-patterson/ Wed, 02 Nov 2016 13:30:47 +0000 http://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=17790 Staking a claim in collaborative models of digital archiving, exhibition and geo-spatial visualization, Sarah Patterson and Jim Casey will introduce questions, concepts and outcomes central to the Colored Conventions Project's online restoration of the Colored Conventions Movement, 1830-1900. Working with literature and data connected to this understudied phenomenon in Black political organizing, Patterson and [...]

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Staking a claim in collaborative models of digital archiving, exhibition and geo-spatial visualization, Sarah Patterson and Jim Casey will introduce questions, concepts and outcomes central to the Colored Conventions Project’s online restoration of the Colored Conventions Movement, 1830-1900. Working with literature and data connected to this understudied phenomenon in Black political organizing, Patterson and Casey will discuss the ways CCP’s interdisciplinary team produces narrative-centric exhibits and interactive visualizations for multiple learning communities. This presentation will especially chart CCP’s interest in tackling key questions on its journey to creating DH content for those interested in social justice pedagogies and collaborative knowledge production.

Questions of focus will include: How do we better grasp women’s instrumentality through mapping technologies that magnify their activities within historical spaces connected to the movement? How do social network analyses contribute to our understanding of Black convention leadership? In what ways do concepts of power and authority impact computing and technology-selection as the project emerges within a broader landscape of Black histo-digital studies? We seek to highlight DH praxis and pedagogies to enhance what scholarly and public audiences know about the debates, people, places and texts related to the seven-decades-long campaign for Black rights.

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

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Ravon Ruffin Digital Dialogue https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd-fall-2016-ravon-ruffin/ Wed, 19 Oct 2016 13:30:31 +0000 http://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=17793 Could a Spotify playlist be considered an archive? How do hashtags challenge our finding aids of certain communities? Social and digital media tools and platforms have increasingly been utilized to advance community-centered approaches to archives, collections, and interpretation. These methods decolonize the archival practice and assert the presence of marginalized communities. This challenge comes [...]

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Could a Spotify playlist be considered an archive? How do hashtags challenge our finding aids of certain communities? Social and digital media tools and platforms have increasingly been utilized to advance community-centered approaches to archives, collections, and interpretation. These methods decolonize the archival practice and assert the presence of marginalized communities. This challenge comes as critiques such as #archivessowhite and #museumsrespondtoferguson have been pushed by professionals of color from within the field. This talk is a theoretical and practical exploration of what I call ‘radical archives’ to expand the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, and identity. How do we as GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) professionals, educators, and scholars learn from this engagement toward greater intersectionality in our interpretations? How do these radical archives bridge GLAM institutions? These social and digital media tools and platforms are utilized to interact with the archive that are not legible to the institution and confront perceptions of cultural fluency.

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

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Kim Gallon Digital Dialogue https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd-spring-2016-kim-gallon/ Thu, 18 Feb 2016 01:30:42 +0000 http://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=16588 In the recent past, black people have created and utilized a variety of digital spaces and media to reconfigure the terms and terrain of debates and discussions on what it means to be human. How do we as scholars, educators, librarians and archivists use specific cases and experiences to teach habits of critical thought and [...]

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In the recent past, black people have created and utilized a variety of digital spaces and media to reconfigure the terms and terrain of debates and discussions on what it means to be human. How do we as scholars, educators, librarians and archivists use specific cases and experiences to teach habits of critical thought and practice about the intersections between race and technology? This talk is at once a theoretical and practical reflection on an Africana/Black Studies-centered approach to the digital humanities in and outside the classroom. It, then, is a forum for considering the black digital humanities as the use of digital tools and platforms to teach and produce scholarship about the complex histories, societies, and cultures of people of African descent in the United States, Africa and the larger Diaspora. However, I hope to also think about the black digital humanities as concerned with how theories of race and blackness come to bear on and transform technological activity and processes, affording us opportunities to ask new and different questions about humanity.

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Thomas Haigh and Mark Priestley Digital Dialogue https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd-spring-2016-haigh-priestley/ Tue, 09 Feb 2016 01:30:38 +0000 http://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=16584 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 [...]

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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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Elissa Frankle Digital Dialogue https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd-spring-2016-elissa-frankle/ Thu, 21 Jan 2016 09:30:02 +0000 http://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=16575 In 2013, Ms. Frankle gave her first Digital Dialogue, "Making History with the Masses: Citizen History and Radical Trust in Museums." Three years later, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has taken the theory of citizen history into practice with the launch of a full-scale citizen history project, History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust. [...]

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In 2013, Ms. Frankle gave her first Digital Dialogue, “Making History with the Masses: Citizen History and Radical Trust in Museums.” Three years later, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has taken the theory of citizen history into practice with the launch of a full-scale citizen history project, History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust. During that time, the Museum undertook a learning journey to test assumptions about community engagement, crowdsourcing, and digital development. “Making History with the Masses Revisited” reviews the theory and practice of citizen history as updated for 2016, and outlines a path forward for citizen history as a methodology in public history.

