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.

Hi,

I’m not Lisa.

But I will be taking on her role at the upcoming Digital Humanities 09 Conference in College Park, MD. I will be blogging from the conference, which begins with a keynote speech by Lev Manovich on Monday evening, June 22. If I can manage, I will even do some “live blogging.”

DH09 is the joint international conference of ALLC and ACH, the most prominent umbrella organizations for digital humanists. Depending on how you want to date things, it has run continously since 1973 (when ALLC held its first conference), 1989 (when ALLC and ACH held their first joint conference), or 2006 (when the joint ALLC/ACH conference was first called “Digital Humanities 06″). The conference alternates between North America and Europe. Last year’s meeting was at the University of Oulu in Finland. Next years meeting has not been set. Who knows, if the South Jersey Center for Digital Humanities @ Stockton College flourishes, the international community of digital humanities might descend upon Jimmie Leeds Road one day!

Here’s a link to the abstract book for the conference. Take a look. I’ve got a few ideas for sessions I want to see, but you can feel free to make your own recommendations.

John

Back to Basics: The Library

We reassemble on Thursday morning, and Jed Morfit and I betake ourselves and our equipment to the library to work through the process of putting a hypothetical medical recipe book, created by a hypothetical student, online so we can work with it in Picasa. At this point I should pause and explain the purpose of the assignment. Medical recipe books are fascinating historical documents, essentially scrapbooks of medical recipes taken from books or newspapers, or suggested by family members, friends, and medical professionals. They are like family cookbooks except that they deal with diseases and injuries, and in fact many scrapbooks combine notes and recipes for medical matters, household hints, and cooking. Like cookbooks, they were often passed down within a family, so that they include several generations’ worth of recipes. The College of Physicians of Philadelphia has a fine collection of them, which I’ve used for research and presentations. The important things about them for my history of medicine course are: 1) they perfectly encapsulate the patients’-eye view of disease, because they show what their patient-owners think is important, rather than what a medical professional might or might not think, and 2) they illustrate the different ways that people from different cultures make sense of disease.

Over the past few years I’ve had great success in having students create their own medical recipe books. I give them strict guidelines about length and content, and encourage them to collect recipes from their own family, friends, and medical professionals. Often they’ll take great pains with content and presentation, and the recipe books become a record of a kind of oral tradition in medicine. Since southern New Jersey has a fairly diverse population, students’ recipe books usually encompass a wide range of cultural traditions. But unfortunately we don’t usually get to discuss them as a class, because the assignments are handed into me, graded, and then returned. I could build a class discussion into the course, but it would be most productive if students had previously interacted in some way with each other’s recipe books. I would also like to expand the project to include medical artifacts, like aspirin bottles, which could be compared to medical artifacts held in the Mutter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

Taking Pictures

This is what has brought us to the library to develop a workable process. We stake out a couple of carrels away from summer school students and set up shop. Our digital equipment consists of 1) a laptop with Picasa installed 2) a digital camera 3) a card reader. Our game plan is to assume that students have brought in their medical recipe books on the assigned day, together with other artifacts, like aspirin bottles. They will be handed a digital camera, told to take a picture of themselves (for record-keeping purposes), then to take pictures of each page of their recipe books and each artifact.

So we locate a copy of Gray’s Anatomy to serve as a trial recipe book. We quickly determine that reflecting light is a factor: we may need to set up a specific place within my classroom where we can control the light source. We also determine that it’s hard for me to hold the camera steady: we may have to set up a tripod for the camera, and arrange the recipe books accordingly. Once the images are in the camera, though, moving them to my laptop is easy enough. I attach the card reader, insert the memory card from the camera, and copy the images into a newly-created folder (to protect the originals). start Picasa on my laptop, and create an album called Gray’s Anatomy Trial. We discuss whether any part of this process should be done by students, and decide that they could certainly take the pictures. But it will minimize opportunities for disaster if I then take the camera from them and take care of the rest of the upload process myself. Students can re-connect with the images when they are safely stored online.

Multiplying Googles

We are ready to begin the next phase, syncing to the online version of Picasa so students can have access to the files. But Jed points out to me that I don’t really want to use my own Google account, the one I use for my Google calendar and so on, for my classes. It would give students — and potentially the rest of the world — too much information about me. Much better to create a new Google account, with its own gmail, specifically for class purposes. The next little while is taken up with multiplying Google accounts needlessly, as it takes me several tries to hit on a set of usernames and passwords that would be useful for other products as well as Picasa, and other courses as well as history of medicine. The formalities attended to, I sync the albums. Jed and I take turns tagging images and sending each other posts. We realize this can be a perfect solution to the student-interactivity issue: Once the images of their medical recipe books and artifacts are online, students can be assigned to adding tags, using Picasa’s search tools to analyze images, and writing thoughtful and perceptive comments.

But that means they will each need a Google account, and they will have to be taught how to use Picasa which, though intuitive to us, may not be for them. And so we put away all our equipment — for the moment — and discuss how my medical recipe assignment, once just one among several course projects, will have to be moved front and center. I will have to schedule time in the computer lab at the beginning of the course, so that students can sign up for Google accounts; I will have to build in follow-ups and drafts during the semester; and I will have to make sure we have enough time for the digital process we’ve modeled as the end of term approaches. It will be — to be frank — a lot more work than I expected. But it will also be a lot more exciting, a chance to for us as a class to create something innovative and significant.

It’s been a day both productive and exhausting.

To be continued…

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: