Faculty Grant Projects for 2001-2002

2001-2002 was the first year of STG's faculty grants program. STG awarded five grants, with each grant providing $20,000-$35,000 to cover STG consulting support, additional production costs, and project costs such as equipment or data.

Jeff Titon, Music:

Prof. Titon plans to develop a hypertext-multimedia project. C. L. Franklin, father of the singer Aretha Franklin, was the most popular and influential black preacher of his generation. A combination of brilliant oratory and traditional chanted/intoned poetry of African American preaching was never better represented than in the sermons of C. L. Franklin (d. 1983). Yet he is little known outside of the black communities, where in the 1950s and 1960s he was a media superstar. Fortunately, more than seventy of his sermons are extant on recordings that sold millions of copies during their heyday.

In 1977-78 Prof. Titon held an NEH fellowship to research Franklin extensively, and recorded and videotaped another ten of his sermons. This work resulted in a book, Give Me This Mountain, featuring Franklin's life history and the printed texts of twenty of his oral, spontaneous sermons (arranged partly as oratory and partly as poetry). He would like to publish a multimedia project -- one that would convey the full texts of Franklin's sermons, biographical information, historical and religious context, and most important, highlights from the sound and video footage of Franklin's preaching. He envisions a hypertext/multimedia project involving a searchable text, biography/life history (including sound clips from interviews in which Franklin narrates incidents in his life, Civil Rights, etc.), audio and video footage from his sermons (keyed to the texts), and historical/religious contextual information.

Sheila Bonde, History of Art & Architecture:

Prof. Bonde is planning an interactive multimedia reference plan for the web site related to her research in the ongoing (since 1982) excavation of the medieval abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes in Soissons, France. Bonde is co-director (with Prof. Clark Maines of Wesleyan University) and architect for the project. The research is currently supported by a grant from the Ministre de la Culture in France, in conjunction with the Commission des Monuments Historiques. Current excavation focuses on the Gothic cloister and eastern claustral range. Recent articles consider not only the site of Saint-Jean itself, but also its landed domain, its hydraulic resources and its interactions with the larger urban and rural landscape. She envisions a site plan encoded so that you click on a location and can access a photograph, video clip, verbal information (including the unpublished later customary for the site), and three-dimensional axonometric reconstructions. She would also like to link in a customary, the handbook of how to live in and use the monastery. This is in Latin, would be translated into English, and could also be linked to/from the site plan and other resources.

Massimo Riva, Italian Studies:

Progetto Pico Prof. Riva would like to make available the Theses of Pico de la Mirandola, in Latin and English, and to annotate them. This project would entail entering and marking up in SGML the Theses, and a provision to collaboratively annotate the work, which include, written in Latin: "Conclusiones Nongentae publicae disputandae" (900 Theses), Rome 1486; "Apologia", "Epistulae plures" and "Oratio De Hominis Dignitate" (Oration on the Dignity of Man), both included in the incunabula at the John Hay Library and in Bologna (1496-98). Spanish and German translations could also be added.

The project is also an experiment in collaborative scholarship with wide potential implications (both scholarly and pedagogical) in the areas of Renaissance Studies, Ancient Thought, Classics, Judaic Studies, Religious Studies, History of Art, and the critical electronic editions of texts in general. It could be also linked to both the Decameron Web project and the Catasto/Tratte (in addition to the recently acquired Lectura Dantis) to create a comprehensive gateway into 14th- and 15th-century Florentine culture. Prof. Riva's proposal is a new project that builds on work already accomplished in Bologna, with Brown's participation.

Steven Sloman, Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences:

Prof. Sloman proposes collaborative creation of a tool to create online surveys. He would like to use these questionnaires in order to increase his subject population, and would like a tool so he and his students can build them by themselves.

Shoggy Waryn and Annie Wiart, French Studies:

Profs. Waryn and Wiart propose an online modular system designed so that faculty in French Studies can pick and choose instructional materials for their beginning courses, and start and maintain an annotated web resources database for French materials.