“You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.”

Recognize these lines? They’re from the opening screen of Will Crowther’s ADVENTURE (1975), the first example of the genre known as interactive fiction and arguably our first example of a virtual world (and as such the distant ancestor to places like World of Warcraft and Second Life). There is also an appropriate literary resonance: this path in the forest where the straight way is lost is reminiscent of another great underground epic.

As part of our work on a project funded by the Library of Congress dedicated to Preserving Virtual Worlds (http://www.ndiipp.uiuc.edu/pca/), MITH will be hosting a table-read of the original version of ADVENTURE, recently recovered from backup tapes at Stanford University. We will read through the complete text of the game, and also (geeks that we are) have a look at its FORTRAN source code.

We’re inviting anyone with an interest in gaming, interactive fiction, or virtual worlds to join us for an hour or two on Thursday, May 15, at 12:00 noon in our conference room (MITH is located on the basement level of McKeldin Library). Appropriately, we will provide tasty food: pizza. As with all adventures, we’re unsure of where this one will end or exactly how we will get there. But there are sure to be breathtaking views along the way. Please RSVP to mgk at umd dot edu if you would like to attend.

A final reminder of the amazing Digital Diasporas conference beginning on campus later this week. We look forward to seeing many members of the MITH community at this landmark event.

We regret that Tuesday’s Digital Dialogue with Greg Crane has had to be canceled. We look forward to rescheduling with Greg for the fall.

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is seeking a full time TEI encoder to work on in-house text encoding projects as well as a collaboration with the National Gallery in Washington DC on a new digital archive under development: “The History of the Accademia di San Luca, 1589-1635: Documents from the Archivio di Stato, Rome.” The successful candidate will have experience with humanities encoding projects and knowledge of TEI (preferably P5). Experience with transforming TEI via XSL and DOM manipulations is preferred.

MITH is the University of Maryland’s primary intellectual hub for scholars and practitioners of digital humanities, electronic literature, and cyberculture, as well as the home of the Electronic Literature Organization, the most prominent international group devoted to the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature. MITH functions as an applied think tank for the digital humanities in its symposia and weekly seminar series; in its furthering the excellence of MITH Fellows’ research; and in its cultivation of an innovative in-house research agenda that currently clusters around digital tools, text mining and visualization, and the creation and preservation of electronic literature, digital games, and virtual worlds. MITH and the University of Maryland will host the international Digital Humanities 2009 conference.

Salary range: $40,000 to $50,000 plus benefits. We will begin accepting applications immediately and will continue until the position is filled. To apply, send a cover letter and resume to MITH’s assistant director, Doug Reside (dreside at umd dot edu).

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, April 29, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Cyberinfrastructure for Global Cultural Heritage”
by GREGORY CRANE

Cultural heritage materials are traditionally accessible either to highly trained professionals or in the form of manually produced translations with hand-crafted background information. The challenge today is to design fields that are accessible across barriers of language, culture and immediate intent: we are beginning to design fields for translation, customization and personalization. This talk looks at the interaction between wholly automated and largely general systems and the knowledge structures on which particular domains depend.

On the one hand, we need to update our models of intellectual activity to keep pace the already present and rapidly emerging practices. At the same time, as we identify new services to support new activities, we need to develop methods whereby we can mine the machine actionable data from vast libraries of legacy print data available as page images and scalable accept user contributions of every type. One goal in the next five years is to have available for speakers of Arabic and Chinese the core data about Greco-Roman culture and then to make available corresponding materials about Chinese and Arabic culture to the English speaking public. This involves a suite of data driven services that provide high performance results for particular domains.

GREGORY CRANE is Professor of Classics and Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship at Tufts University. He is also the founder and director of the Perseus Project, which has been working on digital libraries and cyberinfrastructure for twenty years. He is directing projects aimed at developing a coherent cyberinfrastructure for cultural heritage in general and for Greco-Roman culture in particular.

This talk concludes MITH’s Digital Dialogues series for the semester. It is free and open to the public.

It’s not too late to register for Digital Diasporas, the first conference devoted exclusively to the intersection of African American/African Diaspora Studies and the digital humanities: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/diaspora2008/

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).