Timothy Beal
Timothy Beal, the Florence Harkness Professor of Religion and chair of the Department of Religious Studies, is interested in changing the way we consume biblical translations in a post-print media world. Traditional translations have no way to explore the rich ambiguities and inconclusive nature of literary texts. Using Python, a programming language, Beal will develop a program that will take text from the Hebrew Book of Genesis and find new ways to explore various translations.
Denna Lammarino
Denna Lammarino, a lecturer in the department of English, aims to preserve and transcribe John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne, a 16th century literary gem. By creating the first-ever digital edition of the text, Ianmmarino will build digital learning tools around the text with abilities to toggle between annotations and transcribed editions. Her goal is to make the text accessible beyond academia, taking a rare understudied text and reviving a significant piece of literary history.
Rachel Lovell & Misty Luminais
Lovell and Luminais, senior research associates at the Begun Center for Violence Prevention Education & Research, have collected data from more than 500 backlogged sexual assault kits from Cuyahoga County dating from 1993 to 2009. Using The Freedman Center’s ArcGIS visual mapping software, Lovell and Luminais are interested in exploring the spatial relationships between attackers, survivors and the surrounding environment. By exploring the geographical data and making it available to the public, they aim to be a resource to criminology circles where data at this level of detail has not been seen before.
Elliot Posner
The research, carried out by Associate Professor of Political Science Elliot Posner and Nicolas Véron (Bruegel and the Peterson Institute for International Economics), addresses core scholarly and public policy questions about the European Union’s role in international affairs. Is Europe a good internationalist supporting cooperation, human rights and good governance, or is it like any other giant polity that pursues such goals to the extent that they correspond to narrow “national” interests? Because the EU is the world’s largest market, the answer to this question has enormous implications for the future of global financial regulation—a domain that the 2008 financial crisis taught us can affect everyone from Goldman Sachs bankers to average working families. The fellowship will enable Posner and an undergraduate research assistant to transfer the existing dataset into an appropriate digital platform that will make it easier to adhere to fast-changing new standards in political science for organizing, disseminating and storing qualitative data. In addition, Posner and a graduate research assistant will use the fellowship to improve the project's current textual analysis. Using more sophisticated techniques for analyzing big data will make it possible to evaluate hypotheses and replicate and advance existing studies.
Dr. Posner's 2017 presentation, Muddling Through Technology-Related Challenges in Qualitative Social Scientific Research, discussed the technology-related challenges that he and his co-author, Nicolas Véron, encountered in conducting research and writing an article about European Union financial regulatory internationalism. The presentation it focused on 1) problems connected with the organization and presentation of qualitative data, 2) more demanding research transparency requirements in the social sciences, 3) issues surrounding corporate news aggregators, and 4) complications vis-à-vis the use of big data.
Shannon Sterne
Assistant Professor of Dance Shannon Sterne convened a collaborative creative research project entitled Small Talk, which investigated the range of discomfort and pain experienced by introverted people as they try to navigate a world biased towards extroverts. Together with Eric Charnofsky, Instructor in the Department of Music, and Cleveland video artist Jared Michael Sobotka, Sterne explored contemporary scholarly viewpoints on introversion and interpreted them via interdisciplinary and collaborative integration of live performance, projected digital photography and videography, and aural stimuli. This process-driven creative work served to encourage new avenues of expression and to enhance understanding of how concepts or ideas are transformed by the mode of expression, and then altered once again as that mode—that viewpoint—comes into contact with alternative interpretations.
Small Talk comprised two distinct performance sections: an ensemble section featuring six dancers performing to an original professionally recorded score, and a solo section which melded live performance of dance, piano, and spoken word with projected video art. Sterne's 2017 presentation,Small Talk: An Interdisciplinary Creative Collaboration Investigating Introversion, Social Anxiety, and Depression, detailed the orchestration of the various artistic considerations and practical processes involved in the creation of the solo section with particular regard to how each element was transformed by the inclusion of the video art component. The work premiered in November 2016 at Mather Dance Center on the CWRU campus as part of the Department of Dance faculty and guest artist concert.
Gillian Weiss
Our 2015-2016 Fellow Associate Professor of History Gillian Weiss, PhD student Elise Hagesfeld, and undergraduate researchers Rye Carroll and Francesca Langer began their work on the role of Jewish students, faculty and administrators in campus activism. They worked closely with the University Archives and KSL Special collection to collect and digitize material primarily related to the years 1967-1973. These years saw the federation of Western Reserve University and Case Institute of Technology, the mobilization of the campus in response to wars in Vietnam and the Middle East, unrest in the Cleveland neighborhoods of Glenville and Hough, and the civil rights and women’s movements in the United States. They sought to discover to what extent was “the American Jew…at the forefront of the youth movement today,” as a CWRU senior declared in 1968?
The project continued into the 2016-2017 academic year with the goal of making these materials available in a website featuring archival documents, images, video and audio, and interactive finding aids with accompanying explanatory essays. PhD student Michael Metsner and undergraduate researcher Noah Boksansky worked on the second phase of the project which included curating an exhibit, The Jewish View at CWRU, in KSL Special Collections in addition to completing an Omeka site with the digitized materials.
