New Project Funded

Got great news the other day about an NEH Digital Humanities Start Up application I put in. The project’s official title is “Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use,” which I know sounds terribly dry and information science-ish, but this has really been a dream project of mine for a while now. The basic premise is to develop strategies for integrating born-digital literary materials into library special collections—not just the avant garde stuff (hypertext fiction, etc.) but the electronic records of any contemporary author using computers as part of the creative process. Here’s a bit from the announcement, which you can also read in full:

The University of Maryland is pleased to announce the receipt of an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up award, “Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use.” The project, directed by Matthew Kirschenbaum, Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, will involve a series of site visits and planning meetings among personnel working with the born-digital components of three significant collections of literary material: the Salman Rushdie Papers at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (which includes Rushdie’s laptops), the Michael Joyce Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. The meetings and site visits will facilitate the preparation of a larger collaborative grant proposal among the three institutions aimed at developing archival tools and best practices for preserving and curating the born-digital documents and records of contemporary literary authorship.

So if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to boot Salman Rushdie or Norman Mailer’s laptop, we’re going to find out. This is essentially the applied side of what I wrote about in a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education last summer, “Hamlet.doc: Literature in a Digital Age.” I’m working with Kari Kraus here at Maryland, as well as great people at Austin and Emory and we’re all eager to get going. The first meeting will probably be in September. We’ll keep you posted.