Text Rain

Text RainText Rain is an interactive installation in which viewers play with the falling text of a poem. The text responds to motion and can be caught, lifted and released to fall again. If participants accumulate enough letters along their outstretched arms, or along the silhouette of any dark object, they can read words and phrases formed by the falling letters. With active participation the text of the poem “Talk, You” by Evan Zimroth can be gradually reconstructed. As Utterback and Achituv put it, “Zimroth’s poem creates metaphorical bridges between the physical and the linguistic. It employs images of the body moving through space to speak of interpersonal relationships, illustrating how ‘meanings’ come together and fall apart through transient ‘syntactical’ spatial relationships.”

MITH Announces Spring Speakers Schedule

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park—ELO’s host institution as of July 1, 2006—is pleased to release its Spring Speakers Schedule. Between our weekly seminar series Digital Dialogues and a variety of special guests we are bringing to campus in partnership with other campus units, we are able to offer speakers and events in the digital humanities and electronic literature every week of the spring semester.

Alongside of showcasing a diverse array of current research by MITH’s Fellows and College Park faculty, MITH will host or co-host talks by such distinguished visitors as Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker (University of Virginia), Alan Liu (UCSB), Joseph Tabbi (UIC), Scott Rettberg (Richard Stockton College, and co-Founder of the Electronic Literature Organization), Shelley Jackson (author of Patchwork Girl and Skin), and Scott McCloud (author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics).

MITH is located on the basement level of McKeldin Library. Unless otherwise noted, all talks are Tuesdays at 12:30 in the MITH Conference Room and are free and open to the public.

Call for Net Art Proposals: Turbulence.org

Turbulence announces a call for proposals for Turbulence New England Initiative II: Net Art and Hybrid Networked Art Competition. Three commissions of $3,500 each will be awarded by jurists Julian Bleeker, Michele Thursz, and Helen Thorington. Commissioned works will be exhibited on Turbulence.org and at Art Interactive. For more information, visit Turbulence.org. Proposal deadline is February 28, 2006.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Creates Center for Digital Research in the Humanities

The new Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln aims to advance “collaborative, interdisciplinary research in the humanities by creating unique digital content, developing text analysis and visualization tools, and advancing knowledge of international standards and their implications for humanities computing.”

Co-directed by Kenneth M. Price and Katherine L. Walter, the CDRH will support research faculty fellowships, a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, and the Nebraska Digital Workshop to showcase and improve digital humanities work for outstanding early-career scholars.

The inaugural workshop will be held September 22-23, 2006. The CDRH invites proposals for presentations from advanced graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, and pre-tenure faculty. Selected scholars will receive full travel funding and an honorarium, and will have the opportunity to present their work to senior scholars in the humanities. Deadline for application to participate in the first Nebraska Digital Workshop is May 1, 2006. Visit the CDRH for additional information, or contact workshop committee Chair William G. Thomas, III.

Postdoctoral Fellowship at De Montfort University

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral research fellowship on a new project, led by Professor Sue Thomas, entitled “Interdisciplinary Applications of Experimental Social Software to the study of Narrative in Digital Contexts”. This one-year post will be jointly based in the Institute of Creative Technologies and the Faculty of Humanities at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

The successful applicant will have a major role in “the survey and evaluation of collaborative social software tools and their application to people-to-people models of transdisciplinary knowledge-sharing in relation to narratives in a digital context.”

Qualifications include a Ph.D., proven knowledge of narrative in digital environments, experience in managing web-based collaborative tools; a substantial understanding of the technical aspects of the project, including knowledge of HTML, databases, data collection and analysis skills.

The deadline for applications is March 17, 2006.

Get additional information and apply online by visiting De Montfort University’s employment website.

Informal inquiries may be made to Sue Thomas.

Moving Toward the Light

Moving Toward the LightChristy Sheffield Sanford’s “Moving Toward the Light: A Meditation for the Solstice” is one of the remarkable pieces created by this unusual artist and poet. Known for her use of color and light, Sanford’s work often broke new ground in Web practice. This piece, created in 1997, uses sound, Java Applets, layers, motion, highlighted backgrounds, and mouseovers to explore the many moods of the Winter Solstice. Sanford is well known for her work as a trAce Writer in Residence, for her collaborative Madame de Lafayette’s Book of Hours, and for works such as “Water~Water~Water” (with Reiner Strasser), “Rockgarden of Love,” “Moon Swimming,” and “Bodies of Water: Fountain Albertas.”

MITH Digital Dialogue on William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition

MITH’s (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanites) first Digital Dialogue of the spring 2006 semester will be a discussion of William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition (2003), on Tuesday, Feb. 7th at 12:30 P.M. in the MITH seminar room.

Pattern Recognition has been widely received as Gibson’s most significant and prescient work since he coined the term “cyberspace” in Neuromancer in 1984.

Our discussion will be the basis for three additional Digital Dialogues, to be held at intervals throughout the semester, each of which will explore the general theme of “pattern recognition,” a heuristic for much of MITH’s current research, in varied contexts.

MITH is located in McKelden Library on the campus of the University of Maryland, College Park. Click here for map and directions.

Beautiful Portrait

Beautiful Portrait“Beautiful Portrait” is featured in a recent issue of Born Magazine. In keeping with the mission of the magazine to combine designers and writers, the poem itself is written by Thom Swiss and the Flash animation is the creation of Motomichi Nakamura. Although there is no written text, the Flash sequence is accompanied by a synthetic voice that delivers the poem as the reader explores a grid pattern of accented silhouettes. The action of the reader escalates the tone and imagery of the piece, bringing about a surprising finish. Thom Swiss, well known in critical and scholarly literature, has written new media poetry for several years — his works include “The Dream Life,” “Hey Now” (also with Motomichi Nakamura), “Shy Boy,” and “City of Bits.”

Glazier, Carpenter, Moulthrop to Read at Penn

The MACHINE reading series at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House, co-sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization, will include two programs in Spring 2006.

February 15, 5:30pm: Loss Pequeño Glazier (University of Buffalo, author of Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries, numerous digital works, and Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm) joins Penn’s own Jim Carpenter (creator of the Electronic Text Composition system) to take the Writers House to the limits of computing and poetry. The program will be hosted by poet and critic Charles Bernstein (With Strings, My Way: Speeches and Poems, Republics of Reality: 1975-1995). The February 15 “Constructing Poets” program is co-sponsored by the Penn Creative Writing Program.

April 19, 5:30pm: Stuart Moulthrop (University of Baltimore) will read from early and recent work. For more than fifteen years Moulthrop has been writing digital works, which include Victory Garden, Hegirascope, Reagan Library, and Pax. One of the most-discussed writers from what Robert Coover called the “golden age” of hypertext, Moulthrop continues to innovate. He has developed his electronic writing in HyperCard, Storyspace, HTML, Quicktime VR, and Flash.

Both events are free and open to the public, no registration required. The Kelly Writers House is at 3805 Locust Walk on the Penn campus.