Gillian Weiss
Our 2015-2016 Fellow Associate Professor of History Gillian Weiss, PhD student Elise Hagesfeld, and undergraduate researchers Rye Carroll and Francesca Langer began their work on the role of Jewish students, faculty and administrators in campus activism. They worked closely with the University Archives and KSL Special collection to collect and digitize material primarily related to the years 1967-1973. These years saw the federation of Western Reserve University and Case Institute of Technology, the mobilization of the campus in response to wars in Vietnam and the Middle East, unrest in the Cleveland neighborhoods of Glenville and Hough, and the civil rights and women’s movements in the United States. They sought to discover to what extent was “the American Jew…at the forefront of the youth movement today,” as a CWRU senior declared in 1968?
The project continued into the 2016-2017 academic year with the goal of making these materials available in a website featuring archival documents, images, video and audio, and interactive finding aids with accompanying explanatory essays. PhD student Michael Metsner and undergraduate researcher Noah Boksansky worked on the second phase of the project which included curating an exhibit, The Jewish View at CWRU, in KSL Special Collections in addition to completing an Omeka site with the digitized materials.
Justin Gallagher
Dr. Gallagher’s project focused on how the receipt of federal public assistance following a devastating natural disaster affected individuals’ finances and migration decisions. Data on the destruction paths of tornadoes have been correlated with financial and migration information using GIS software. The project’s overall goal was to better understand how individuals respond to uncertain environmental risks and how the Federal government can best protect citizens while not distorting individual incentives to live in environmentally safe and sustainable locations.
Melvyn Goldstein
Dr. Goldstein and the Center for Research on Tibet have been collecting and translating oral history interviews and documents relating to modern Tibetan history and society for over three decades. These materials, all of which are part of theTibet Oral History and Archive Project (TOHAP), are a unique primary source on the social and political history of modern Tibet and Sino-Tibetan relations. The collection consists of approximately 1,600 hours of oral interviews with both the “common folk” who lived in villages in traditional Tibet, as well as in depth interviews with monks from Drepung, Tibet’s largest monastery. To prepare these interviews for publication in an online archive hosted by the Library of Congress, Dr. Goldstein worked to correct TEI-XML syntax errors from this large corpus of data. Encoding the data in TEI expanded the availability of this valuable primary resource, and amplified how it can be used by other scholars for years to come.
Cynthia Beall
Dr. Cynthia Beall (Distinguished University Professor, Anthropology) focuses her research on the adaptation of indigenous highlanders (Andean, Tibetan and East African) to the low levels of oxygen where they live at altitudes above 10,000 feet. Her Freedman Fellow project set out to design and implement a database of the biological characteristics of people living in these high altitudes.
Mark Pedretti
Dr. Mark Pedretti (Lecturer, Department of English) examined literary artifacts surrounding the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Drawing primarily upon Ibuse Masuji’s 1965 novel Black Rain (Kuroe Ame), along with photographic archives of Hiroshima both before and after the bombing, Pedretti used the novel’s obsessive attention to place names as a way of virtually reconstructing the city. The goal of this project has been to use geospatial information coordinating technology to precisely describe the locations of Ibuse’s novel, and to visualize a place that, for many Americans, remains a distant abstraction.
John Grabowski
First published in 1987 and later presented as an online database this year marks the 25th anniversary of The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Grabowski’s proposal focuses on bringing the web-based archive of Cleveland history to a whole new level. By incorporating new media-related features, descriptive “tagging”, and seeking an innovative content management platform, these features aim to promise sustainability to this digital humanities vault of Cleveland history.
Click here to access the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.
Brian Gran
Through specialized digital mapping software, Gran proposes to expose child trafficking in our own backyard. Statistics gathered aim to develop maps and scientific estimates of where, how often and what kinds of trafficking is taking place around Northeast Ohio. This research also aims to identify key law enforcement departments and social service providers where victims can turn for refuge and support.
Stephen Hefling
The powerful symphonies and songs of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) have enjoyed enormous growth in popularity since the mid-1960s. Along with increased recordings and scholarly interest in his works, however, there’s also been a growing critical need for a detailed catalog of musical manuscripts and editions. It's a need that will be met by a 2011 Freedman Fellow.
For Dr. Stephen E. Hefling (Music) the 2011 Freedman Fellow Program Award offered new opportunities and support for him to transform Edward Reilly’s lifetime work into a searchable database.
Paul Iverson
Before Apple and Dell there was the Antikythera Mechanism. This device, found in 1901 in a shipwreck, is estimated to have been constructed in the 2nd or 1st century BCE. Capable of computing and displaying information such as lunar phases, the rising and setting of stars and constellations, the lunisolar calendar of northwestern Greece, and Panhellenic festivals including the Olympic games, it is considered the first analog computer. Iversen will use this award to purchase tools that will facilitate the study of inscriptions on the Antikythera Mechanism and travel to Germany to work with the raw data consisting of CT images.
Susanne Vees-Gulani
Vees-Gulani aims to create a database and visualizations both in print and electronic format. These visualizations will serve purpose in her book, The Myth of Dresden: Origins and Manifestation of the German Victim Discourse I, and interactively through digital presentation to be used in lectures. Her study focuses on the German city of Dresden and how it acquired its place as a tourist destination and later destruction during World War II, to the eventual rebuilding of this city back to its original condition. Artifacts such as photographs, film, paintings, postcards, and tourist guides provide counter-examples of images of Dresden following wartime destruction, leaving room for discussion of its victimization after the bombing in 1945.
