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

National Endowment for the Humanities

The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...

 (NEH), MITH began operations during the fall semester of 1999, under Martha Nell Smith

Martha Nell Smith

Martha Nell Smith is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park...

, Professor of English at the University of Maryland

University of Maryland

When the term "University of Maryland" is used without any qualification, it generally refers to the University of Maryland, College Park.University of Maryland may refer to the following:...

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Projects

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

• Archimedes Palimpsest, a collaborative project with the Walters Art Museum
  Walters Art Museum
  The Walters Art Museum, located in Baltimore, Maryland's Mount Vernon neighborhood, is a public art museum founded in 1934. The museum's collection was amassed substantially by two men, William Thompson Walters , who began serious collecting when he moved to Paris at the outbreak of the American...
  
   involving a detailed digital study of the Archimedes Palimpsest
  Archimedes Palimpsest
  The Archimedes Palimpsest is a palimpsest on parchment in the form of a codex. It originally was a copy of an otherwise unknown work of the ancient mathematician, physicist, and engineer Archimedes of Syracuse and other authors, which was overwritten with a religious text.Archimedes lived in the...
  
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• 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
  Ohio State University
  The Ohio State University, commonly referred to as Ohio State, is a public research university located in Columbus, Ohio. It was originally founded in 1870 as a land-grant university and is currently the third largest university campus in the United States...
  
  , the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
  John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
  The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is a performing arts center located on the Potomac River, adjacent to the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C...
  
  , and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
  New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
  The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center houses one of the world's largest collections of materials relating to the performing arts. It is one of the four research centers of the New York Public Library's Research library system, and it is also one...
  
   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
  Folger Shakespeare Library
  The Folger Shakespeare Library is an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., in the United States. It has the world's largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare materials from the early modern period...
  
   to create a digital collection of pre-1642 editions of the plays of William Shakespeare
  William Shakespeare
  William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
  
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• The Shelley-Godwin Archive. MITH is creating the project’s infrastructure with the assistance of the New York Public Library
  New York Public Library
  The New York Public Library is the largest public library in North America and is one of the United States' most significant research libraries...
  
  ’s digital humanities group, NYPL Labs. With the Archive’s creation, manuscripts and early editions of texts from Percy Bysshe Shelley
  Percy Bysshe Shelley
  Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...
  
   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

Deena Larsen

Deena Larsen is a new media, hypertext author, known for ground-breaking work in creating structural patterns in hypermedia literature. Larsen has been working with electronic literature since the 1980s and is considered one of the pioneer artists in the field...

 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

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a cultural historian and media scholar, and is currently a professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia. Vaidhyanathan is a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times...

 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 Electronics Archives, Romantic Circles

Romantic Circles

Romantic Circles is an academic peer-reviewed website dedicated to the study of Romantic literature and culture, featuring online editions of many texts of the Romantic era, as well as essays devoted to Romantic literature, culture, and theory...

, and Electronic Literature Organization

Electronic Literature Organization

The Electronic Literature Organisation is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature." -History:...

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