 |  | Introduction | Agenda | Previous Work | Current Best Examples | Proposal Writing CURRENT BEST EXAMPLES [last updated 9/21/00] Below are included examples of exemplary digital projects submitted by participants, classified under broad headings and tied in, where possible, to themes of the conference. This area is designed to show the best possible examples of what is currently possible. See field area "Preliminary Readings" for more specific resources for particular fields. Topical Session A: Possibilities of Digital Media Topical Session B: New Models of Electronic Publication/Dissemination Topical Session C: Visualization/Interactivity TOPICAL SESSION A: Possibilities of Digital Media The Rossetti Archive - Edited by Jerome J. McGann This work-in-progress not only provides a sophisticated approach to web site construction, but it also asks searching bibliographical questions about what we mean by "edition" and even "text." It is as theoretically interesting as it is practically useful. For an already large site, it seems to be evolving in a very lucid way. - Jeff Groves History Monuments of the Future: Designs by El Lissitzky This site exemplifies the type of interdisclipinary (art history; information science; cataloging; photography; digital imaging; project management) teamwork that is necessary to build high-quality digital library resources. It also shows how the Web can be used by institutions to disseminate collections that would otherwise only be seen by a handful of researchers who had the ability to consult them in situ. (see accordion foldout under “Printing Trades and Pressa Exhibitions” - Murtha Baca Visual & Media Studies Investigating Bellini's Feast of the Gods (Also see resting technical multimedia: http://webexhibits.org/feast/theVersions/comparison.html This site explores what versions of this painting might have looked like after Titian's famous re-painting. It is provided as a public service of Brandeis University and the Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement (IDEA) by WebExhibits. It demonstrates how any student can develop insight into art from scientific data - individually, interactively, in great detail and depth - using interactive media. -Kirk Alexander Visual & Media Studies Walks in Rome (Public Demo) - John Pinto and Kirk Alexander, Princeton University This project addresses the issue of CONTEXT in teaching in the humanities. Specifically it examines the architectural development in Rome over the course of many centuries. Various aspects of context (historical, spatial, literary, supplemental) are explored by means of a complex database and an intricate digitized map from the 18th century while thematic context is explored in the animated Walks themselves. Here three separate online "lectures" are built up from over 100 animated segments that form a part of the sequence in the lectures but which can be used as standalone components in the classroom. Two of these animated segments are available on the demonstration site. -Kirk Alexander Visual & Media Studies TOPICAL SESSION B. New Models of Electronic Publication/Dissemination A Historian of Computing Abandons Traditional Publishing for CD-ROM's --Chronicle of Higher Education article, 9/13/00, pertinent to this discussion Frank Mohler Performing Arts The History Cooperative is an innovative effort in electronic journal publishing. It is the only project devoted to a single discipline. Four founding partners launched it in March 2000: the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the University of Illinois Press, and the National Academy Press. It now publishes electronic versions of the two leading history journals in the United States: the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History. The History Teacher, the nation's leading journal devoted to historical pedagogy, just joined the Cooperative and others will soon do so. The intent of the founders is to make the Cooperative a major site for the dissemination and review of historical scholarship and a leading innovator in electronic publication. - Mike Grossberg History "In 2000, Project MUSE enters its second phase of development with the addition of over 60 quality journal titles from other scholarly publishers, bringing the database's total offerings to well over 100 titles. As the academic community's primary electronic resource, Project MUSE covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, and many others. Project MUSE is setting the standard for scholarly electronic journals in the humanities and social sciences. At this time, Project MUSE subscriptions are available only to institutions."