{"id":17802,"date":"2016-08-08T09:30:29","date_gmt":"2016-08-08T13:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/?p=17802"},"modified":"2020-10-08T15:59:42","modified_gmt":"2020-10-08T19:59:42","slug":"the-digital-dialogues-collection-chronicling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/the-digital-dialogues-collection-chronicling\/","title":{"rendered":"The Digital Dialogues Collection, chronicling a slice of the digital humanities since 2005"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the 6th post in MITH\u2019s Digital Stewardship Series<\/a>. In this post, MITH\u2019s summer intern David Durden discusses his work on MITH\u2019s audiovisual collection of historic Digital Dialogues events.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Digital Dialogues series showcases many prominent figures from the digital humanities community (e.g., Tara McPherson, Mark Sample, Trevor Owens, Julia Flanders, and MITH\u2019s own Matthew Kirschenbaum) speaking about their research on digital culture, tools and methodologies, and the interlocking concerns of the humanities and computing.<\/p>\n

As mentioned in my earlier post<\/a>, the nature of this collection presents several challenges to preservation and access as the series continues on into the future. As with many collections that are the focus of digital curation, the topics and subject matter covered in the Digital Dialogues continuously evolve and change over the course of the series. The collection itself is a record of the evolution of the digital humanities, the growth of MITH, and the rapid development of digital technologies, e.g., audio podcasts, multimedia podcasts, HD web hosted video.<\/p>\n

My project was intended to help MITH balance the challenges of proper storage of existing content with the challenges of developing sustainable workflows for the dissemination of current and future content. Prior to this project, the Digital Dialogues collection was dispersed among several locations, representing different workflows, available technologies and access platforms over time. There have been 193 Digital Dialogues since September of 2005. There are recordings of 129 of these\u201478 recorded on video, and 51 recorded on audio (only). Access copies for videos and audio tracks were hosted in a variety of locations, such as Vimeo, Internet Archive, or an Amazon S3 server instance. Source and project files were located on a combination of the internal drive for MITH\u2019s iMac video editing station, an external hard drive, and a separate local server. After the completion of this project, the preservation, storage and accessibility of all Digital Dialogues content has been streamlined. Source and project files are now organized in a set file directory structure and stored redundantly on two separate local drives, and all access copies are available through a single source\u2014Vimeo\u2014making it easier for users to have access to the entire collection. Due to weekly upload limits imposed by Vimeo, there are currently 71 videos uploaded<\/a>, and 45 more videos are in the upload queue and will be available soon.<\/p>\n

Over the course of this project, I was involved in the processes of editing and exporting videos, updating the MITH site,, and preparing digital content for long-term storage, but through that process I did manage to find some time to actively engage with the sheer volume of content that exists within the collection. Several Digital Dialogues were in line with my own research interests and hobbies, so I was able to engage with the collection as both a curator and researcher, and watched these videos in their entirety.<\/p>\n

Here are a few (only a tiny sample) of my favorites:<\/p>\n

Spectacular Stunts and Digital Detachment: Connecting Effects to Affects in US Car Movies, by Caetlin Benson-Allott<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>

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