That was the topic of conversation at the latest Mellon Funded Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) held at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) between October 22^nd-October 23^rd,2012. MATRIX Associate Director Ethan Watrall was invited to attend this institute, which focused on discussing what skills and pedagogical needs graduate students in the humanities will require to succeed in the digital age— as well as how traditional and digital humanities centers can intervene effectively in the transmittal of those skills and pedagogical processes to best prepare graduate students for traditional and alternative academic careers.

Dr. Watrall was part of a select group of invited attendees which comprised of directors and associate directors of various digital humanities and traditional humanities centers, along with deans and department chairs. Among the initiatives and programs central to the discussion was the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative Grad Fellowship Program and the Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool, both of which are directed by Watrall.

To learn more about the Scholarly Communication Institute, or to read about upcoming and past institutes, visit their website. Or, to view the survey results that informed and prompted this institute, view Karina Rogers’ SCI presentation on the perceptions of career preparation in humanities graduate programs.

MATRIX’s Assistant Director Ethan Watrall has been invited to give a talk at the prestigious Microsoft Faculty Summit. He traveled to Redmond, Washington on Monday, July 16^th to participate in the two day conference and exhibition.

Watrall is speaking in a session organized by Donald Brinkman, manager of external programs in digital humanities, digital heritage, and games for learning at Microsoft Research. The session is entitled “Big Heritage, Big Quilts, and Big Canvasses” and also features Anne Balsamo— director of the AIDS Memorial Quilt— and Andries van Dam— a leader in pen-and-touch computing research from Brown University.

Watrall’s talk is entitled “Big Data, Small Stories: Community, Collaboration, and User Experience in the Age of Digital Cultural Heritage.” He frames his talk in the context of two MATRIX projects: the Quilt Index and Slave Biographies. The Quilt Index collects metadata about quilts and quilt ephemera from all around the world and the Slave Biographies project organizes information on individual slaves that were bought and sold in the Atlantic region.

In his lecture, Watrall plans to show how big datasets can, and should, be used to tell personal stories. He argues that, more often than not, large databases are used solely for the purposes of seeing large trends and patterns. This leaves out the equally important task of telling individual narratives and biographies. This dual purpose has been exemplified by both the Quilt Index in their attempt to preserve quilt stories and the Slave Biographies database in its attempt to create individual slave profiles.

His talk will also explore how large databases can be a source of community building and collaboration. Both the Quilt Index and the Slave Biographies projects exist because of high levels of collaboration and data sharing between various scholars, museums, public institutions, and individuals. Watrall will demonstrate how these shared repositories can create a sense of community and belonging between previously disparate people and organizations.

Finally, Watrall will demonstrate how large databases can be translated into multi-modal, user-centered interfaces. In particular, he will talk about the Quilt Index’s development of an iPhone application that serves selected quilt data to an individual’s mobile device.

The Microsoft Faculty Summit attempts to serve as a bridge between Microsoft’s technology experts and the academy with the purpose of exploring new opportunities and challenges in computer science research. In addition to Ethan Watrall, MATRIX director Dean Rehbergerhas also been asked to attend as an invited observer. To view a live stream of the conference, visit the Microsoft Faculty Summit website.

On May 26^th, the Haaretz Daily Newspaper, a popular Israeli news outlet, released a full-length article focused on the Samaritan Archive project, a collaborative endeavor lead by two U.S. researchers and universities: Dr. Jim Ridolfo of the University of Cincinnati (UC) and Dr. William Hart-Davidson of Michigan State University (MSU).

The article contained an extensive interview with Ridolfo, who is studying the Samaritan people’s attitudes towards the circulation of their books through a Middle East and North Africa Regional Research Fulbright fellowship. The Fulbright is split between the West Bank Fulbright program and the Israel Fulbright program, due to the fact that the Samaritan people live half in the Palestinian Authority, West Bank and half in Israel. Ridolfo talked about how he became interested in the Samaritan Archives during his time as a graduate student at MSU and how that initial interest grew into the dynamic and internationally acclaimed project it is today.

The Samaritan Archives project seeks to digitize thousands of ancient, sacred Samaritan texts and make them available to the Samaritan community that produced them. You may ask why, if the texts are Samaritan in origin, they are not already available to the Samaritan people. The answer is rooted in the Samaritan’s complex and chaotic past. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the Samaritan people faced a growing state of poverty. To counter this, they sold their ancient texts and manuscripts to foreign collectors in exchange for monetary goods.

One of these foreign collectors was a Michigan industrialist and philanthropist named Edward Warren. He bought a number of ancient manuscripts that were later donated to MSU by his children. It is these papers that have now become known as the Samaritan Archives.

In the Haaretz article, Ridolfo focuses on how this digitization effort has a strong user-experience component that goes along with it. The goal of this project is not just to make an online repository of Samaritan texts for scholarly purposes, but to create a digital tool that current Samaritans can use to reconnect with their ancient texts and culture. This could eventually include things like Facebook tools, websites, and cell-phone applications. The article focuses on the novelty of this approach saying, “This is an innovative approach that places an emphasis on the users of digitized data— in this case, the Samaritan community— while the project is being planned and designed.”

The Samaritan Archives project is another example of MATRIX’s commitment to digitizing endangered texts, designing user-centered interfaces, and building international partnerships. We are encouraged and excited that this work is being recognized by international news media and hope to engage in many more of these projects in the future. Says Ridolfo of his experiences in Israel, “I’m confident that the work I’ve done here will help make the ongoing grant work with MSU MATRIX and MSU WIDE that much more rewarding for the Samaritans. I’ve collected data that shows how such a cultural-digital infrastructure will matter to the lives of community members.”

To learn more about the Samaritan Archives, please read the Haaretz article (in both Hebrew and English), visit Jim Ridolfo’s personal website, or check out other international media that has also focused on this story— including the A.B. Samaritan news, the Samaritan’s only newspaper. Also, be on the lookout for Digital Samaritans, Ridolfo’s upcoming book on the Samaritan Archives project.

As part of MATRIX’s collaborative IMLS grant to develop best practices for conducting oral history in a digital age, Scott Pennington, Head of MATRIX’s Digital Lab, traveled to New York recently to meet with the Oral History in the Digital Age (OHDA) Video curating group and advisors. Participants, including collaborators from the private sector as well as Columbia University Library, began to outline and write best practices for collecting and curating digital video for oral historians. The group’s ultimate goal is to identify new methods for collecting, curating, and distributing data as oral history moves from analog audio to digital video recording. The OHDA best practices guide is on target to enter final draft status by the end of April.

In conjunction with the Department of History at Michigan State University, MATRIX conducted a three-day training workshop and nearly one week post-workshop consulting at the National Records Service in Banjul, The Gambia.  Professor Walter Hawthorne, Chair of the Department of History; Scott Pennington, Head of Digitization at MATRIX; and Bala Saho, The Gambia’s Director General of the National Counsel for Arts and Culture, coordinated with local archive staff to assess and begin preservation and digitization of important 19th century government records.

This work is made possible by generous funding from the Endangered Archives Program at the British Library, and was featured on The Gambian Television and Radio Services News Broadcast.

The King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives, part of the Saudi National Museum and home to the Saudi National Archives, invited Matrix to come to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and consult on digitization. Scott Pennington, Head of Matrix’s Digital Lab, flew to Riyadh to conduct a workshop on digitization with an emphasis on audio and video digitization. Matrix and the King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives hope to form future partnerships.