Robert Brown
Physics faculty Robert W. Brown, one of the 2011 Freedman Fellows says that he became interested in 3-D effects after an introduction to Freedman Center tools, because his work in nanoparticle behavior was relevant to so many things. When the spring 2011 Freedman Center call for proposals came, opportunities called, too: "it was a match made in heaven!"
Georgia Cowart
Cowart's project aims for a new view of 18th century Parisian culture with an annotated digital archive of Watteau's Paris. Such a digital project would complement other works about the growing body of works about the French art, music, dance, and theater. Cowart emphasizes that sharing the Fellows experience is invaluable so that others can see how the instruction, advice, and introductions to new areas can be beneficial as Fellows move on to more independent work.
William Deal
Nearly 20 years ago, Deal (Religious Studies) meticulously color-coded by hand the content categories of some of the tales from the Japanese Buddhist text Hokke genki, "Miraculous Tales of the Lotus Sutra," in order to see the people, events, regions of 11th century Japan.
His 2011 Freedman Fellows award and newly gained skills now allow him to apply digital textual and spatial analysis tools to the texts. Using XML and TEI to analyze and interpret the tales unlocks the complexity of the texts and also "dramatically changes what is possible," beyond reading texts. Using digital technologies, research is possible in new ways: one can see word frequencies, the relationships of those content categories on a larger scale, the scope of Buddhism in 11th century Japan via GIS, and a developing concordance of key words in context.
Daniel Goldmark
Music department faculty Daniel Goldmark knows what musical life in Cleveland was like 100 years ago. He's researched & acquired 900+ pieces of Cleveland-produced sheet music, covering musical genres from 1890-1950s, including the theme song for the Exposition. Goldmark says his Freedman Fellows 2011 project is about "the presentation of the Cleveland musical story, the diversity of publishers, and how the mass media in music started."
Stephen Hefling
The powerful symphonies and songs of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) have enjoyed enormous growth in popularity since the mid-1960s. Along with increased recordings and scholarly interest in his works, however, there’s also been a growing critical need for a detailed catalog of musical manuscripts and editions. It's a need that will be met by a 2011 Freedman Fellow.
For Dr. Stephen E. Hefling (Music) the 2011 Freedman Fellow Program Award offered new opportunities and support for him to transform Edward Reilly’s lifetime work into a searchable database.
Henry Adams
I am an art historian who has produced over several hundred publications in the American field, including books, exhibition catalogues, and scholarly and popular articles. My most noteworthy recent project is the book Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, which was reviewed recently in The Cleveland Plain Dealer. I have also worked in film production, working on documentary films for PBS with Ken Burns of Florentine Films, Walpole, New Hampshire, and Tom Ball, of Telos Productions, Cleveland, though not from the technical side (camera-work, editing, etc.) but as a researcher and script-writer. I am very interested in the ways in which new media can make learning a multi-sensory experience and can also expand the scope of scholarship. For example, I'm interested in the ways in which tape-recorded interview can often supplement written records and lead to new scholarly discoveries.
I regularly teach classes on American art, particularly art of the early to mid 20th century. I would make use of these sound-recordings for nearly all the classes that I teach. Material such as this obviously makes artists seem more vivid and human and often brings famous paintings “to life” by revealing the character of their subjects. From the standpoint of teaching research skills, I’m committed to the idea that students should learn how to conduct and record interviews, in addition to learning to conduct library research.
Georgia Cowart
I have also experimented with new teaching strategies that 1) transfer the art of multimedia presentation from the lecture hall to a seminar setting and 2) effect a full integration of multiple arts/humanities fields. These strategies stand to be powerfully enhanced through the integration of art, music, and theater/dance into multimedia presentations incorporating music and video. The Freedman Center Fellowship will allow more technological expertise in 1) developing my multimedia skills for the classroom and, 2) in cooperation with the Freedman Center and its personnel, sharing my technological knowledge with students and crafting a series of gradated assignments designed to build on that knowledge. (For example, instruction in PowerPoint presentations might begin with slides of art works, progressing later in the semester to the incorporation of music and video.) Finally (3), I would also like to develop an expertise in producing podcasts for use in my courses. More specifically, over the summer and the next academic year I would like to craft four multimedia podcasts that can be used, as a series or separately, in all four of the classes mentioned above. These would feature different aspects of my own interdisciplinary research, and would serve both as course content and models for audio-visual presentations. Tentative titles of the 4 podcasts are:
- The Musical Theater in Watteau’s Paris
- Watteau’s Isle of Love and the Theatrical Stage
- Watteau, Louis XIV, and the Staging of Satire
- Watteau, Venetian Carnival, and the Commedia dell’arte
Noelle Giuffrida
As an art historian, my primary sources for research and teaching are images of works of art. Over the past ten years, I have collected thousands of images through scanning, downloading from databases and museum websites, and my own personal digital photography. Managing these visual resources so that they are accessible to my students and me both inside and beyond the classroom is an ongoing challenge. This project will focus on coming up with a system to more efficiently create, catalog, and archive digital images, metadata, and related resources while making them more accessible for me and my students. Since the textbook for the course serves mainly as a field guide rather than a comprehensive image and background resource, the ability to create and manipulate an image and resource database for the course is paramount. In order to make this project manageable as a test case, I plan to concentrate on developing an image and resource database for a course I teach each spring: Buddhist Art in Asia.
