Earlier this month the National Endowment for the Humanities announced 28 new awards from their Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants program, including the funding of my proposal to organize and run a two-day API workshop. The workshop will gather 40-50 digital humanities scholars and developers who are using or interested in using APIs in their digital projects, industry leaders who will demonstrate their APIs, and practitioners who will help guide the group through the “working weekend.” The workshop’s abstract is available online.
I was inspired to organize the MITH API workshop by discussion at last year’s NiCHE API workshop, organized by William Turkel. I hope our workshop will build off the success of NiCHE’s event and offer concrete ways that APIs can be integrated into digital humanities projects today. As part of the event, time for hacking/building is scheduled in afternoons to prototype ideas. Video of presentations will be recorded and made available online for those that can’t attend. I’ll blog further details about the API workshop and how to participate in October.
Funded by the same NEH program, congratulations to my colleagues Tanya Clement and Doug Reside on their “Professionalization in Digital Humanities Centers” workshop.
Things have been quiet here at Finding America, but haven’t been slowing down. In January I began a new position at the University of Maryland as Assistant Director of MITH. Joining UMD has been a great opportunity to play a significant role at a growing digital humanities center, and share my experience from working down the road at Center for History & New Media. MITH hosted the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, is home to a talented group team of digital humanists including Neil Fraistat, Matt Kirschenbaum, Doug Reside, and Tanya Clement, and growing, growing, growing! With the recent creation of the Digital Cultures and Creativity living and learning program in the Honors College, new digital humanities faculty positions in the College of Arts and Humanities, and an emerging suite of software tools developed by MITH that I’m managing, it’s proving to be an exciting place to work.
I began heavily blogging not long after starting at CHNM in May 2007, and with that came many posts about my role with Omeka as well as THATCamp. In my job transition I’ve passed the baton on both projects, but I’m pleased that over the last several months they have continued to flourish. Individuals can now sign-up for Omeka.net, a hosted-version of the software which creates an installation of the software without requiring separate website hosting. Earlier this week it was also announced that THATCamp has received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which will provide significant support for the event and its regional events which are spreading everywhere. Related to the big THATCamp announcement is the hiring of Amanda French as Regional THATCamp Coordinator. Congratulations, Amanda!
So what have I been up to? Life has been a great mix of code, travel, concerts, and friends. At UMD I’m managing several grant-funded projects including software development on the Our Americas Archive Partnership with Rice University, and integration of MITH’s AXE annotation tool into Zotero to offer compatibility with the Open Annotation Collaboration. I’ll be presenting the latter development at CNI next month. I’ve also been having a great time working with Alex Quinn of the UMD Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) on a project to develop a Microsoft Surface application for a museum, which I’ll be excited to share more about in a future post.
