January 2003 – December 2004
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.
October 2002 – February 2004
The Virtual Lightbox is a software tool for comparing images online. It exists in two versions, an application and an applet (both programmed in Java). The applet version, which is newly developed, furnishes what we believe to be an extremely flexible environment for online image comparison. Its primary audience is developers who wish to add an image comparison tool to a Web-based image collection. Simple server-side scripting allows users to populate the Lightbox applet in any number of ways. The application version, which was developed earlier, allows users to share images in peer-to-peer fashion: all users participating in a common session see the same images in the same on-screen configuration at the same time. Movement of an image and other operations are all globally propagated in realtime. Thus the application version functions as an image-based whiteboard.
September 2002 – June 2004
The Steinschneider Bibliographic Database is a digitized relational database for the study of pre-modern Jewish philosophy, science, and belles-lettres, based on the standard reference-work, Die Hebraeischen Ubersetzungen des Mittelalters und dir Juden als Dolmetscher (The Hebrew Translations of the Middle Ages and the Jews as Interpreters, henceforth HU).
September 2002 – December 2002
The LGBT Studies Program, like the programs and departments in Afro-American Studies, Asian American Studies, Jewish Studies, Latin-American Studies, and Women’s Studies that preceded it, is part of the institution’s broad and deep effort to transform curricula to reflect new developments in multicultural scholarship and to provide students with a set of educational experiences that convey some sense of the diversity of human cultures.
April 2002 – June 2005
The DISC website was a MITH Fellowship project of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and was an outgrowth of her early work, begun in the mid-1990’s, attempting to establish disability studies as a legitimate academic field of study. The DISC site was an international, interdisciplinary, user-generated, digital forum providing support, collegial networks, and information that sustains a disability studies academic community and promotes disability studies in a humanities focus.
February 2002 – October 2002
Rethinking the Americas Teaching History
was an educational outreach project created as a collaboration between the University of Maryland’s Department of History, the David C. Driskell Center, and Montgomery County Public Schools. This three-year project was designed to enrich teachers’ understanding of history, and improve student learning among Montgomery County middle and high schools.
February 2002 – February 2002
These two MITH-sponsored events were held in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of America’s great literary forces, the poet Langston Hughes. The first event was a Poetry Slam produced in collaboration with Border’s Books & Music, the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora, the Clarice Smith Center and the Committee on Africa and the Americas. The second event, Langston’s First Book of Jazz, was a collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution’s America’s Jazz Heritage Program (A Partnership of the Lila-Wallace Readers Digest Fund), and the Program in African American Culture of the National Museum of History. It was held on February 25, 2002 in Carmichael Hall at the National Museum of American History.\r\n
January 2002 – June 2002
This was a 2002 Faculty Fellowship project of Professor Carolina Robertson from the Ethnomusicology Department. Based on the core premise that creativity is not necessarily a state of grace rooted in innate talent or skill, a series of seminars were offered through the University’s ‘Teachers as Scholars’ program, in which teacher participants explored their own life narratives as doorways to creativity against a backdrop of parallel stories from other cultures. Dr. Robertson worked with a MITH programmer to develop an interactive website with malleable texts, sounds and images as the dynamic outcome of this process.
January 2002 – December 2006
Irish Resources in the Humanities was developed in 1999 by Dr. Susan Schreibman as a Gateway to sites on the World Wide Web that contain substantial content in the various disciplines of the humanities in the area of Irish Studies. As a rule, commercial sites are not linked.
January 2002 – December 2002
The Versioning Machine was a display environment designed specifically for displaying and comparing deeply-encoded, multiple versions of texts, including a robust typology of notes and bibliographic information. It also displayed manuscript images of each version in an applet which provides for several image enhancement features (such as increased/decreased contrast, image enlargement/reduction, etc. In short, it proved an electronic environment for creating a critical electronic edition. The Versioning Machine made its debut at the 2002 ALLC/ACH (Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing/Association for Computers and the Humanities) Conference in Tübingen, Germany, July 2002.
January 2002 – January 2003
The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. Open to the public for research and teaching purposes, EADA was published and supported by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) under the general editorship of Professor Ralph Bauer, at the University of Maryland at College Park.
January 2002 – June 2002
This web-based language learning project was developed by 2001 MITH Faculty Fellow, Professor Maria Lekic from Asian and East European Languages and Cultures. The project involved the teaching and analysis of adult foreign language acquisition within relatively unscripted naturalistic settings through the design of computerized modules for individual or classroom involving specialized vocabularies (such as Russian for business use, space science, etc.).