My goals in developing an image and resource database for Buddhist Art in Asia are to tackle several related challenges. First, I want to develop a system to consolidate and catalog existing digital resources so that I can more easily find what I already have and determine what additional materials need to be gathered and processed for the course. In other words, I want to come up with one system to rule, and replace, the many that I currently use. Once such a system is in place, archiving will also be more consistent and reliable. Second, students need access to high quality interactive images with accurate metadata in order to more effectively prepare for exams, discussions, and do research for their projects. Right now, because of the space and format limitations of BlackBoard, students can only access images through a small static PDF file. Ideally, students could access large, zoomable images associated with each class session and/or assignment. Third, since art history begins but does not end with images, I want to be able to link other digital resources directly to images in order to encourage and guide student research. For instance, I want to provide links to other images, to museum and artist websites, to articles in JSTOR, to other digital databases, and to books available at Kelvin Smith Library, CIA, Ingalls Library at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and through OhioLink. Finally, I hope to eventually use the database as a repository for images that I can draw upon directly for classroom teaching through the implementation of some sort of zoomify system that will allow me to use images more interactively.
Kristine Kelly
My project proposal involves designing an undergraduate SAGES seminar tentatively to be titled, Order and Context: Storytelling and Digital Critique. This course will be based on the related objectives of exploring the relationship between narrative form and content and using multimedia technologies to develop novel ways of teaching and producing research writing.
My primary focus is on how the structural qualities of stories (textual, cinematic, artistic) contribute to the production of culturally valuable meanings. I envision a sequence of multimedia assignments that offer hands-on opportunities to both critique and participate in this production. In proposing this course, I am responding to what I see as a need to reinvigorate research writing processes and to account responsibly for the experience and interests of students in multimedia technologies. While multimedia projects are clearly already of interest in literary studies, methods of production, pedagogical objectives, and terms of evaluation are in the process of development. I see my project as participating in this process. In using the resources of the Freedman Center, I hope to become technologically literate and thus to be able to explore the creative potentials of digital media for scholarly research.
Susanne Wish-Baratz
I serve as co-leader of the Human Anatomy Course at Case School of Medicine and I have been teaching medical anatomy for over twenty years. At Case, in response to the many fewer hours available in the curriculum for the teaching of anatomy, we have developed several "new ways" of teaching anatomy. These include short instructional videos, voice-over PowerPoint presentations, targeted study guides, weekly formative assessments, video-streamed "old-fashioned" lectures – all exercises in which students can engage during their free time. In addition, the students still perform some dissections; however, much "complicated" anatomy, such as that of the cranial cavity, neck, and pelvis, is presented to them in demonstrations of pre-dissected specimens. Much of the interactivity that I, and many other anatomy educators, feel is essential to the learning of anatomy and that previously occurred during dissection laboratories has been lost. In addition, the fact that Human Anatomy occupies less than 10% of their class time each week understandably leads the students to place a relatively low priority on anatomical studies.
In order to discover additional, more interactive and more appealing ways to convey the information that I believe is critical for our students' education, I started attending KS Learn sessions at the Kelvin Smith Library. Through KS Learns, I discovered the Freedman Center. I believe that in order to reach the greatest number of medical students I have to learn the multimedia technologies and digital tools with which my twenty-first century students are most comfortable. I am interested in and open to learning and implementing any methods that can improve medical student anatomy learning and retention. One tool I have considered is "Articulate Presenter" which allows one to import narration and other media as well as interactivity into a power point presentation and which permits real-time assessment. Articulate presentations can also be converted into pod casts which many medical students have indicated would render the material much more accessible. It is my hope that this, or similar, digital augmentations to our current and relatively "old-fashioned" teaching modalities might increase student interest and improve student performance in the medical school anatomy course.
Tatiana Zilotina
My project proposal focuses on the redesign of RUSN375/WLIT375, Russian Literature in Translation. This course is taught in the spring semester of 2010 and will be part of the Russian curriculum in consecutive academic years. Russian Literature in Translation is an interdisciplinary course by its nature, as it combines the examination of historical and cultural sources in addition to literary ones. This course crosses the boundaries of History, Art History, Film Studies, Religious and Cultural Studies. It is cross-listed as an upper-level course that counts toward the Minor in Russian and as a course in the World Literature program.
I propose to create an online learning portal with integrated multimedia technologies and digital tools, where students can have comprehensive exposure to textual and scholarly resources, interact with one another and the instructor, and efficiently fulfill their assignments. The topics and discussions in this class reflect my current research interests in the studies of Russian national identity. My involvement in this project will bring together various aspects of research, teaching and learning and encourage students' critical thinking. Furthermore, my project will be beneficial to other instructors of the humanities at Case and other institutions, since it will contain a broad range of materials.
William Deal
In studying Asian religious and ethical traditions, my students are limited by the lack of access to other cultures outside of the textual descriptions and analyses that I provide them or that they uncover in their essay research. Images, films and other media are of some help, but there is rarely the opportunity for significant immersive, interactive experiences with the extensive visual culture that Buddhist traditions have produced. Buddhist traditions are image-rich and these images often express in visual and concrete ways the deeply theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of Buddhist thought and ritual.
My project proposal, “Buddhist Imaginative Worlds,” envisions the use of multimedia technologies and digital tools to bring students a much richer cognitive and aesthetic experience and understanding of Buddhist traditions. In short, I want to move my students from the static descriptions they encounter in Buddhist texts to the rich, imaginative world of Buddhist thought and iconography. In order to accomplish this, I need to learn the kinds of digital tools and technologies taught through the Freedman Fellow Program.
For more information please see his website: http://www.williamdeal.org.
Paul Iversen
The IAS itself is a newly formed, long-term, interdisciplinary research collaboration between members of the Department of Classics at Case Western Reserve University (Iversen/De Giorgi), members of the Kelvin Smith Library system at Case Western Reserve University (Eustis/Holstein), members of the Department of Archaeology at Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi, Isparta (most importantly Bilge Hürmüzlü who is the project’s overall Director), members of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Tübingen (Richard Posamentir), and members of the Fachhochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft, Berlin (Kay Kohlmeyer). It also will feature undergraduate and graduate students from all those institutions, most importantly CWRU students who will be taking CLSC 318/418, which is a new course on Landscape Archaeology and Epigraphy that will be firmly tied to the IAS (for the summer of 2009 we have four undergraduates and one graduate student who intend to go).
The area that will be the focus of our archaeological survey is located between the modern city of Isparta, the northeastern spit of Lake Burdur, and the northwestern shore of Lake Egridir (see map on p. 3). In antiquity this region was known as Pisidia. Here our international team of scholars and students will employ a coordinated array of research strategies and technologies, in particular linking a landscape archaeological survey that uses satellite images, Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) coordinates, and Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies with the publication of inscriptions on-line.
As mentioned above, CWRU students will be involved in the project through CLSC 318/418 and the methodology they will learn and employ is that of “Intensive Archaeological Survey,” Landscape Archaeology’s most powerful application, in which the careful sampling of the areas to be investigated is a primary concern. Once we arrive at the day’s starting point, we will walk next to our Turkish counterparts (both students and professors) spaced 10-20 meters apart to cover a pre-determined section of landscape. Along the way we will collect all the ancient artifacts that we find on the ground, photograph them, and map their trajectory via Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) hand-held devices. When a site is encountered with a concentration of cultural material, presence of architecture, or any other traces of human intervention, the area will be more carefully mapped and recorded by the Germans. Few landscapes have been studied in this holistic manner; in addition we will applying several recent technologies to the study of landscapes that will be incorporated into CLSC 318/418, so the students will have a hands-on experiential learning environment where they will apply cutting edge technologies and techiques to a real landscape archaeological project with real inscriptions.
The advantages of using the latest technologies for publishing these inscriptions online, both in Case Digital and on the Arts and Sciences server, are numerous. With the GPS coordinates and GIS technology, each inscription’s find spot will be perfectly situated in space to strengthen the intimate relationship between the text and its original environs. Linguistic peculiarities, names, and any meaningful lemmata will also appear on the GIS map and be searchable, thus suggesting patterns and relations such as that of families, kin groups, or individuals of Phrygian, Greek, Roman, or other origins. Being a part of both the Arts and Sciences server and the Digital Case archival repository, the website will be sustainable because it will have stability of citation (permanent URLs) and it will be freely available to the general public as well as to researchers.
Daniel Lacks
Dr. Lacks participated in the Freedman Fellows Program with the following two projects in mind:
(A) Development of interactive web¿based modules for teaching thermodynamics. These modules will be used in the graduate course I teach, ECHE 460: “Thermodynamics of Chemical Systems”, which is a required course for all graduate students in my department (and is also taken by students from other departments). I plan to develop the module in collaboration with the Etomica project at the University of Buffalo,6 which is funded by the National Science Foundation. The Etomica group administers a suite of interactive web¿based modules that use molecular simulations to aid in teaching topics in thermodynamics. The Etomica project is run such that outside contributors develop the ideas and teaching materials for the module, and the Etomica group at Buffalo creates the simulation that implements these ideas.
(B) Teaching the use of multimedia presentations for chemical engineering undergraduates I teach the undergraduate course ECHE 365: “Measurements Laboratory”. This junior-level laboratory course is required for all chemical engineering undergraduates, and a major focus of the course is technical communication (both written and oral). In previous years, the oral presentation has been a standard PowerPoint-based presentation. However, it would be useful for students to learn how to incorporate multimedia into their presentations – e.g., video clips of aspects of the experiments, and animated schematics demonstrating how the experiment works or the physical basis of the underlying phenomena.
Kathleen Meyer
I am in the early stages of developing a research proposal that will test a self care management program for clients with chronic illnesses such as heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. This population of client is at risk for multiple re-hospitalizations. Home Health Care agencies have implemented programs using staff nurses and frequent, early visits to address the problem. My model will study the effect of an APN assisting a client in developing self care management skills of their illness in reducing frequent hospitalizations. Part of the self care management program involves client education. The interventions would be education provided by the APN directly or by modules that the client could complete using their computer. Client learning modules would allow the client to participate at a time that is convenient for them rather than the lesson needing to be completed while the nurse is present. The client modules would be approximately 10-15 minutes long to consider attention span time for a client with physical impairments. I envision creating a product that is visually stimulating and designed considering a variety of educational backgrounds, but primarily limited education. A web site, blog, and newsletter will be created to augment the educational services available. A web site will be created where by the client can complete a module directly on the site or use a DVD if they do not have internet access.
Peter Yang
I have been interested in using instructional technology in my teaching for years. I experimented with the use of DVDs, CDs, and Web resources in my German and Chinese language courses and found digital and multimedia technologies very useful to enhance the student learning especially because these technologies have the capability of exposing students to authentic linguistic and cultural materials.
I plan to pursue the Freedman project of curricular redesign to technologically enhance my SAGES seminars by creating an online learning portal for these courses. In this Freedman Fellow project, I will participate in the week-long Freedman Fellow seminar on the capabilities of multimedia technologies and digital tools and work closely with other Freedman Fellows and Freedman Center technical experts. The intensive instruction will be an excellent opportunity to explore the potential of digital and multimedia technologies for leaning enhancement and communicate the ingenious ideas and most effective ways in various Freedman proposals of using these technologies to enhance the engaged and collaborative student learning. I will greatly benefit from learning these ideas from other Freedman Fellows and Freedman Center experts and will have great time to discuss with them how I can incorporate the use of technologies into my learning modules to transform my SAGES seminars as part of world’s most powerful learning environment at CWRU.
Robert Brown
Used information technology to move the seminar course PHYS 339 entirely online. Most of this was accomplished using courseware. A significant portion of this project, however, was dedicated to creating student-driven video or Camtasia pieces that explained concepts, used interactive media modules to act as "flash cards" to aid memory and classify problems, and aimed at preparing students for the Graduate Record Examination. Using this test (GRE) as well as pre-test and preparatory materials, clear assessment methodologies (outcome data) were drawn for determining the effectiveness of the material; as well as offering students a convenient method of preparing and accessing materials.
Daniel Goldmark
This project will investigate the exponential growth of the popular music industry in the United States from 1890 to 1925 by examining its main product, sheet music. I plan to combine historical methods with data analysis techniques that have been little used in musicology to provide new insight to the history of American music while taking advantage of the countless examples of sheet music available in online digital archives. My goal is to create a cultural history of the popular song business, known by the nickname Tin Pan Alley. The proposed project would allow me to combine my current research interests with topics that I explore in the classroom (how music becomes popular through the devices of mass media) while bringing new technology to bear on musicology, a discipline that is far behind in the use of data organization and interpretation methodologies.
Yanna Popova
I propose to redesign COGS 329, Performance and Cognition: Cognitive Approaches to Theatre and Dance. This is a permanently approved course for the Department of Cognitive Science that has already been taught once in the spring of 2008. As intended, it attracted a population of cognitive science majors but also students from the department of theatre and dance. The course combines empirical research on the brain, including the neuroscience of motion, with studies of performance, both live and pre-recorded. The course was intended and continues to be highly multidisciplinary, linking a more traditional approach to the body in theatre and dance studies to a most up-to-date research on embodied cognition. Firstly, analysis of movement can only be successful if students are able to incorporate certain knowledge of video editing and produce their own materials for analysis in class. A second crucial aspect of the intended use of technology for this course involves teaching students to be able to utilize brain images. One of the objectives of this course is to learn about the processes in human brains that are responsible for movement, on the one hand, and to assess the implications of that knowledge for our aesthetic experience of performance (in both drama and dance), on the other.
Raymond Watkins
My project involves the use of technology in USSY 285: The Documentary Impulse. This SAGES course, which will be taught for the first time in Spring 2009, is structured around an historical overview of documentary film from 1920 to the present, and will be similar to the English 368c/468c Topics in Film: World Cinema course I taught in the Spring of 2007. The course will begin with Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), and will then focus on a different documentary style and form each week, from the lyrical city symphony films of the late 20s and early 30s (Jean Vigo, On the Subject of Nice, 1930), to avant-garde experiment (Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), to cinéma vérité (Rouch and Marin, Confessions of a Summer, 1955) and its effects on the French New Wave (Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless, 1959). Other styles will include direct cinema (Drew and Pennebaker, Primary, 1960), the improvisational theatrics of John Cassavetes, the use of time-lapse photography toward a pure poetics (Reggio, Koyaanisqatsi, 1982), and, finally, the mocumentary (Bob Roberts, 1992). The course will also emphasize the importance of ideology, political bias, and feigned efforts to capture the “real” through the work of Leni Riefenstahl (Triumph of the Will,1935; Olympia, 1938), and 1970’s examples of Third Cinema in Cuba, Brazil, and Argentina. Each student in The Documentary Impulse will be required to create one five-minute video using a particular documentary mode examined in class, paying attention to ideology, narrative structure, transitions, sound, and video editing techniques. The final project will use either found stills, or newly shot filmed images, and will include a sound track either from the Freedman Center’s archives, or of the student’s own creation.
