Semester Finale of Stylish Happenings

MITH recently hosted a farewell party to close out the spring semester in honor of our student staff. Thank you Alex, Brooks, James, Jordan, Sahil and TinTin for your hard work, enthusiasm, support, and stellar Kinect skills. Enjoy the summer!

• On April 30th, MITH participated in Maryland Day, an annual event at University of Maryland, where warm weather and a myriad of event tents drew a record-setting 97,000 attendees throughout the day. MITHers Travis Brown, Grant Dickie, Rachel Donahue and Matthew Kirschenbaum donned 80s jean jackets and rocker tees to highlight MITH’s work on Preserving Virtual Worlds I & II. A partnership between University of Maryland, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, and Rochester Institute of Technology, Preserving Virtual Worlds I & II investigates the preservation of digital games in the context of libraries, archives, and museums. UMD’s investigators are Matthew Kirschenbaum, Kari Kraus and Rachel Donahue. Several visitors stopped by to play various arcade games (Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Burger Time and Seadragon) on an old Apple II computer, and Super Mario Brothers 2 and 3 that ran via a Nintendo (NES) emulator on an iMac - though the pink shag rug stole the show.

• The final Digital Dialogue on May 3rd featured Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, and author of _The Googlization of Everything – and Why We Should Worr_y (University of California Press, 2011). Using Google Street View as a case study, Dr. Vaidhyanathan discussed notions of surveillance and privacy, the “process of being processed,” and the benefits and drawbacks of our relationship with the world’s most universal search engine.
• The Society of American Archivists (SAA) recently awarded a special citation in the Preservation Publication Award category to Matthew Kirschenbaum, Richard Ovenden, Gabriela Redwine and Rachel Donahue for their innovative research reflected in Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections (Council on Library and Information Resources, 2010). Congratulations!
• Check out Developapers, the blog recently launched by Rachel Donahue, doctoral student at University of Maryland’s iSchool and Program Associate at MITH, on aggregating and discussing game developer diaries, concept sketches, and more…
• We were excited to see mention of Project Bamboo’s partnership with the HathiTrust Research Center in a recent article on text-mining in Library Journal.

Looking ahead, MITH eagerly anticipates welcoming Deena Larsen and Bill Bly as they spend a week in residence working with born-digital materials in the Deena Larsen Collection. In addition, along with University of Maryland, Ohio State University and George Washington University, MITH will be sponsoring a public presentation of the Documentation and Preservation of Dance project, held at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. See recent blog post by Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts at the New York Public Library, and former Associate Director at MITH, to read about issues surrounding the preservation of dance. As always, please continue to follow us here, on Twitter and on Facebook for more news of MITH and the greater digital humanities community.