- Charles Harris Language & Literature I hesitated between this and trying to find Stephen King's on-line publishing ventures, which are the most visible sign that electronic media will change the relationship between author, publisher, and consumer forever. Eastgate combines aspects of a portal, a publisher, and a bookseller, yet belongs fully to none of these categories. It "publishes" hypertext, which some have theorized changes the nature of textuality itself. My interest in all this relates primarily to the fate of my own scholarly writing: if I can publish myself instantly on-line, why should I wait an extra two years to appear in a print journal? - Tom Beebee Language & Literature Originally a discussion forum for the open source community, slashdot has evolved into a 24/7 focal point for a variety of issues having direct bearing on scholarly electronic publishing -- notably data standards and intellectual property -- not to mention the odd bit of industry rumor mongering and humor. The real interest of the site, however, may be in its innovative "slash" source code which enables threaded discussions of remarkable complexity: posts are quasi-refereed, with contributions moderated up or down in the hierarchy by peer observers; readers can choose to browse discussions at multiple thresholds, viewing only the most highly rated comments or every electronic scrap and jot; contributors log in and accumulate "karma," so that those who participate regularly and well have greater visibility and influence in the community. Many potential applications to scholary communication in the humanities here (and the source code is free). Matt Kirschenbaum Language & Literature A scholarly collaborative, publishing works in classics on a peer-reviewed website: "We intend:
Electronic Literature Directory, TOPICAL SESSION C: Visualization/Interactivity dohistory: Martha Ballard's Diary On-line Interactivity is difficult to achieve in digital history. Dohistory manages to introduce interactivity into doing history by several innovative means. Among other interesting applications, the site allows students to grapple with 18th century manuscript script and use primary documents to explore two interesting incidents. - Paula Petrik History Provides a remarkable primary source document along with the contextualizing tools and information needed to make it comprehensible to the average user. Bernard Reilly Visual & Media Studies American Memory: Panoramic Maps "The panoramic map was a popular cartographic form used to depict U.S. and Canadian cities and towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Known also as bird's-eye views, perspective maps, and aero views, panoramic maps are nonphotographic representations of cities portrayed as if viewed from above at an oblique angle. Although not generally drawn to scale, they show street patterns, individual buildings, and major landscape features in perspective." These maps have always been interesting teaching and research tools. Unfortunately, they are as large as small area rugs or large bathmats and have not been practical for classroom use. Using software developed by Lizard Technology--a technology that allows high resolution "zooming," the Library of Congress has made it possible for both researchers and students to explore these maps interactively. - Paula Petrik History For many historians, the built environment has become increasingly interesting as a focus research and teaching. Although the collection is not finished, "[s]s of March 1998, America's built environment has been recorded through surveys containing more than 363,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 35,000 historic structures and sites dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. This first release adds digital images to the searchable on-line catalog records, including images of the pages of written histories for all HAER surveys and about 25% of HABS surveys, 17% of the HAER survey photographs and a small sampling of the HABS and HAER measured drawings." Researchers can explore (and compare) structures ranging from slave dwellings to industrial buildings.- Paula Petrik History -[The American Memory project in general] is the repository of a terrific amount of information for historians of this country's built environment, including a wide range of zoomable maps and views (using MRSID), photographs and prints, and the huge body of documentation in the Historic American Buildings Survey and the Historic American Engineering Record, the former of which began compiling photos, drawings, and data in the 1930s - Jeffrey Cohen Visual & Media Studies The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative Founded by prominent Buddhist scholar, Lew Lancaster, this ambitious project is a scholarly dataset clearinghouse that is attempting to create uniform metadata standards [using the Dublin Core] and make accessible through the ECAI dataset browser information and access to over 150 databases. The ECAI is developing an interface that will incorporate interactivity in utilizing the data, and also will utilize GIS. According to the primary mission statement: "The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative(ECAI) constitutes a new dimension in academic research and international collaboration.ECAI Atlas Teams of area specialists, in conjunction with ECAI Technical Teams, are producing an interactive electronic atlas of theworld from which selected data from regions, eras, and disciplines can be instantaneously accessed. ECAI encourages participation of individuals and organizations in a wide range of academic disciplines as well as technical specialists.With the support of academic