September 2001 – June 2002
Daryle Williams, Associate Professor of History, worked with MITH on an interactive digital historical atlas of the Jesuit-Guaraní missions (located in the Paraná-Uruguay watershed, along the borders of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay). Making use of text encoding, image mapping, and interactive media technology, the atlas explores the missions’ evolution from remote colonial-era missionary settlements to UNESCO World Heritage sites. A parallel objective is the integration of textual and visual sources in humanistic scholarship.
September 2001 – June 2002
This was the MITH Networked Associate Fellowship project of Ysaye Maria Barnwell, a renowned musician, composer, actress teacher and choral clinician in African American cultural performance. Barnwell’s project aimed to produce a multimedia digital presentation about her family, which eventually became the Ellis Barnwell Robinson Archives. The fellowship also provided support for Barnwell to prepare materials for an exhibit with the potential for traveling, and to prepare materials for inclusion in a book of photos and letters.
September 2001 – June 2004
The Thomas MacGreevy Archive is a long-term, interdisciplinary research project that explores the life, writings, and relationships of the Irish poet and critic, Thomas MacGreevy (1893-1967). The project is committed to investigating the intersections between traditional humanities research and digital technologies.
September 2001 – June 2002
The Portinari Project was one of the initial MITH Networked Associate Fellowship projects. MITH worked with João Candido Portinari, son of the late painter Candido Portinari, on a digital resource to make his work and legacy available broadly on the web.
September 2001 – December 2003
The University of Maryland Women’s Studies Database, begun in September 1992 and continued/developed later at MITH, serves those people interested in the women’s studies profession and in general women’s issues. Designed in collaboration with researchers, program administrators and information specialists in women’s studies, the database contains links to bibliographies, announcements, conferences and calls for papers, and other references relevant to the discipline.
June 2001 – June 2003
Over three consecutive summers between 2001 and 2003, MITH worked with the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland to organize Digital Directions, three separate one-week, intensive seminar for high school students to explore the use of technology in the arts and humanities. Digital Directions aimed to provide enrichment for high school students by exploring the interdisciplinary nature of technology and its cutting edge application in the fields of arts and humanities.
January 2001 – June 2001
Langston Terrace is the nation’s first public housing program built in Washington, D.C. Opened in 1937, Langston Terrace housed Black low-income, working class families; it was one of 51 racially segregated projects built by the Public Works Administration as part of the New Deal. In collaboration with Kelly Quinn from UMD’s Department of American Studies, MITH staff assisted with the creation of a website, Learning from Langston Terrace, which sought to commemorate the history of the community by compiling and offering primary sources for visitors. The materials on the site were meant to augment user’s experiences and memories of Langston and the scholarly literature.
January 2001 – June 2001
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.
January 2001 – June 2001
This was a 2001 Faculty Fellowship project of Professor Carol Burbank from the Department of Theatre. Employing two different models of performative technology, a series of interactive templates for student experiments in writing, and a web collage or performance “fugue,” Dr. Burbank explored the way pastiche and narrative function within a technological frame.
January 2001 – June 2001
In Fall 2000, the University of Maryland School of Music voted unanimously to begin offering its Masters of Ethnomusicology program in a combined residential/online program with the goal of targeting students in Latin America and Spain through courses taught primarily in Spanish. Former MITH Faculty Fellow Carolina Robertson, who eventually worked on the Narratives That Heal project, collaborated with MITH on the development of the online learning environment for this Distributed Learning Masters, making Spain/Online an early ‘MITH Affiliate.’
September 2000 – May 2001
This was a project of a group of Networked Associate Fellowships awarded to three English graduate students: Helen L. Hull, Meg F. Pearson, and Erin A. Sadlack. The goal was to construct a significant scholarly online resource for studying John Milton’s A Maske, familiarly known as Comus. The choice of this particular work was made due to its various interpretations and forms (text, hypertext, pictoral and musical). The site consists of four core content sections: a textual archive, multimedia representations, critical essays, and a bibliography.
September 2000 – June 2001
The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies was an online, not-for-profit organization whose purpose was to research, teach, support, and create diverse and dynamic elements of cyberculture. Collaborative in nature, RCCS sought to support ongoing conversations about the emerging field, to foster a community of students, teachers, scholars, explorers, and builders of cyberculture, and to showcase various models, works-in-progress, and on-line projects. As of 2002, the site contained a collection of scholarly resources, including university-level courses in cyberculture, events and conferences, an extensive annotated bibliography, and two full-length book reviews each month. RCCS was originally founded by David Silver in 1996 at UMD, and became part of a MITH Networked Associate Fellowship awarded to Silver in 2000-2001.
January 2000 – June 2000
King’s Feminism and Writing Technologies was an early MITH Faculty Fellow project which featured a virtual 17th-century Quaker women’s printshop designed to plumb more fully (by reconfiguring objects of study) the intertwinings of print and digital distributions of knowledge production and their implications for research in the twenty-first century university.