“Over here,” said Matt Kirschenbaum as he led past the researchers’ desks toward the far side of the room. He stopped and beamed as he pointed toward the corner and said, “Mysty.”
“Mysty” – weighing about 200 pounds and shaped like a small refrigerator — is an IBM MT/ST, the first product ever marketed as a word processor. It is one of the many vintage artifacts at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and one of the resources that makes MITH an institutional leader in digital forensics and preservation.
Kirschenbaum, associate director of MITH [Trevor Owens profiled Kirschenbaum in the Signal in August 2013], walks around the gleaming new center, nodding here and there, talking about MITH’s digital forensics work, its research in digital preservation and access, and the influence of technology on writing. MITH’s area of concentration is digital humanities, which Kirschenbaum describes as a term still very much in flux.
Around 2008, Kirschenbaum’s father found his son’s old Apple IIe, Kirschenbaum’s first computer, and Kirschenbaum brought it to MITH’s offices. He said, “That’s where it seemed to belong. And it still worked.” He set it up in a prominent spot and people seemed to enjoy it, partly, at first, for the nostalgia of the green screen and the 8-bit sound effects. Then UMD staff started offering up their own machines. An Osborne. A Commodore 64. And soon MITH got a campus-wide reputation as a place for cool, vintage technology. The MITH staff came to appreciate vintage technology as valuable resources, especially for accessing outdated games and works that had cultural value; Kirschenbaum characterizes this as “digital archaeology.”
The challenge of restoring and preserving decades-old computer content sharpened MITH’s digital forensics capability and expertise. The next phase of this work was MITH’s participation in the development of BitCurator, a dedicated configuration of equipment and software for digital archivists to safely access just about any data on a range of different devices. Kirschenbaum said, “We can insure the integrity and authenticity of the data stream and then archive and package those data streams with robust metadata.”
MITH has also hosted the Electronic Literature Organization and helped drive ELO’s agenda of preserving born-digital literature. Neil Fraistat, the director of MITH, said, “It was a pressing question to people who were authoring born-digital literary works in the ’80s and early ’90s and worried about whether people would still be able to interact with those works because of changes in platforms, operating systems, software and computers. We could have been on the cusp of a digital dark age as far as our born-digital literary heritage went.”
MITH integrates their collections with University Special Collections. Kirschenbaum said, “We are moving to something like a joint stewardship model between MITH as a humanities center and University Special Collections.”
“The archive has been built with the collections of the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the New York Public Library, the Huntington Library and the Houghton Library,” said Fraistat. “Just among that cluster, we have about 90% of all the known manuscripts of Percy and Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley’s parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. For some we have transcriptions [of handwritten documents]; for some, we don’t. This will be a chance for students to transcribe, correct transcriptions and encode the text. It drives students and the general public deep into the heart of a literary work.
“We wanted to reveal more about what you could find within the website and highlight what parts that various visitors have found most compelling, which almost always has something to do with Frankenstein.”
MITH is forward-thinking in its outreach and training efforts. Last year they started a week-long digital humanities winter institute that was so successful they are continuing it this year but as a summer institute called Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching. Also last year, MITH conducted a program for UMD students and faculty titled the Digital Humanities Incubator. Fraistat said, “We took 50 library faculty and staff members from the University of Maryland libraries and gave them a sequence of four workshops on how to develop digital humanities projects. That was very successful, so we’re building on our incubator model now. It seems like a good investment of the Center’s time to invest in widespread training, to reach a lot more of your faculty and students at once, give them advice and help them get started on things.
Given MITH’s ambitious list of projects, they are clearly building their capacity to address the needs of digital humanities in a wide array of different domains, including but not limited to digital preservation and forensics. Yet there is no question MITH is distinguished by its emphasis on digital forensics, textual scholarship and digital preservation and access. Fraistat said, “I can’t really think of any other digital humanities center that has all these disciplines so deeply interwoven into its own fabric.”
Comments
It’s nearly impossible to find knowledgeable people about this subject, but you sound like you know what you’re talking about! Thanks