Martha Woodmansee
The focus of my research and scholarly activity is intellectual property. My articles and books, published in the 1980s and 1990s, introduced scholars in the humanities to the urgency of interdisciplinary inquiry in this area, and a collection forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press, Con/texts of Invention, will extend the audience for interdisciplinary approaches to IP to the sciences and technology. In a new initiative, I am collaborating with an international group of scholars from across the disciplines to develop a scholarly society devoted to the history and theory of intellectual property (ISHTIP). The organization will foster, coordinate, and disseminate historical, theoretical and ethnographic research on the diverse mechanisms that have been devised and continue to be devised to “manage” the production and exchange of information. Aside from sponsoring an annual conference or workshop, the society will live strictly virtually – i.e., through a website designed to support a spectrum of activities including the posting and discussion of work in progress, a searchable digital library of documents in the histories of IP, bibliographies, reviews of new publications of interest, course syllabi and other teaching resources, and eventually also a peer-reviewed open access digital journal. As co-executive director of the society (with a professor of law at Cambridge University), I will be responsible for overseeing website design and development. To carry out this responsibility effectively I desperately need the kind of systematic, hands-on introduction to state-of-the-art digital technologies that the Freedman Fellows program is offering.
Linda Ehrlich
Linda Ehrlich, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Japanese, Associate Director of College Scholars, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures; whose proposal focused on a redesigned course entitled “Readings on Dance and Film” and required students to participate in film viewings, the development of pachyderm exhibits, and the creation of lesson plans to be presented to area school students, senior centers, and children’s museums. Linda states that “the course will explore images of movement and kinetic symbolism across a wide spectrum of cultures and performance styles; it will cross the boundaries of Film Studies, Religious Studies, Art History, and Visual Anthropology. The films analyzed…will represent a variety of national cinemas, historical periods, and artistic styles.”
Anne Helmreich
The Freedman Fellows Program will assist in support of ARTH490 Visual Arts and the Museums. This course is a core course for the Art History and Art Department Master's in Art History and Museum Studies and is offered each spring semester. In ARTH490, students are introduced to various facets of professional work in the art museum as well as the history of museums and collecting and issues of museology. New media is on the rise in the museum in terms of acquisitions, exhibition design and display, education, and interpretation. In 2001, for example, the Guggenheim Museum opened the Sackler Center for Arts Education which emphasizes "exploration and experimentation with new technologies" through computer and multimedia labs, a new media theater, and resource center. The George Eastman House and International Museum of Photography and Film has integrated new media into its exhibition rotations, featuring, for example, the work of David Byrne, Trees, Tombstones, & Bullet Points, in 2004-2005. It is crucial for students entering the museum profession to gain training in the intelligent and critical use of new media. A course such as this will be significantly improved with a technology enhancement because this will allow the course to fulfill more fully two of the three primary goals as stated on the current syllabus:
- The Components of a Museum: We will examine, through discussions with museum professionals in the area as well as selected readings, the anatomy of the museum as both an institution and a career track. With regard to the latter, we will develop an understanding of the different jobs that contribute to the function of a museum and gain practical knowledge that can be applied and developed through internships and future employment.
- Museological Practice: Through interviews and discussions with museum professionals in the area as well as selected readings, we will consider some of the key issues and ethical debates facing the museum professions today.
Eva Holsinger
Eva Holsinger, MD, Assistant Professor, Department of Pediatrics, developed a proposal that aimed to redesign a course to “make participants aware of the special needs of children and families in disaster situations, and understand public health approaches to address these needs. The learning objectives of the course include identifying the most important problems and priorities for children in disaster situations and their specific vulnerabilities, assessing epidemiologic issues and prioritizing relief efforts, recognizing key health indicators in displaced populations and planning interventions, and developing critical thinking and problem solving skills.” The manner outlined to accomplish this is the development by medical students of interactive multimedia modules that “include video and photography based on key information given in the case, and a narrator presenting the information on-screen in a newscast or documentary-style format, making it more of a multi-media presentation…video clips, enhanced photographs and other interactive learning tools in their talks.”
Peter McCall
Peter McCall, JD, Ph.D., Professor, Geological Sciences; Director, Environmental Studies Program. Dr. McCall’s proposal pointed out some of the problems of traditional lab/learning environments and the potential solutions multimedia offer: “I depend on items brought into lecture to increase student ability to identify important rocks, fossils, and preserved biologic specimens. While this is effective with small numbers of students, as class size increases not everyone can see the important features of a specimen as I am pointing them out. By the time students examine specimens that are passed around, I have often moved on to some other topic. It is impractical to give all the students access to specimens before exams. This is an area of instruction that is ripe for virtual learning. At a minimum I would like to put online labeled digital images of the items I pass around in class and on which students will be tested. Well executed narrated video clips of each would likely be even better, as multimedia learning via words and pictures is thought to be more effective than either alone, simultaneous presentation is better than sequential, and animation and narration are better than text and pictures, at least with low knowledge learners.” And this is what the Freedman Center has set out to help Dr. McCall do.
