UMBC Professor Helen J. Burgess was recognized has for creating "the first truly digital dissertation in the United States" by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. Dr. Burgess is an Associate Professor of English in the Communication and Technology track and specializes in digital humanities.
Her 2003 doctoral dissertation, Highways of the mind: the haunting of the superhighway from the World's Fair to the World Wide Web, was completed at West Virginia University.
In addition to the recognition, Dr. Burgess received an Innovative ETD Award from NDLTD for her work.
“In Helen J. Burgess’ doctoral dissertation ‘Highways of the mind: the haunting of the superhighway from the World's Fair to the World Wide Web’ she produced the first truly digital dissertation in the United States which took full advantage of a Web-based format — incorporating an HTML and multimedia environment. Her dissertation consists of well-organized Web pages, persistence index links, photographs as well as video and audio clips linked throughout the document. This allows the reader to completely immerse into the digital environment and provide immediately accessible examples indicated in textual format. As a true testament to time and durability, Burgess’ ETD is still as functional today as the day it was posted online a decade ago. The bundle of dissertation files contain the Web page version as well as a "linear" book format version in PDF format, along with copies of all multimedia objects preserved in their original format, for preservation purposes.”