Weighing In

By Ashley O'Connor, The Diamondback

Photo courtesy of Victoria Robinson

In light of the 50th anniversary of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities government agencies, a panel met with the University of Maryland's arts and humanities college to discuss the agencies' status and their place in the future.

Jane Chu, the 11th chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and William Adams, the 10th chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, joined Bonnie Thornton Dill, the arts and humanities dean, for the discussion Tuesday evening at the Gildenhorn Recital Hall in the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

"We want all Americans to have an opportunity to be involved in the arts," Chu said.

Sheri Parks, the college's associate dean for research, interdisciplinary scholarship and programming, moderated the conversation in front of about 40 people.

Parks asked the panelists how they believe the arts and humanities can be better integrated in today's society, in which the arts are commonly cut out of school budgets. Entering her current position, Dill said, she had to explain the value it has for students, families and future generations.

Chu said a major problem in declining arts education programs is a lack of participation.

"Eleven million Americans want to participate in the arts, but don't," she said.

Many people who have mobility difficulties could have trouble getting to arts and humanities centers, or feel there are challenges to bringing kids to access the arts, but these barriers can be broken down, Chu said. She mentioned she would like to see arts programs implemented in all public schools.

It's important to show that art education not only provides a skill set, but can also be correlated with better performance in other classes, Chu said. For example, she said, a recent study revealed a correlation between art classes and higher grades in science classes.

"The pipeline is about making kids able to think wisely and be creative, not necessarily like the arts," Chu said.

Read more here.

By Sydney Tonic, The Diamondback

Photo Courtesy of Victoria Robinson

The arts and humanities college partnered with the Office of Diversity & Inclusion and the Office of International Affairs to foster a discussion about the ongoing refugee crisis in the country and what students at this university can do to help.

Sheri Parks, the director for the Center for Synergy and the associate dean for research and interdisciplinary programming in the arts and humanities college, organized the “Thinkathon,” hoping to implement a “think and do” model to involve students in the discussion.

About 15 students gathered for the workshop Friday morning in Stamp Student Union.

“We believe that, along with faculty and staff, students care about major issues of our time, such as the refugee crisis,” Parks said. “We have students here who have been refugees or are the children of refugees.”

Yasmine Taeb, a legislative representative for human rights and civil liberties at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, spoke about the crisis and its human impact at the event. She said the present crisis is devastating and more than 8 million refugees are internally displaced in Syria.

As part of the committee, Taeb lobbies and advocates about refugee-related issues with congressional offices in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. 

“Refugees coming to the U.S. are by far the most scrutinized community of entrance to the U.S.,” Taeb said. “We just don’t feel as though the U.S.’s response to the crisis has been adequate; their response has been quite tepid, at best.” 

Hiba Salih, program manager for youth and health at the International Rescue Committee in Baltimore, and Tyler Stoddard, its development coordinator, also came to talk about the work they do for refugees. Salih, a former refugee from Sudan, explained the difficulties of the life of a refugee coming to this country.

“The major challenges are the trauma that they have been through,” Salih said. “Having to adapt to a new country, new systems … they haven’t seen civilization.”

Read more here. 

by Jordan Branch, The Writer's Bloc

University and College Park community members will participate in an open discussion this Saturday titled Think-A-Thon, an event to promote infusion of the arts and culture into the planning process for revitalizing Baltimore Avenue.

The venue is a “think and do type of event,” using the arts and culture to look for solutions to Route 1 obstacles, said Nicky Everette, the marketing and communications director for the College of Arts and Humanities.

The discussion is hosted by the College of Arts and Humanities’ Center for Synergy at this university and will be held from 2 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the College Park Community Center and Youth Soccer Complex.

For the past two years Think-A-Thons have occurred in Baltimore City to discuss the city’s challenges.

However, this year Sheri Parks, research, interdisciplinary, scholarship and programming associate dean for the College of Arts and Humanities, said it was time to start a discussion in College Park about the future of Baltimore Avenue’s development.

To read more, please click here.

by Nick DiMarco, abc2news

Location, location, location.

Once the maxim of picking prime real estate, location is becoming recognized as the most important feature shaping the future of social and mobile media.

Emerging social media applications focused on location recognition are trying to change the way we see the world. These tools are being used increasingly to mine data from consumers, provide real-time updates of important happenings, take us to events we want to see and in some cases to keep us safe.

Apple iPhone users, for example, may have noticed the emphasis on location technology during the upgrade to iOS7. Thousands of App Store applications were required to request permission of the user’s location before publicly publishing posts. 

It's most prevalent in navigation apps, however social media giants like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram rely on location tagging to connect users to each other and to nearby places. 

“The most pervasive digital technology on the planet is a mobile device,” said Jason Farman, a University of Maryland professor and social/mobile media researcher.

To read more, please click here.

By Paul Voosen, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Sean Pue had an Urdu problem. An assistant professor of South Asian literature at Michigan State University, Mr. Pue was searching for a way to automate his analysis of classical Urdu's internal meter. As an adherent of the small but growing digital humanities movement, he had some coding proficiency, but not enough: Urdu poetry is not based on stress, but on contextual patterns of syllables. His program ran slow, and the problem proved to be, in computational argot, "combinatorially explosive"—the variables piled up, bogging it down.

While at his daughter's ballet class, Mr. Pue mentioned his difficulties to Tracy K. Teal, a microbial ecologist and postdoc at the university. The two had never seen each other on campus, but their girls, best friends, brought the families together. Ms. Teal began to see analogies between how the information in DNA causes proteins to form and the chain of transformations Mr. Pue used to extract Urdu's scansion. Perhaps, she offered, she could help?

The duo were soon in for a surprise, though. The central dogma of biology—that DNA makes RNA makes protein—had nothing on the ballads of Mirza Asadullah Khan. "As we discussed it further," Ms. Teal said, "we actually realized that Urdu poetry is a lot more complicated."

That revelation was one of many packed into a small, two-day meeting at the University of Maryland at College Park that brought together, for the first time, scholars engaged in the digital humanities with scientists from the data-heavy trenches of computational biology.

Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institutes of Health, among others, and held by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, the symposium, titled "Shared Horizons," sought to present the fields together as equals. In application, though, it offered lessons to digital humanists from biology, a field that has already gone through its own, sometimes painful, computational revolution.

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