Brad Ricca
Brad Ricca, Ph.D., Fulltime Lecturer, Department of English. Brad’s proposal focused on the redesign of USSY 275 (CRN: 59876) COLORS, CAPES, AND CHARACTERS. “This course – proposed by myself in 2006 and first offered in spring of 2007 – is the first academic course on the history and study of superhero comics at Case Western Reserve University. My goals as a possible Freedman Fellow are to be able to 1) use these artifacts in imaginative ways as subjects of original research by students of USSY 275 and 2) develop a system of digital deployment whereby the students’ work can be published in a critical, scholarly form that will not only be of great use to viewers, but also as a permanent (but evolving) fixture of the Superman Collection at KSL. In short, I want the students to use the material as original research for a project in which they will share in the credit...Since these materials are old and valuable, scanning (as well as other transcription methods) is imperative, but I want students to engage the material. I want them to identify the questions raised by these materials and evaluate them – not copy them. When the material is eventually published (on the Web? a circulating DVD? video podcasts linked to each piece of material? a digital course pack for local schools?) what I want to be represented are not the actual artifacts, but the students’ critical interactions with them.”
Sara Waller
Sara Waller, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Sara’s proposal focused on a redesign of PHIL – COGS -BIOL 314 (PHIL 414) course on the philosophy of animal consciousness and cognition for the upcoming 2007-2008 academic year. “First, it will give me assistance in re-developing several of my PowerPoint-based lectures to include more animal behavior video and more animal vocalization audio. Second, it will help me to digitize and present recordings of animals in action from remote locations (such as the wolves, coyotes and foxes living in Wolf Park Indiana, and Pacific bottlenose dolphins living off the coast of southern California). I already have several hours of such recordings that can be processed and presented to the class to enhance their experience in observing animals. Further, a prior research grant of mine recently funded the purchase of a boat and field equipment useful for making new recordings of dolphins and other marine life. Such fresh information will undoubtedly make the course more informative and more exciting. Freedman Center Fellowship Application 2007 Sara Waller Third, I would like to explore the possibility of developing a live webcam-style feed from remote locations, especially Wolf Park Indiana, but also including the Cleveland APL.” A student is currently in the Freedman Center digitizing the dolphin recordings.
Michel Avital
Formerly, Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the Weatherhead School of Management, Dr. Avital created a curriculum that utilized interdependent modules and tasks that required students to search for information repositories, critically assess these resources, and reproduce their findings for presentation in a variety of multimedia publishing applications; including the option of a five minute video or by creating a website dedicated to the subject. This course resulted in both Jared Bendis and Tom Hayes teaching sessions on digital video and web development respectively. In total, the inclusion of the Freedman Center in course projects has resulted in over forty students from the Weatherhead School of Management working with Freedman Center resources to complete course assignments.
David Carney &Andrew Dorchak
David Carney and Andrew Dorchak of the Case School of Law continue their work to digitize the background information on a famous nightclub fire and to create multimedia presentations about the fire, model interviews, and model videoconferences with attorneys involved in the lawsuits. They are modeling legal research strategies by digitizing text and providing online tutorials that explain research tasks so that students can learn at their own pace. Currently, Carney and Dorchak have sought out the Freedman Center’s recommendations for a programmer and an approach to adding the programming components necessary to complete the more technical backend requirements for their project. When this project is complete examples of it and its use will be made available.
Kurt Koenigsberger
Kurt Koenigsberger, Assistant Professor, Department of English. Dr. Koenigsberger’s project focuses on questions of cultural and textual display over the past 200 years. His project involves the use of the Freedman Center to digitize and contextualize materials from Special Collections, Iron Mountain Storage, and the Kelvin Smith Library collections. Currently, Dr. Koenigsberger and one of his assistants, Jamie McDaniel, have been learning and working with Pachyderm, a multimedia authoring tool developed by the New Media Consortium and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for online displays.
Heather Meakin
Heather Meakin, formerly Assistant Professor, Department of English. Dr. Meakin used the media resources of the Freedman Center and Kelvin Smith Library’s Special Collections to design a course in Early Modern Cultural Studies. This course was envisioned to create a virtual Early Modern or Renaissance world for students to explore. In addition, Dr. Meakin is considering using Pachyderm so her students can create resources that will contextualize these time periods.
Kimberly Emmons
Understanding the historical development of English from its Germanic roots to its global future(s) provides students with the opportunity to explore research questions that will affect the way they communicate and comprehend the language that surrounds them. This project includes the development of a series of course modules that capitalize on print and online resources for the study of the English language. These modules will increase student engagement with a variety of historical texts and foster an awareness of linguistic diversity.
Kelly McMann
Evaluating the quality of information on the Internet is essential for dealing with the mundane, such as choosing a new computer, to the life-threatening, such as understanding a medical diagnosis. It is ironic that teachers rarely emphasize Internet skills even though students turn first to the web to complete research assignments. My project prepared guidelines regarding Internet research for students, designed multiple research exercises that incorporated Freedman Center resources, and developed a form to help evaluate the impact of these materials and activities in my Politics of Central Asia course.
Catherine B. Scallen
For her new SAGES University Seminar course, "Art the Mirror of Art 1400-1789," Dr. Scallen incorporated extensive research-based learning, collaborative learning, and multimedia-based learning approaches. The course is interdisciplinary in its focus on images about art and artists in the Renaissance and early modern periods, and is designed to appeal to a broad spectrum of students, including those who might not be interested in a traditional, regionally-based art history course. Emphasis is on the active production of knowledge through multimedia student presentations (individual and group-based) and on improving critical thinking and research, writing, and oral presentation skills.