MITH will host the first annual Digital Humanities Winter Institute (DHWI), from Monday, January 7, 2013, to Friday, January 11, 2013, at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. We’re delighted to be expanding the model pioneered by the highly-successful Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria to the United States.

DHWI will provide an opportunity for scholars to learn new skills relevant to different kinds of digital scholarship while mingling with like-minded colleagues in coursework, social events, and lectures during an intensive, week-long event located amid the many attractions of the Washington, D.C. region.

Courses are open to all skill levels and will cater to many different interests. For the 2013 Institute we’ve assembled an amazing group of instructors who will teach everything from introductory courses on project development and programming, to intermediate level courses on image analysis, teaching with multimedia, and data curation. DHWI will also feature more technically-advanced courses on text analysis and linked open data. We hope that the curricula we’ve assembled will appeal to graduate students, faculty, librarians, and museum professionals as well as participants from government and non-governmental organizations.

An exciting program of extracurricular events will accompany the formal DHWI courses to capitalize on the Institute’s proximity to the many cultural heritage organizations in the region. This stream of activities, which we’re calling “DHWI Public Digital Humanities,” will include an API workshop, a hack-a-thon, and opportunities to contribute videos and other materials to the 4Humanities campaign to document the importance of the humanities for contemporary society.

Both the outward-looking DHWI Public Digital Humanities program and the week of high-caliber, in-depth digital humanities coursework will be kicked off by the Institute Lecture. This year’s speaker will be Seb Chan, currently the Director of Digital & Emerging Media at the Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City.

We hope that many of you will join us this winter in Maryland for what promises to be a terrific event. Registration is now available at this site.

Like DHSI, we will be offering a limited number of sponsored student scholarships to help cover the cost of attending the Institute. The scholarships are made possible through the generosity of this year’s DHWI Instructors and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

To keep up with news and events related to DHWI, follow @dhwi_mith. For all other enquiries, please contact Jennifer Guiliano, dhinstitute@umd.edu

This version supports two major changes:

1.  Z39.50 support has been added to allow you to pull a MARC record from a Z39.50 endpoint directly into the MARC record class structure. To use this funcionality, you need to copy the contents of DLLSZoom.net directly into the bindebug or binrelease folder. Likewise, if you distribute an application which uses this library for Z39.50 support, the contents of that folder must be included in your executable folder. Currently, Z39.50 support does not work for 64-bit machines. I hope to fix this at a later time though.
2. More support for character encoding included. The parser now correctly parses MARC8 character encoded records. It identifies the encoding from the record leader and will convert most the common combinatorial characters in MARC8 directly into Unicode. This required quite a bit of changes to accommodate reading the records or streams one BYTE at a time, rather than using any string operations. String operations in C# inherently use Unicode encoding, so this introduces a number of problems.

For more information on character encoding in the MARC records, see Mark Sullivan’s blog entry.  The complete code and an example application can be downloaded directly from SourceForge. 

http://ufdc.ufl.edu/software/mets

The new SobekCM METS Editor version includes the following changes:

• Added ability from the structure map to add file references ( i.e., URI ) to the METS. (External files)
• Added ability to recurse through subfolders within the resource folder and include files in subfolders in METS
• Added ability to import records via Z39.50 ( on 32-bit machines )
• Added ability to easily add wrapper divs in the structure map outside the resource ( commonly used for volume/issue information )
• Updated the installer to be built by the open-source WiX Installer, rather than Visual Studio Installer

The GUI and some limited instructions are both available from the SobekCM tools site: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/software/statsreader

More on SobekCM

SobekCM allows users to discover online resources via semantic and full-text searches, as well as a variety of different browse mechanisms. For each digital resource in the repository there are a plethora of display options, which may be selected by an appropriately authenticated use. This repository includes online metadata editing and online submissions in support of institutional repositories.

The software was developed at the University of Florida Libraries by Mark Sullivan, with much input from the UF Digital Library Center.

SobekCM is released as open source software under the GNU GPL license and can be downloaded from the SobekCM Software Download Site.

University of Florida libraries receive $265,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant
Tuesday, May 1, 2012.

Online resource will provide first-time access to hidden St. Augustine treasures

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — To prepare for the 450th anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine in 2015, the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries has been awarded $265,000 to build an online collection of hidden and fragile resources related to colonial St. Augustine.

The grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities is the largest and one of only four NEH grants in Florida this year. There are 34 nationally.

The “Unearthing St. Augustine” grant, led by project director Thomas Caswell and co-director James Cusick, will establish a specialized computer digitization lab at the Government House in St. Augustine. This two-year project will create an interactive digital collection or database consisting of 10,000 maps, drawings, photographs and documents available freely online.

Partnering with the Smathers Libraries to realize this project are the City of St. Augustine departments of heritage tourism and archaeology program, the St. Augustine Historical Society, the UF College of Design, Construction and Planning, and the Government House, which is managed by UF.

The “Unearthing St. Augustine” materials are scattered among four repositories that have been previously inaccessible to researchers worldwide. Among the important items to be “unearthed,” which date from the 16th century to present, include archival materials from the following:

• Government House — maps and overlays of the city, architectural drawings of historic structures and related government documents
• St. Augustine Historical Society — Spanish documents, transcriptions and English language translations
• City of St. Augustine archaeology program — records, photographs and site summaries for 100 excavations conducted over the past 20 years
• Herschel Shepard Collection at UF — drawings, photos and documents related to Shepard’s restoration and reconstruction of the city’s colonial buildings.

The collection will support research in a broad range of subjects: Florida and U.S. history, Spanish colonies, Native Americans, slavery, exploration, architecture and urban planning, social and economic development, missionary work, military defenses and warfare. When completed, “Unearthing St. Augustine” will not only satisfy the needs of a wide variety of researchers including historians, archaeologists, architects and historic preservationists, but the project will also help in telling St. Augustine’s unique story on a global scale.

In support of the grant, Kathleen Deagan, distinguished research curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, wrote: “Digital access to primary materials is probably the single most important factor in stimulating new and diverse scholarship on St. Augustine’s colonial history. This is also a very timely project, in that the 450th anniversary of St. Augustine’s founding will occur in 2015, providing an opportunity to focus both public and scholarly attention on the role of Florida in our nation’s history.”

Jane Landers, professor of history at Vanderbilt University, added: “I have long recognized the international significance of St. Augustine, as well as its importance in our national history. I can attest to the unique nature of the city’s historical documents, maps, and artifacts and firmly believe they constitute a national treasure that should be made more accessible to a wider public. These records and archaeological reports document much about the material culture, economy and social and political organization of St. Augustine and its indigenous and African hinterlands.”

Credits

Contact: Tom Caswell, tcaswell@ufl.edu, 352-273-2805

The MLA is pleased to announce that it has been awarded an $83,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support development of the MLA Commons, an online platform for MLA members. As part of the association’s broader project of facilitating more interactive scholarly communication, the MLA Commons will provide a space for members to share research, work collaboratively, and explore new modes of scholarship that exceed the capabilities of traditional forms of publication. The MLA is working with the developers of the City University of New York (CUNY) Academic Commons on the open-source platform, which it will later make available to other scholarly societies. A beta phase of the project will launch in early 2013.

The MLA Executive Council has recently approved a revision of the association’s guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship. Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media, composed by the Committee on Information Technology, addresses the changes in scholarly communication and the digital humanities in the nearly twelve years since the original guidelines were introduced.

The first annual Digital Humanities Day is a joint event in partnership with Spring Interface 2012. The joint event is themed “Open Resources, Open Possibilities.” For ten years, MIT has made all of its educational content available for anyone wanting to use it. During the same time period, Stanford has championed Creative Commons, which has defined and made available a form of open intellectual property attribution. Many other institutions and organizations are moving in the direction of open content and resources, including scholarly disciplines and societies, federal granting agencies, and library archives. The result is a wealth of new opportunities for the use and dissemination of scholarly work, resources, and learning materials.

At the University of Florida, we are exploring the implications of “Open Resources, Open Possibilities” and the impact on teaching, learning, research, and public engagement with scholarship in higher education by joining the 2012 Interface Faculty Seminar and the first annual UF Digital Humanities Day to focus on the production and use of open resources on our own campus. The event will include 10-minute lightning talks, roundtables, posters, and refreshments, including lunch. These presentations will examine a range of projects from open archives and data, to open courseware and open educational resources, and to open and alternative publishing venues. The complete schedule for the event is available online: http://interface.at.ufl.edu.

