May 4, 2001
Electronic poetry, interpretive videos of Spanish texts, digitizing court records, oral histories of 1970s campus activism and high-tech costume design are among the faculty projects earning funding this spring through the Arts & Sciences Technology and Curriculum Initiative.
This is the second year that Edward S. Macias, Ph.D., executive vice chancellor and dean of Arts & Sciences, has made a $100,000 provision for faculty members to enhance their teaching with technology. Project proposals are evaluated by a committee co-chaired by Dennis J. Martin, associate vice chancellor and associate dean in Arts & Sciences, and James W. Davis, Ph.D., director of the Teaching Center and professor of political science in Arts & Sciences.
The following Arts & Sciences faculty projects were funded last month:
J. Andrew Brown, assistant professor of Spanish, received funding to teach literary interpretation in Spanish classes by having students create interpretive videos of the text they are studying. This new focus on literature and culture will combine textual and image-based study and will utilize digital video camcorders and a high-powered laptop.
Leslie Brown, assistant professor of history, was awarded a grant to develop the first phase of a program in oral history. In this initial phase, up to 10 students in American Culture Studies will be selected as interns to interview University alumni from the early '70s on the topic of campus activism. The students will conduct interviews and digitize and archive the material for future research purposes.
Funding will be used to provide recording hardware to be used in the field and lab equipment to digitize, edit and archive the material. The project will assess the use of this material in coursework and the extent to which the results support student research activities, such as seminar papers, summer research projects and senior honors theses.
Peter Kastor, assistant director of American Culture Studies, will oversee a multidisciplinary project that received funding to support the Historic Circuit Court Records Digitization Project, a massive collection of materials dating back to the 1790s. Graduate and undergraduate students will work with American Culture Studies, history, and legal studies, as well as University Libraries and the state archives to develop the protocols for scanning and cataloging selected items from these court records. These protocols in turn will establish models for use in other digitization projects on campus. The searchable image database created through this project will be used in a variety of courses.
Bonnie Kruger, senior artist in residence in the Performing Arts Department, led an effort to acquire software and hardware to incorporate greater use of technology in theater production and costume design courses. Importantly, the equipment will be useful to a wider group of faculty and students and will be made available as part of an emerging media lab in Eads Hall.
Steven Meyer, associate professor of English, received funding for a laptop and for courses he'd like to take in HTML and XML. This will support a course Meyer will teach on electronic poetry. He and his students will be investigating the extent to which electronic poetry is actually poetry rather than "screen art." An assessment will determine whether or not the course has achieved its chief aims --to provide students with tools to evaluate electronic works of art and to understand the nature of writing in a new, technology-driven century.
For more information on the Technology and Curriculum Initiative, contact Kathy Atnip, director of academic support for Arts & Sciences (kathy@artsci. wustl.edu), Liz Peterson, associate director of the Teaching Center (liz@artsci.wustl.edu), or Martin (djm@artsci.wustl.edu).
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