Citizen history is, as ever, a contract and a dialogue, where the participant is more than a user or contributor and is instead elevated to a full partner in the process of discovery. This time, though, the process of learning from participants begins before they even open the project site. By listening to and learning from communities from the first steps of a citizen history project, institutions can better serve not only the needs of the project or their participants, but the larger body of historical inquiry and their institutions’ larger goals of engagement and relevance. This talk will also touch on the nuts and bolts of creating a citizen history project: who needs to be in the room where it happens? What does success look like? And how do you ensure the waltz of marketing, digital development, historical inquiry, and participant engagement is in time from the first beat to the last chord?

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including links to resources and projects that Frankle referenced during her talk.

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Mauricio Giraldo Digital Dialogue https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd_spring-2015-mauricio-giraldo/ Mon, 23 Feb 2015 13:00:19 +0000 http://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=13679 I'm currently an interaction designer at NYPL Labs, The New York Public Library’s digital innovation unit. One of our latest projects is Building Inspector, a tool to extract data from historic insurance atlases through a combination of computational (vectorization, computer vision, alpha shapes) and human (crowdsourcing, game design concepts) processes. This talk will provide an insight [...]

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I’m currently an interaction designer at NYPL Labs, The New York Public Library’s digital innovation unit. One of our latest projects is Building Inspector, a tool to extract data from historic insurance atlases through a combination of computational (vectorization, computer vision, alpha shapes) and human (crowdsourcing, game design concepts) processes. This talk will provide an insight into the Building Inspector and other projects developed by NYPL Labs, with an emphasis on design and HCI-related challenges. For instance: how does one design tools that anyone can use regardless of prior knowledge, to validate computer-generated geographic data or to create stereographic images from 100-year-old photographs?

 

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The Harlem Renaissance in Second Life https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/the-harlem-renaissance-in-second-life/ Tue, 29 Sep 2009 04:00:58 +0000 http://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=4141 This talk will address various aspects of teaching in Second Life. Drawing on their two-year experience co-teaching courses on the Harlem Renaissance that have brought together students from the University of Maryland, the University of Central Missouri, and the Sorbonne, Bryan Carter and Zita Nunes will discuss the pedagogical opportunities afforded "in-world."

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This talk will address various aspects of teaching in Second Life. Drawing on their two-year experience co-teaching courses on the Harlem Renaissance that have brought together students from the University of Maryland, the University of Central Missouri, and the Sorbonne, Bryan Carter and Zita Nunes will discuss the pedagogical opportunities afforded “in-world.”

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Early Cinema as New Media https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/early-cinema-as-new-media/ Tue, 22 Apr 2008 04:00:45 +0000 http://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=4190 In this talk I will discuss early cinema as new media in the context of my recent book, Body Shots: Cinema's Incarnations, 1893-1904 (University of California Press, 2007). Body Shots puts the human body at the center of cinema's first decade of emergence, arguing for the complexity, richness, and sophistication of these moving corporeal representations [...]

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In this talk I will discuss early cinema as new media in the context of my recent book, Body Shots: Cinema’s Incarnations, 1893-1904 (University of California Press, 2007). Body Shots puts the human body at the center of cinema’s first decade of emergence, arguing for the complexity, richness, and sophistication of these moving corporeal representations as both formal objects and culturally resonant ones. Rather than treat the body as primarily marking identity—gendered, racial, national—or invoke it to make claims about early cinema’s sensational attractions in relation to modernity (two common approaches to the subject), I begin by focusing on films that reveal striking anxieties and preoccupations about persons on public display, both exceptional figures, such as 1896 presidential candidate William McKinley, as well as ordinary people self-consciously caught by the movie camera in their daily routines. The book closes with a meditation on early cinema and death (when the body stops moving), with implications for new media and technology studies more generally.

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Architecting Cultural Spaces: Case Studies of Virtual Representation in the Humanities https://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/architecting-cultural-spaces-case-studies-of-virtual-representation-in-the-humanities/ Tue, 25 Sep 2007 04:00:37 +0000 http://mith.umd.edu/?post_type=mith_dialogue&p=4225 This presentation addresses the evolution of the technologies of virtual representation in the cultural milieu. Using project case studies from a decade of experience in this field, the presentation brings to the fore the ways in which these technologies both enforce and challenge traditional ideas of what a museum is or should be. The paper [...]

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This presentation addresses the evolution of the technologies of virtual representation in the cultural milieu. Using project case studies from a decade of experience in this field, the presentation brings to the fore the ways in which these technologies both enforce and challenge traditional ideas of what a museum is or should be. The paper examines the evolution of simple virtual representation to modeled reconstruction and deconstruction and thence to virtual replacement of artifacts in situ at their point of creation or discovery. The presentation concludes with a look forward to the concept of massively multi-user virtual community spaces that permit a participatory experience of virtual cultural heritage.

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