There’s a fascinating piece in today’s New York Times about Peter Greenaway’s digital video installation of Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana.” Greenaway has put a digital reproduction of the original painting in the place where it was displayed until taken by Napoleon in 1797 to wind up in the Louvre. And he has complemented that digital reproduction with videos that illustrate aspects of the painting. Some of the videos seem to be playful digressions while others seem to draw out the themes of the painting in ways that art historians would envy. Roberta Smith calls it “the best unmanned art history lecture you’ll ever experience.”

Back when I was working for Digital Learning Interactive, one of our flagship ideas was called “Exploring a Renaissance Painting,” which took Raphael’s “School of Athens” and created hot links to the various images and themes in the painting. You see Aristotle in the painting, you click on him to learn more about Aristotle and how he was perceived in the Renaissance. It appears as if Greenaway’s production is much more passive in terms of user experience (you get what Greenaway wants you to see, not what you can click on) but it must be several orders of magnitude more impressive in its production values.

The Veronese installation is the third by Greenaway in a reported series of up to nine. The first installation was of Rembrandt’s “Night Watch.” It is now available on DVD and Lisa will order a copy for her Stockton courses.

Final Efforts

three of Jumpstart at Stockton’s Tech Academy. More work at ironing out the kinks in using Picasa to create albums of medical recipe books – or at least understanding the kinks well enough to work around them. Google didn’t really design Picasa for collaborative work: though I can invite other Google account holders to add comments, they can’t add tags. Nor can they do much in the way of manipulating images. The only way they can have full access to Picasa features when working with the images is to log in under my account, but then I don’t have any easy way to keep track of the work contributed by each individual student. Picasa should really be set up to have blog-like capabilities, where one person (me) can have access to administrative features, while my students can all have access to “contributor” features, including the ability to tag images. Google Picasa developers, are you listening?

Wimba Interlude

In the afternoon we had a 2-hour introduction to Wimba technology, which creates a live classroom environment. It really is amazing: entire courses and conferences can be set up online, with full interactivity among participants. I am particularly intrigued by the possibility of setting up virtual break-out rooms, so that specific sets of participants can have access to specific materials, analyze them, discuss them, then rejoin the main group. I don’t expect to be using it any time soon – I want to see my history students face to fact, thank you, and we prefer the library, the real library, for break-out discussion – but it is intriguing to think how the technology might be useful. How about setting up a Live Classroom for a review the night before a test? Or a question-and-answer session just before a paper is due?

Final Wrap-Up

And finally, fortified with coffee, we met to present the results of the three-day intensive digital experience. I’ll skate over my own presentation — if you’ve made it this far through the blog, you already know all about it — and concentrate on my Jumpstart colleagues. Nora Palugod learned how to harness the power of Wimba to create live classrooms so her students could discuss global management issues with their counterparts in the Philippines. Lyn Mathis used the screen recording software Camtasia to put herself and her computer applications lesson into a wonderfully sleek package. We were awestruck as, with the click of a button or two, her voice and her lesson appeared before us on the presentation screen. And students can stop, replay, and fast forward to any part of her demonstration, unlike in real life. Fang Liu migrated a substantial portion of her course online to Blackboard, organizing lectures, problem sets, and assessments neatly according to date, and incorporating appealing graphics. And Jo Ann McEnerney won the award for Completion-of-Project-in-Shortest-Possible-Time, using Blackboard and Wimba, to carry out the complex task of turning her Financial Accounting course from classroom-based to distance education. She had the whole thing up and running by the end of the three day workshop, just in time for the start of her class three days later.

Reflections on Digital Projects @ a Liberal Arts College

The Summer Tech Academy at Stockton College is a solution to one of the ongoing issues in how to bring the promise of digital humanities to the liberal arts college environment. Faculty may be reluctant to buy in to digital technologies — especially if they believe, as we faculty often do, that neither their discipline nor their institutions may reward them for the extra work involved. By bringing together faculty who already have identified a way to improve a specific course with facilitators who can help them use technology to make that improvement, and also by providing one-on-one tech support, unlimited access to targeted software and hardware, and a stipend to boot, the Summer Tech Academy overcomes some of the most serious barriers to entry to the digital world. And making it easier to become tech savvy is the surest way to make work in the digital humanities relevant to the wider academic community.

Digital Humanities on Youtube

Here are a few of Youtube’s offerings in the Digital Humanities — any thoughts?

The Foundations and Future of Digital Humanities, from the 2007 HASTAC conference:

The Digital Humanities: A Mediated Translation — The Remix: