HyperStudio Receives NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant
By Kurt Fendt on April 9, 2012
We are happy to announce that HyperStudio has received a Level II Start-Up grant from the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for “Annotation Studio – Multimedia Text Annotation for Students”.
Annotation Studio is an open-source web-based application that actively engages students in interpreting literary texts and other humanities documents. Initial features will include:
1) Easy-to-use annotation tools that facilitates linking and comparing primary texts with multi-media source, variation, and adaptation documents;
2) Sharable collections of multimedia materials prepared by faculty and student users;
3) Multiple filtering and display mechanisms for texts, written annotations, and multimedia annotations;
4) Collaboration functionality;
5) Multimedia composition tools.
While strengthening new media literacies, Annotation Studio will help students develop traditional humanistic skills including close reading, textual analysis, persuasive writing, and critical thinking.
Digital Humanities Faculty Workshop with Brett Bobley (NEH), January 27, 2011
By Kurt Fendt on January 26, 2011
Please join us for an all day Digital Humanities Workshop with Brett Bobley, Director of the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH), National Endowment for the Humanities, jointly held on January 27, 2011 at MIT and Harvard University.
Here’s the program for both MIT and Harvard:
MIT
10:00 to 11:45 (Spofford Room: Room 1-236, Building 1, Second Floor)
Talk by Brett Bobley, Chief Information Officer and Director, NEH Office of Digital Humanities
“Emerging Trends in the Digital Humanities & the NEH Funding Landscape”
Abstract: Brett Bobley will talk about emerging trends in the digital humanities in the context of NEH-funded projects. He will cover a wide variety of projects that cover numerous disciplines and technological methods. He will also talk a bit about projects that study the impact of technology on scholarship and the academy.
Harvard University
2:30 – 5:00 Three Part Digital Humanities Grant Workshop, Barker Center Room 133
1. MIT Faculty Presentations:
Prof. Jeff Ravel, History: The Comédie-Française Registers Project
Prof. Fox Harrell, Writing/Comparative Media Studies/Computer Science: Gesture, Rhetoric, and Digital Storytelling
Prof. Jim Buzzard, Head of Literature: The Serial Experience Project
Wyn Kelley, Senior Lecturer in Literature: Melville Remix and the Melville Electronic Library
2. Harvard Faculty Presentations:
Prof. Peter K. Bol, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Ben Lewis: World Map
Prof. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
3. Brett Bobley (NEH):
Abstract: Brett Bobley, Director of the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, will highlight funding opportunities at the NEH for digital projects. He will also discuss and highlight some recently funded projects in a variety of humanities disciplines. He will provide examples of successful grant proposals and discuss grant writing strategies for digital humanities projects.
HyperStudio participates in MIT-Haiti Symposium
By Anna van Someren on November 1, 2010
HyperStudio participated in the MIT-Haiti “Best Practices for Reconstruction: Technology-enhanced and Open Education in Haitian Universities” Symposium (October 21-22), which brought Haitian University professors together with MIT faculty, staff and technologists to discuss rebuilding Haiti’s educational infrastructure. Based on HyperStudio’s experience in developing educational projects for language and culture, Executive Director Kurt Fendt shared a presentation describing an approach which would engage Haitian students in building identity awareness, linguistic, cultural, and global skills. Given the linguistic situation in Haiti – 90% of Haitians are native speakers of Kreyòl for whom French, as the official language in education, is inaccessible – these skills would be developed through two core educational components: documenting heritage by working closely with planned oral history projects in Haiti and strengthening cultural awareness by developing cross-cultural curricula and integrating them in a variety of university courses.
Links of interest:
Read MIT News article “Build Back Better” on the Haiti Symposium.
Michel DeGraff’s Op-Ed “Language Barrier” in the Boston Globe, June 16, 2010.
Browse photos of the Haiti Symposium.
Photo credit: Jeff Merriman.
