Faculty Grant Projects for 2002-2003
2002-2003 was the second year of STG's faculty grants program.
Katherine Goodman, German Studies:
Katherine Goodman has been studying the 18th c. poet Luise Kulmus (Gottsched), as an exemplary figure of the German Enlightenment. Kulmus, born in Danzig, married Johann Christoph Gottsched, an important figure in the German enlightenment who was influenced primarily by French culture and reflected its style and ideas. To help counter this image of the German Enlightenment Goodman will present Kulmus, who grew up in Danzig, a major seaport with strong trading and intellectual ties to England and Holland. Luise Kulmus had access and was open to ideas from England much earlier than many in the interior of Germany. The advent of German interest in English literature is routinely dated at around 1750, but Luise Kulmus brought her interest into her marriage with Gottsched in 1735. Throughout the remainder of her life (until 1762) she worked full-time at his side and introduced works of the English Enlightenment (Addison, Steele, Pope) to German audiences (by translating them and reviewing them in her husband's periodicals).
This project will look at the young Kulmus through her and her husband's writing. It will contain short essays and notes by Goodman herself as well as images from the period. STG is developing data structures for the text documents, and devising a hypertextual structure that will guide readers along Goodman's arguments, as well as allow them to explore the information on their own.
Thomas Kniesche, German Studies:
Thomas Kniesche works on German cultural history of the 1960s German science fiction television series. This project will result in an electronic publication which analyzes the series, and provides documentary materials for this kind of cultural study. The links between the text (the TV series), the analyses or readings of the text, and the documentary materials open up new vistas of research and understanding. Using categories such as "Genre," "Medium," "Historical Context," "Gender Roles," "Anti-Americanism," "Militarism," and "Reception" (and, possibly, others), the project will use the TV series to examine West German popular culture of the 1960s and provide insight into the postwar ideology and aesthetics of this critical period in German history. The electronic format of the project is a crucial component of this undertaking. When certain parts of the text, documents on the historical and cultural background of the text and critical readings can be easily combined and juxtaposed, new perspectives become available and fresh insights might be produced.
STG is designing an online publication that can incorporate offline materials, and working on the thematic organization with Prof. Kniesche.
David Pingree and Kim Plofker, History of Mathematics:
David Pingree and Kim Plofker have been part of a group of scholars working to compile a descriptive bibliography of South Asian manuscripts in American collections employing the languages and scripts of South Asia (e.g., Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, Hindi and other Indo-Aryan vernaculars, and the Dravidian languages), accompanied by detailed bibliographical and prosopographical information about their contents and their creators. Tens of thousands of these manuscripts exist in North American collections; all genres of literature in South Asian and Islamic cultures, from scientific to religious to literary works (some standard texts, and some extremely rare), are represented. Their potential value to scholarship cannot yet be assessed, though it is easy to point to specific known manuscripts which would potentially contribute greatly to our understanding of certain texts and literary genres. Experience indicates that as much as three-quarters of the texts preserved in the manuscripts have never been published, and that many of these texts are uniquely preserved in an American manuscript or exist in only a few other collections elsewhere in the world.
An early prototype of the ACSAM database exists, in proprietary software, created by STG and Plofker. This faculty grant will convert the database user interface and delivery engine from its present format to a more robust and powerful standards-based format. The catalogue's delivery engine will be able to perform customized searches of the underlying XML database and to deal successfully with non-roman and transliteration scripts, including transliteration variants and right-to-left character processing.
R. Burr Litchfield, History
R. Burr Litchfield has been the driving force behind two
well-known databases of Renaissance Florentine census and voting
records. The Catasto, containing the census data of 1427, was one of
STG's earliest projects. He received an NEH grant to publish the
Tratte, a database of of men who held office or who were candidates
for office in Florence from 1282-1532. STG had created the database
that was published on the web, and the web interface. New information
was discovered in the Florentine archives during the course of the
NEH grant, so this faculty grant will be used to incorporate the new
data, and to fine tune the existing Tratte interface.
Julie Strandburg, Theatre, Speech, and Dance:
Julie Strandberg is creating an archive of American contemporary dance materials, and developing ways to make that material accessible to scholars and students.
The New Dance Group, a collective of dancers, choreographers and teachers in New York City in the 1930s-1950s was one of the first integrated arts organizations in the country. Its members were also political activists who believed that dance could bring about social change. They were committed to creating dances that had social importance and to make those dances accessible to the masses. Because of this mission and because of the diversity of the group, the study of their lives and the works they created provide reach resources for the cultural study of mid-20th century America. Strandberg and the American Dance Legacy Institute have collected archival and anecdotal material about the New Dance Group, created documentaries about members of the Group, developed lesson plans on the Group for K-12 teachers, created dance and music notation scores and captured music on compact discs.
Strandberg and her students have already started to create databases and a website for this projects. STG will work with them to plan and start developing the overall interface and to develop the underlying databases.
Thalia Field, Robert Coover, Carole Maso, and John Keene, Creative Writing Program
Thalia Field, Robert Coover, Carole Maso, and John Keene will plan and create a specification for an innovative online creative journal. The journal will be innovative in two respects. First, it will publish experimental, interdisciplinary creative work from nationally-recognized artists and writers. Second, it will make innovations in electronic publishing - both in how work is presented on the journal's electronic pages and in how it is sent out into other electronic contexts.
Kerry Smith, History
Kerry Smith (History) is doing the research for his next book, a social and cultural history of the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923. That disaster destroyed much of Yokohama and Tokyo; the tremors did considerable structural damage, but most of the 100,000 or so deaths were the result of the fires that swept through urban neighborhoods in the hours after the initial shocks. Over the next few days, as rumors spread that Korean and Chinese residents were engaged in acts of looting and sedition, ad hoc groups of vigilantes, with the cooperation of members of the armed forces, massacred as many as several thousand Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese mistaken for the same. In trying to imagine how to go about putting the pieces of these various narratives together, he realized how useful it would be to be able to visualize the connections across particular geographical locations, specific events, as well as broader changes over time, in a dynamic manner.
Smith would like to develop a research tool which will allow him to enter data as he does research, and that will allow him to generate different views based on categories and connections. This tool will also have to handle 2-byte character sets such as Japanese and Korean. Ultimately, he would like to include a GIS component. The research tool and its contents will form the archive on which his book will be based.