Faculty Grant Projects for 2004-2005
2004-2005 was the fourth year of STG's faculty grants program.
Paul Buhle, American Civilization
Last year, the students in Prof. Buhle's oral history class investigated the arts in 20th c. RI. The interviews and supporting materials they collected were then used in an exhibit at the Providence Historical Society, and later at the Newport Jazz Festival. The project is called "Underground RI" and will continue to grow as successive oral history classes interview members of the RI arts communities.
Prof. Buhle would like to continue the oral history project, and also to ensure a wider audience for it. A digital exhibit would be able to include all the materials collected by the students, and it to a wider audience, for a longer period of time than a museum exhibit. STG worked with Prof. Buhle's UTRA students over the summer, so they can digitize and catalog the multimedia materials they have collected. We will also work with Prof. Buhle and the students to determine a structure for the exhibit website. Finally we are working with one of the UTRA students who is in the current class, to show the other students how best to conduct and transcribe interviews that will be published digitally.
Keith Brown, Watson Institute/Anthropology:
Prof. Brown has been studying the first political assassination to be captured on film; the 1934 murder of King Alexander of Yugoslavia, in Marseilles. He is interested in the political ramifications of the event, the reception as well as the effects of the film as a newsreel in different European countries. Over the summer, he worked with five UTRA students, collecting contemporary information about the assassination and subsequent murder trial from French, German and Italian newspapers and diplomatic correspondance.
STG worked with the students during the summer to discuss useful metadata to capture as they did their research. We will work with Prof. Brown over the fall semester to incorporate the newsreels, newspapers and diplomatic accounts with the team's own writing into a web publication. The goal of the website is to present these materials in a way that will provoke questions, and also show the varied approaches that this event invites. We will develop an infrastructure for the website, work with students to tag and keyword the collected materials, and develop an interface design that reflects the analytic trains of thought that are developed in the website.
Wendy Chun, MCM:
Prof. Chun is publishing a book with MIT Press called Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. She would like to design and implement an electronic version of the book, which will consist of a limited portion of the book, material that she couldn't include in the book because of space constraints, links to other sources and ways to interact with and think about the subject matter of the book.
She will collaborate with STG to discover and implement appropriate presentations for her texts, and to present the main issues of control and freedom on the net. The project will launch in Mar. 2005, at the same time as the publication of the book.
Sanda Golopentia, French Studies:
Prof. Golopentia had constructed a corpus of Romanian love charms on the Brown mainframe over 10 years ago. This was implemented by Allen Renear using Waterloo Script, and was used to typeset a book analyzing the love charms. She now wants to expand the corpus by adding more texts, and also to continue to organize and analyze them at least as productively as she did before. She would like to move the texts into a database, and be able to edit and access them over the WWW. She also wants to develop a website about the love charms, adding information about the informants, audio and video of the charms, and other supporting materials.
STG will analyze the original Script files in order to determine the structures that were put in place, create an SQL database, accessible via the web, and help her learn how to use it. Once that is complete, we will make any additions or changes needed to support Prof. Golopentia's current work. If there is time, we will begin to design and implement a website for the supporting materials.
Beverly Haviland, Comp. Lit.:
Prof. Haviland is in the research phase of a book project on childhood sexual abuse. She is collecting and analyzing imaginative texts from literature, television and film. She would like to work with two databases: a bibliographic database for cataloging materials she locates on childhood sexual abuse, which will ultimately provide a bibliography to benefit other researchers, and a database of themes that will form the core of her own research.
STG will create the databases using Filemaker, so Prof. Haviland can maintain them on her laptop. She may be able to use EndNote for the bibliography.
Julie Strandberg, Theater, Speech and Dance:
Prof. Strandberg has created many curricular materials for teaching dance to K-12 and college students, and publishes them through the American Dance Legacy Institute. She would like to create a digital component to the section on the New Dance Group, a New York dance and activist group of the 1930s-1950s. This will be focused on archival materials which she and others have collected, and will be organized so as to allow users with differing levels of expertise to learn from it.
She would like to collaborate with STG to plan the digital component, design a database to store the archival documents, and design the web site.
Onesimo Almeida, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies:
Prof. Almeida is on the editorial board of an electronic journal of Portuguese history. The journal is a collaborative effort between Brown and the University of Porto; a great deal of the editorial work takes place in Portugal, and the site is hosted at Brown. In the early planning stages, STG participated in discussions about what Brown could easily host, and advised on the process of converting the submitted MS Word files to HTML and PDF.
Prof. Almeida's production team will consult with STG about streamlining as much of the production work for the journal as possible.