The documentary was a project of 2003-04 MITH Fellow Regina Harrison. It depicts miners in Potosi, Bolivia, who extract silver, zinc, and lead from the mountain in the same precarious conditions as their ancestors did five centuries ago. Tourist agencies and transnational mining companies promise to bring in additional revenue for the miners, but it is apparent that the ‘rich’ mountain is dying.
Silvia Mejia was a Clara and Robert Vambery Distinguished Graduate Fellow and MITH Graduate Fellow during academic years 2004-05 and 2005-06. Working from within the Comparative Literature program with John Fuegi, and with MITH Director Martha Nell Smith, Mejia focused on three different narrations of migration from Ecuador to the United States, Spain and Italy. The resulting documentary video and its study guide explored how new technologies such as the Internet, satellite communications, email, videoconferences, and cell phones have changed the experience of displacement.
Videogame preservation has made great strides in the last four years, from having the Art of Video Games on display at the Smithsonian Museum of [...]
This talk will analyze reading and writing practices that are interactive, social, live, sited, and algorithmically produced. With examples ranging from installations, performances, interactive text [...]
I had originally planned to use this post to log my adventures in desoldering the CPU from the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), but, alas, the [...]
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.
The Bill Bly Collection of Electronic Literature is a rich archive of materials from the early literary hypertext movement, received as a generous donation to MITH directly from Bill Bly.
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.
Between 2008 and 2010, MITH partnered with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) for a project funded by the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) on Preserving Virtual Worlds. The project, supported by NDIIPP's Preserving Creative America program, explored methods for preserving digital games, interactive fiction, and shared real time virtual spaces. Major activities include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games and electronic literature, as well as Second Life, the popular and influential multi-user online world.
Preserving Virtual Worlds II: Methods for Evaluating and Preserving Significant Properties of Educational Games and Complex Interactive Environments (PVW2) was conducted in partnership with the University of Illinois (lead institution), the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Stanford University, with the goal of improving the capacity of libraries, museums, and archives to preserve computer games, virtual worlds, and interactive fiction. This IMLS-funded project was a follow-up to the original Preserving Virtual Worlds I project.