Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Maryland Institute For Technology In The Humanities
Established	1999
Director	Neil Fraistat
Admin. staff	20
Location	College Park, Maryland, USA
Website	mith.umd.edu

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is an internationally recognized, rapidly growing research center that is helping to transform the humanities in an era of new media and global information. A collaboration among the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities, Libraries, and Office of Information Technology, MITH cultivates innovative research agendas clustered around digital tools, text mining and visualization, and the creation and preservation of electronic literature, digital games, virtual worlds.

History

Made possible by a challenge grant in late 1998 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), MITH began operations during the fall semester of 1999, under Martha Nell Smith, Professor of English at the University of Maryland.

Projects

MITH is involved in several on-going projects, including the following:

• Archimedes Palimpsest, a collaborative project with the Walters Art Museum involving a detailed digital study of the Archimedes Palimpsest.

• The Documentation and Preservation of Dance, a collaborative project of MITH, the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) at Ohio State University, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to establish and document the current state of dance and push forward action on the pressing problem of dance preservation.

• Preserving Virtual Worlds I & II, a project that explores methods for preserving digital games, interactive fiction, and shared real time virtual spaces.

• Project Bamboo, a partnership of ten research universities building shared infrastructure for humanities research. Within Bamboo, MITH is leading Corpora Space. We are designing research environments where scholars may discover, analyze and curate digital texts across the 450 years of print culture in English from 1473 until 1923, along with the texts from the Classical world upon which that print culture is based.

• The Shakespeare Quartos Archive, a collaborative project with the Folger Shakespeare Library to create a digital collection of pre-1642 editions of the plays of William Shakespeare.

• The Shelley-Godwin Archive. MITH is creating the project’s infrastructure with the assistance of the New York Public Library’s digital humanities group, NYPL Labs. With the Archive’s creation, manuscripts and early editions of texts from Percy Bysshe Shelley and his Circle will be made freely available to the public through an innovative framework constituting a new model of best practice for research libraries.

• Theatre Finder, a collaboratively edited, peer reviewed, online database of historic theatre architecture from the Minoan “theatrical areas” on the island of Crete, to the last theatre built before 1815.

• Visual Accent and Dialect Archive, an archive of video clips from around the world, providing both aural and visual information about a dialect or accent to assist performing arts researchers, actors and linguists.

Resources

MITH is the host of the Deena Larsen Collection, a personal collection of early-era personal computers and software.

Digital Dialogues

MITH hosts the Digital Dialogues series, which invites prominent scholars from the digital humanities, new media, and information technology fields to give a presentation on their current research. Recent talks include Siva Vaidhyanathan Ph.D. on The Googlization of Surveillance (May 3, 2011) and Seth Denbo Ph.D., and Director Neil Fraistat Ph.D., on Diggable Data, Scalable Reading, and New Humanities Scholarship (April 26, 2011).

Affiliations

MITH is affiliated with the Dickinson Electronic Archives, Romantic Circles, and Electronic Literature Organization.

External Links

• MITH Blog