Some Collaborations

This class had a separate lab section where students used digital tools to explore new modes of humanities scholarship.  Curriculum included the introduction to markup languages (xml, html and kml), website publishing, and photo editing for the web. Digital tools used included ftp, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop, Simile Timeline, and Google Timemap. At the end of the semester small groups presented their final website projects that included a timemap that traced the publishing history of a book from the library’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections through time and space. Presentation websites were housed on the Universities’ Courses Server that went offline in 2010.

This class explored the Robin Hood persona in popular media. Students in the class looked at a variety of digital humanities projects published on the web and then had the option of writing a traditional research paper or creating a digital project as a final assessment. River Campus library staff members were recruited to work with students on a variety of projects that ranged from a video compilation of Robin Hood YouTube videos to a java-based program “Which Robin Hood Are You?” Marc Bollmann from the Art/Music Library, Nathan Sarr from the Digital Inititatives unit, Cynthia Carlton from Applications Group, and MMC staff members provided technical support. Gayle Altshuler created a digital archive of objects “Many Forms of Robin Hood: The Paraphernalia” drawn from the exhibit “Manufacturing a Legend: Robin Hood” from the Rossel Hope Robbins Library in Fall 2009.

Students in Professor Alyssa Ney’s Philosophy Quest course “Minds and Machines” explored seminal works in the Philosophical Literature. Philosophy librarian Eileen Daly and MMC head Nora Dimmock worked with Ney’s students to explore the libraries resources and use the Refworks bibliographic citation tool to create “crowd-sourced” annotated bibliographies. With some custom programming the bibliographies could be transformed into KML data files, compatible with the Timemap Project, so the students could see the influence of the work through time and space. Timemap is a javascript library that allows for the integration of a Google Map and a Simile Timeline. As you scroll across the timeline the events appear on the map. Clicking on an event will bring up a “bubble” with more information. Students did not need to learn any code or web technologies- the intellectual focus remained on the philosophical literature.

French Professor Julie Papaioannou from the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures received a grant from the College Teaching and Learning Roundtable (CTLTR) to create an online database of video clips from contemporary French films and enlisted the MMC to manage the project. Three students, Trevor Kellogg, Lendsey Achudi and James Yuzawa, completed a phase of the project. The website is currently available to UR students only.