Spring Interface 2012: Faculty Seminar + Digital Humanities Day is co-organized by Academic Technology, the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, and the George A. Smathers Libraries, with support from the CLAS Dean’s Office and the UF Office of Research.

Online Program

The Interface program is being recorded in two separate streams separating the morning and afternoon sessions (this will make it much easier to view the program through the archived streams). As a result, you’ll need two links to watch the online sessions:

• Morning
• Afternoon

In addition to the live streams, we have set up a synchronous communication space for you to join in, chat with other online participants, and, in particular, participate in the breakout sessions. To prepare your computer for online participation, please review the information in the attached file (which is also posted on the Interface web site).

To join the session, please click on the link below. Activity will begin in this space about 30 minutes before the program starts; or about 8:30Am tomorrow: https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2010029&password=M.F833766AC3C52ACDB31AB651AA48AD

We’re looking forward to seeing at Interface + Digital Humanities Day Online!

‘The Milkmaid’, one of Johannes Vermeer’s most famous pieces, depicts a scene of a woman quietly pouring milk into a bowl. During a survey the Rijksmuseum discovered that there were over 10,000 copies of the image on the internet—mostly poor, yellowish reproductions. As a result of all of these low-quality copies on the web, according to the Rijksmuseum, “people simply didn’t believe the postcards in our museum shop were showing the original painting. This was the trigger for us to put high-resolution images of the original work with open metadata on the web ourselves. Opening up our data is our best defence against the ‘yellow Milkmaid’.”

“But it’s not the original, it’s just a facsimile!” How often have we heard such a retort when confronted with an otherwise perfect reproduction of a painting? No question about it, the obsession of the age is for the original version. Only the original possesses an aura, this mysterious and mystical quality that no second hand version will ever get. But paradoxically, this obsession for pinpointing originality increases proportionally with the availability and accessibility of more and more copies of better and better quality. If so much energy is devoted to the search for the original — for archeological and marketing reasons— it is because the possibility of making copies has never been so open-ended. If no copies of the Mona Lisaexisted would we pursue it with such energy — and, would we devise so many conspiracy theories to decide whether or not the version held under glass and protected by sophisticated alarms is the original surface painted by Leonardo’s hand or not. In other words, the intensity of the search for the original depends on the amount of passion and the number of interests triggered by its copies. No copies, no original. In order to stamp a piece with the mark of originality, you need to apply to its surface the huge pressure that only a great number of reproductions can provide.So, in spite of the knee-jerk reaction —”But this is just a facsimile”—, we should refuse to decide too quickly when considering the value of either the original or its reproduction. Thus, the real phenomenon to be accounted for is not the punctual delineation of one version divorced from the rest of its copies, but the whole assemblage made up of one —or several— original(s) together with the retinue of its continually re-written biography. It is not a case of “either or” but of “and, and”. Is it not because the Nile ends up in such a huge delta that the century-old search for its sources had been so thrilling? To pursue the metaphor, we want, in this paper, to behave like hydrographers intent in deploying the whole catchment area of a river, not only focusing on an original spring. A given work of art should be compared not to any isolated locus but to a river’s catchment, complete with its estuaries, its many tributaries, its dramatic rapids, its many meandering turns and, of course, also, its several hidden sources.

To give a name to this catchment area, we will use the word trajectory. A work of art —no matter of which material it is made — has a trajectory or, to use another expression popularized by anthropologists, a career. What we want to do in this paper is to specify the trajectory or career of a work of art and to move from one question that we find moot (“Is it an original or merely a copy?”) to another one that we take to be decisive, especially at the time of digital reproduction: “Is it well or badly reproduced?” The reason why we find this second question so important is because the quality, conservation, continuation, sustenance and appropriation of the original depends entirely on the distinction between good and bad reproduction. We want to argue that a badly reproduced original risks disappearing while a well accounted for original may continue to enhance its originality and to trigger new copies. This is why we want to show that facsimiles, especially those relying on complex (digital) techniques, are the most fruitful way to explore the original and even to help re-define what originality actually is.

Research Computing Day will be an opportunity to:

• Learn about data management concepts and best practices
• Talk to the UF Research Computing staff
• Advocate for new services needed at UF to create a better research environment

See the full schedule on the Research Computing Day website: http://www.it.ufl.edu/community/events/rcday/