Ed Summers (University of Maryland) has published a post on his blog about his collaborations with Matt Kirschenbaum’s Critical Topics in Digital Studies course. The goal of the collaboration between Summers and Kirschenbaum is to “provide a gentle introduction to the use of network analysis, aka graphs, in the digital humanities, while providing the students with some hands on experience using some tools.”

Summers breaks down how working with the demonstration visualizations he created, using MITH’s Research Explorer data, as well as sharing some of his inspiration for the class project (such as Miriam Posner’s Cytoscape tutorials, and a recent conversation with Posner, Thomas Padilla, and Scott Weingart on network visualization pedagogy).

Trevor Owens has posted a terrific interview with Matt Kirschenbaum (Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities). In it, they discuss his involvement in the digital archives and digital forensics communities, the hurdles that born digital materials create, BitCurator, and places like MITH “as inhabiting a kind of ‘third space’ between manuscript repositories processing born-digital collections on the one hand, and computer history museums on the other.”

Regarding what practices to adopt for working with born digital materials in the long-term, Kirschenbaum notes that in some cases the problem is not primarily technical:

[T]he increasing tendency towards preemptive data encryption—practices which will surely become even more commonplace in the wake of recent revelations—threatens to make archival preservation of personal digital content all but unthinkable for entities who lack the resources of the militarized surveillance state. I know of very little that archivists can do in either of these instances other than to educate and advocate (and agitate). They are societal issues and will be addressed through collective action, not technical innovation.

From the position description:

The Project Manager will work with senior MITH staff to conceptualize, implement, and manage digital humanities research work in a collaborative, team-driven environment. The successful candidate will have experience developing and administering collaborative research projects and events; strong oral and written communications skills; experience writing for, and working with, academic and public audiences; and an interest in digital research methods and tools.