Digital Humanities, Media and Cultures at Maryland

At Maryland, digital humanities as a recognized field can be traced back to the founding of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities in 1999 with an NEH Challenge grant. MITH was itself the outgrowth of several years of conversation and planning among a group ARHU faculty and graduate students, many of whom fostered notable early adopter projects, including the Dickinson Electronic Archives, Romantic Circles, and the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies. Under Martha Nell Smith's leadership as founding director, and with co-sponsorship from the University Library and the Office of Information Techhnology, MITH built a strong faculty fellows program that enabled a number of ARHU faculty to produce well-regarded first generation Web-based work. MITH also rapidly took its place among the top rank of international digital humanities centers.
 

Since the term of Neil Fraistat's directorship in 2005, MITH has continued the fellows program but has also moved successfully into externally funded research, winning awards from the NEH as well as the IMLS, Mellon, and NSF, and entering into local collaborations with institutions such as the Folger and the Library of Congress, as well as more distant partnerships such as the British Library, the Bodleian, the Harry Ransom Center, and Linden Lab, creators of Second Life. To date, MITH has received over $1.5M in external funding, making it the 3rd most successful unit in the College (behind only a major language research center and a full department). It hosts speakers on an almost weekly basis, and regularly brings major figures to campus, most recently Lev Manovich, Christine Borgman, and Bruce Sterling. MITH's international reputation was acknowledged last June, when in the year of its 10th anniversary it hosted the prestigious annual Digital Humanities conference and brought over 325 attendees to campus (the most in the conference's 20-year history) from as far away as Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America.

Diversity has been a cornerstone of digital humanities on this campus, as reflected, for example, in the work of the MITH Fellows program under both Smith and Fraistat (see http://www.soweto76archive.org/ for one recent example), as well as events such as Digital Diasporas: Digital Humanities and African American/African Diaspora Studies, the first professional meeting ever devoted to the intersection of these disciplines. Digital humanities at Maryland has also been at least as actively engaged with the emerging digital cultures of the present as it has been with the transposition of the cultural record of the past. MITH hosts the Electronic Literature Organization, the premier international group of writers, artists and technologists creating and studying literary new media, and participates in high-profile research projects such as Preserving Virtual Worlds.
 

There is also significant digital activity underway elsewhere in the College. With the generous gift of a donor, the Art History Department is currently building a collaboratory that will enable 3-dimensional projection for teaching and research. The English Department includes a strong cohort of senior faculty who are recognized leaders in digital humanities and new media, as well as a precedent-setting junior appointment shared with the College of Information Studies. The Art Department too in recent years has significantly built up its faculty, facilities and curriculum in digital media.
 

Digital humanities at Maryland is now also being brought into the curriculum in programmatic ways. This past summer, in conjunction with MITH, ARHU developed a successful proposal for a new living-learning program, one of two new programs to be housed with Gemstone and Honors Humanities in the newly-formed Honors College.  Digital Cultures and Creativity is a 16-credit program for first- and second-year students, with each year's cohort to number roughly around 70. DCC is staffed by a faculty Director (Matthew Kirschenbaum) and a full-time Associate Director. It is co-sponsored by the Computer Science department and the Information School, both of whom will be contributing faculty to the program--a significant cross-campus collaboration. There will be opportunities for ARHU faculty to teach seminars and supervise student research in DCC through a fellows program, which will include money for buyout, stipend, and event programming. DCC students will pursue activities including digital music and video production, digital art, creative electronic writing, virtual worlds and the development of software and online communities. DCC will welcome its first cohort of students next fall.
 

Clearly all this is a strong base from which to realize the College's strategic priority of "Leading the nation in innovative applications of digital technologies in teaching, learning, scholarship, and creative expression to open up new ways of studying the past, comprehending the present, and imagining the future." These cluster hires therefore represent a critical opportunity for both broadening and extending the strengths in digital humanities, digital media, and digital culture.