Matthew Kirschenbaum to speak at UCLA

IS Colloquium Series
Matt Kirshenbaum
April 21, 2011 3-5pm
GSEIS 111
Reception in 2nd Floor Salon

Title: Born-Digital Humanities: Toward A Research Agenda

Abstract: Much has been made lately of digital humanities, which has rapidly become institutionalized and professionalized as a research paradigm at the intersection of cultural heritage, digital tools and technologies, big data, and humanistic scholarship. Yet digital humanities has had surprisingly little contact with researchers in digital preservation and personal digital archiving, an omission all the more surprising given that our born-digital archives of today will be the cultural heritage of tomorrow. In this talk I will draw from my experiences on three recent projects, each of which served to educate me in various aspects of digital preservation practice: Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use, which included archivists at the Ransom Center and Emory University; Preserving Virtual Worlds, a multi-institutional collaboration adopting a case-study approach; and Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, which resulted in a published report for CLIR. Each of those projects suggests ways in which a research agenda at the intersection of digital humanities, digital preservation, and personal digital archives might be cultivated, and I will use this talk to elaborate them. The issues will be framed in relation to wider topics, including digital materiality, retro computing, digital legacies, and computer history.

Bio: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied thinktank for the digital humanities), and Director of Digital Cultures and Creativity, a living/learning program in the Honors College. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, a Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in 2008 and won the 2009 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS), the 2009 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), and the 16th annual Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association (MLA). In 2010 he co-authored (with Richard Ovenden and Gabriela Redwine) Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, a report published by the Council on Library and Information Resources. Kirschenbaum speaks and writes often on topics in the digital humanities and new media; his work has received coverage in the Atlantic, New York Times, National Public Radio, Wired, Boing Boing, Slashdot, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. See http://www.mkirschenbaum.net for more information.