Interactive media are highly complex and at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is actively exploring methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. Major activities include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games, electronic literature and Second Life, an interactive multiplayer game. Project partners are the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (lead), the University of Maryland, Stanford University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Linden Lab. Second Life content participants include Life to the Second Power, Democracy Island and the International Spaceflight Museum. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is funded by the Preserving Creative America initiative under the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) administered by the Library of Congress. In this MITH Research Update, we will discuss the current state of the project eighteen months into the grant cycle, and suggest directions for future research.
Preserving Virtual Worlds
A MITH Research Update
April 28, 2009
MITH Conference Room
Kari Kraus
Assistant Professor, College of Information Studies and the Department of English, University of Maryland
Speaker Bios
Neil Fraistat is Professor of English and Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. He is a founder and general editor of the _Romantic Circles _Website, the Co-Chair of centerNet, an international network of digital humanities centers, and has published widely on the subjects of Romanticism, Textual Studies, and Digital Humanities in various articles and in the eight books he has authored or edited. He is currently seeing through the press Volume III of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship. Fraistat has been awarded the Society for Textual Scholarship’s biennial Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize, the Keats-Shelley Association Prize, honorable mention for the Modern Language Association’s biennial Distinguished Scholarly Edition Prize, and the Keats-Shelly Association’s Distinguished Scholar Award.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied thinktank for the digital humanities). He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a member of the teaching faculty at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in 2008 and won the 2009 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS), the 2009 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), and the 16th annual Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association (MLA). In 2010 he co-authored (with Richard Ovenden and Gabriela Redwine) Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, a report published by the Council on Library and Information Resources and recognized with a commendation from the Society of American Archivists. Kirschenbaum speaks and writes often on topics in the digital humanities and new media; his work has received coverage in the Atlantic, New York Times, National Public Radio, Wired, Boing Boing, Slashdot, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. See www.mkirschenbaum.net for more.
KARI KRAUS’s research and teaching interests focus on new media and the digital humanities, textual scholarship and print culture, digital preservation, and intellectual property. This past fall she joined the College of Information Studies and the Department of English at the University of Maryland as an assistant professor. Kraus is a local Co-PI on a Library of Congress NDIIPP grant for preserving virtual worlds, including the multi-user virtual environment Second Life; a project participant on an NEH Digital Humanities Level I Start-Up grant on approaches to managing and collecting born-digital literary materials for scholarly use; a founding member of the editorial board for MediaCommons, a digital scholarly network under development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book; and a member of the internal advisory board for Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building (CLiMB). She has taught at the University of Rochester and the Eastman School of Music, and in the Art and Visual Technology program at George Mason University. In 2006-2007 she was technology evangelist for Zotero, an open-source research tool for the Firefox web browser, produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.
Doug Reside is Assistant Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). In addition to undergraduate degrees in English and Computer Science from Truman State University, he holds a PhD in English from the University of Kentucky and his dissertation, completed in 2006, proposes a theory for textual criticism and editing of musical theater texts and included an electronic edition of the 1998 musical Parade. Reside directs all programming work at MITH and has taught three courses on programming for humanities students.