Re-Imagining the Archive
By admin on April 21, 2010
THE ROLE OF PROCESS AND DOCUMENTATION IN CREATIVE WORK /
A CASE STUDY OF MIT ACT’S FUTURE ARCHIVE PROJECT
Madeleine Clare Elish, Research Assistant
Part of HyperStudio’s ongoing research agenda in the field of Digital Humanities is to explore the ways in which digital tools can assist and augment humanistic research and education practices. This research paper is to explore what it might mean to create a digital platform that assists and facilitates a creative process. By investigating from a variety of angles a specific case, MIT’s Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) Future Archive Project, we hope to illuminate the possibilities of such an endeavor as well as potential sites of friction. Broadly, this case study stands as an emblem of a current problem facing many humanists – a problem that can and should be addressed through Digital Humanities projects. The complex necessity to gather, store and organize a range of material confronts many humanists, from artists to designers to historians to economists. A platform, such as that described for the Future Archive Project, might be expanded or adapted to any project that involves gathering and displaying material. Moreover, the concept of the walled garden allows this kind of project to be readily adapted to a classroom setting. Above all, this case study demonstrates the great potential digital tools offer in facilitating creative and research processes.
Timeline Visualizations: A Brief and Incomplete Teleological History (Part 1)
By Whitney Anne Trettien on November 4, 2009
Timelines: the blessing and bane of so many digital humanities projects. While tools like SIMILE’s Timeline have made it easier to represent a series of events within the limited space of the screen, the timeline itself — a visualization so natural, so transparent to most users — is increasingly coming under question as means of depicting the complex network of historical relationships. Given that our understanding of temporal modeling has come to a crossroads (ah yes, yet another linear, spatialized conceptual metaphors for time — they’re almost impossible to escape in the English language!), it seems valuable to indulge in some oversimplified teleological history, and trace how the timeline came to be naturalized as the tool for modeling temporally-related events.
The first modern timeline may well be Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg‘s Carne chronographique, produced in 1753. (more…)
Put yourself in Paul Revere’s shoes…
By lisanti on July 27, 2009
Who would YOU call to hang the lanterns?
Rather than simply illustrate the historical narrative of Boston’s Old North Church using primary sources, HyperStudio’s Tories, Timid, or True Blue? asks students to fully assume the role of an historian. The recently launched educational resource, developed in partnership with the Old North Foundation, provides visual access to the social, political, and personal dilemmas of real people at the time of the American Revolution. As the inevitability of the Revolution grew, every person in the American colonies was faced with a difficult dilemma, whether to remain loyal to the Crown, avoid taking sides, or join the fight for liberty and freedom. Their choice: tory, timid, or true blue? (more…)
Why Design?
By mcelish on May 1, 2009
Last weekend my colleague Whitney Trettien and I presented a paper, “Acts of Translation: Digital Humanities and the Archive Interface, at MIT’s Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission conference. In our presentation and paper, we argued for an increased awareness of the importance of design (the presentation and organization of visual information) in Digital Humanities projects. Through the discussion of projects such as NINES, the CHNM’s Object of History, and SFMOMA’s ArtScope, our goal was to show that design is far from “an accessorizing activity.” (See Johanna Drucker’s critique of the reigning attitude toward design Digital Humanities projects.) Indeed, design opens and forecloses interpretative possibilities and essentially influences the ways in which scholars and students can engage with material. (more…)
What is Digital Humanities?
By Whitney Anne Trettien on February 8, 2009
The coalescence of Digital Humanities as a field, a discipline, even (at some institutions) a degree-granting department has been a hot topic lately. Inevitably, a few questions float to the top: What will be our standards, and who will decide them? How can we implement peer-review structures into our project work? What is our canon?
And, perhaps the question I hear most often, even from colleagues in the field: What is Digital Humanities, anyway? (more…)
Social Media Classroom launches
By Whitney Anne Trettien on October 20, 2008
The Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory, a project spearheaded by Howard Rheingold and funded by the MacArthur Foundation, launches this month. I’ll let them explain:
The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. The Collaboratory (or Colab), is what we call just the web service part of it. Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMB materials freely, and we host your Colab communities if you don’t want to install your own.
Tagging Art
By lisanti on October 3, 2008
Major art museums have embarked on a project to include social tagging – by people like you and me – to increase the findability of objects in their collections. The Steve Tagger makes it easy for people to describe works of art in our own words, which can then be used by others. Steve: the Museum Social Tagging Project offers a suite of open source tagging tools, and has the participation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the San Francisco MOMA among others.