institutions, private institutions, and corporate sponsors, ECAI is developing an online system which provides access to a wide range of global information, enabling integrated scholarly analysis of primary resources. " - Marilyn Levine History Created by Ian Johnson at the University of Sydney, this project is about history in its full context of time and space. Currently, the TimeMap has projects on the history of Sydney and the China Time Map. Johnson has also contributed to developing the Metadata clearinghouse for the ECAI and if you browse the datasets you can see there over 100 registered datasets available for access and for mapping. - Marilyn Levine History The Cambodian Genocide Project A broad project, headed by Susan Cook at Yale University, that gathers resources on Cambodia, and in particular has an interactive database, developed by Helen Jarvis at the University of New South Wales. There are four different types of information in the database section: bibliographic, biographic, photographic and geographic. These thousands of records have actually resulted in the reunification of Cambodian refugees. - Marilyn Levine History The Development of Scenic Spectacle by Frank Mohler historical reconstruction with moving images - Mark Pizzato Performing Arts - represents the York cycle plays. Has animation showing different pageant length options. I use this in Theatre History every year. Quite ingenious, and uses technology to illustrate scholarly debate. Susan Kattwinkel Performing Arts Forms of World Literature (CMLIT010) coursepage Believe me, it is laziness rather than vanity that makes me include the coursepage(s) I developed (along with Amy Armbruster of PSU EducationalTechnology Services) for my course in world literature. I'm sure thatbetter and fancier (not synonyms) sites exist. However, clicking through the site does take one through a wide array of web-based teaching technologies: synchronous chat; asynchronous bulletin board; interactive quizzes; on-line reserve readings; and so on. With the right plug-in, you can listen to a poem in Chinese or French. - Tom Beebee Language & Literature Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture. by Stephen Railton, University of Virginia This site brings together materials from a number of different archives, materials that are extremely useful for teaching/studying Stowe's novel. The site serves as model (one of many, of course) for how scholars can utilize the web to pull together images from diverse sources and package them in a sensible but involving way. - Jeff Groves History American Memory - Library of Congress. -Capacious and serendipitous. This site has grown to such an extent that using it is really beginning to feel like walking down the aisles of a library--you're never sure what interesting thing you might come across next. This is an excellent site for anyone who teaches in the American Studies realm.- Jeff Groves History -Aimed in part at helping public school teachers find and use digitized versions of primary source material, this site now maintains more than 80 historical online collections from the Library of Congress. Its greatest strength lies in its providing material that at one time could be accessed only if one traveled to the Library of Congress. I've been especially impressed with with its elegant design and panoply of photographs, manuscripts, rare books, maps, and all sorts of wonderful images. - Gail Hawisher Language & Literature -As an established collection, this site allows both researchers and students to cull a wide variety of materials which can be reused in various ways. This site is exemplary for several reasons: it incorporates and communicates emerging best practices; it combines various media; it offers interoperable search and display techniques in a flexible framework; and it attempts to combine contextual information with database search functions. - Virginia Kerr Visual & Media Studies SCRAN (Scottish Resources Access Network) A consortium project that involves a variety of Scots institutions, and is building a database of wide-ranging cultural materials. It is still under construction and some of it is password protected, but click "projects" and then search "Glasgow" Suggested Categories or Heading Teaching Tool. - Bernard Reilly Visual & Media Studies The John C. and Susan L. Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art : A Photographic Research and Teaching Archive This project has spectacular photos of sacred sites with varying views, and key links on teaching about the art. It is based on the John C. and Susan L. Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Related Art which contains nearly 300,000 original color slides and black and white and color photographs of art and architecture throughout Asia. Countries covered in the collection include India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, and Myanmar (Burma). - Marilyn Levine History A remarkably well-documented and far-ranging, searchable image resource for teaching architectural history. Effective use of database back-end. Broad rather than deep. Its founder has been willing to share images with a handful of similarly conceived projects, including one I've been working on with the SAH, at http://www.sah.org/imagex.html, but this is much more technologically polished and featured. - Jeffrey Cohen Visual & Media Studies A wonderfully rich resource for presenting materials on the physical aspect of this city and its architecture, many of them otherwise usually unavailable outside research libraries in Chicago. Deep more than broad, but on a subject that is considered key to many narratives about the emergence of modern architecture. I've been working on a similar project on the Philadelphia area (http://www.brynmawr.edu/iconog/), but again much less technologically polished and featured. - Jeffrey Cohen Visual & Media Studies Though 2 years old, this site shows how digital imaging technology and the Web, can be used to “publish” information related to art history. - Murtha Baca Visual & Media Studies Getty Vocabularies (Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Union List of Artist Names, Thesaurus of Geographic Names) Available free of charge on the Web, these three databases get an average of 150,000 searches per month. Can be used as lookup tools, cataloging aids, etc. - Murtha Baca Visual & Media Studies A very rich site for the study of and teaching about the ancient world. Includes the Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites and an extensive encyclopedia of terms relating to ancient history, archaeology, architecture, etc. Interface leaves quite a bit to be desired. - Murtha Baca Visual & Media Studies Manfred Jahn's Narratology Web site: To the teacher of narrative theory, this site offers a very usefulcollection of documents, definitions of key concepts, bibliographies, and survey of the field of narratology. Site has recently been expanded to include poetry and drama. - Marie-Laure Ryan Language & Literature The Robert B. Honeyman Jr. Collection Digital Archive An exemplary project in its exploration and resolution of several issues involved in providing access to cultural heritage materials (detailed item-level descriptions as well as digital facsimiles of collection items) via a networked environment. The project developed detailed encoded online finding aids using the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard with a full description of each item hyperlinked to high-quality archival digital images. Katherine Poole Visual & Media Studies Penn State Libraries On-Line Resources Tool Despite its unsophisticated look, no other website gives me more bang for the click than this one. This is how I find stuff, and often how I read it or order a copy. Just as card catalogs and indexes revolutionized the method of looking for books and articles, online indexes have revolutionized the method of looking for -- and through -- card catalogs and indexes! - Tom Beebee Language & Literature The International Dunhuang Project This is a high quality Web project, developed by Susan Whitfield at the British Library. This page gives access to information on over 28,000 manuscripts and printed documents from Central Asia in the British Library collection. It also includes high quality colour images of manuscript fragments, with more images being added every week. - Marilyn Levine History The Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature This site is the home for several projects: Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML), Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology--Online (DDM-Online), Saggi musicali italiani (SMI), and Musical Borrowing. The TML, which provides fully searchable texts for music theory written in Latin from the time of Augustine through the sixteenth century, is one of the largest full-text databases (5,000,000 words of text and more than 4,000 graphics) of literature; it averages more than 1300 visits and 700 searches per month. DDM-Online, which isalso fully searchable, contains more than 10,000 records and averages more than 5,000 searches per month. SMI and Musical Borrowing are smaller and newer projects. Both the CHMTL and the TML have been Scout, Webivore, and Schoolzone selections; the TML has also been the recipient of two substantial NEW grants (in 1992 and 1994). Thomas J. Mathiesen Performing Arts GENERAL/PROFESSIONAL RESOURCES CAA.Reviews: Books Received - New College Art Association's Database (coming this winter) - College Art Association's CAA's "Books Received" list-that is, a list of all books and exhibition catalogues that are sent to the College Art Association for review in one or all of our three journals (Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and CAA.Reviews) is published in Art Bulletin and put up on our CAA.Reviews site (www.caareviews.org/books/bookindex.html). We are currently turning this book list into an interactive, searchable database. Initially created to permit a cost-effective and timely way for CAA staff and reviewers to keep on top of the business of book reviewing, the new database will allow scholars to design their own subject headings by using indexes and keywords and combining search terms. The working list for categories for the database are "chronological," "geographical," "medium," "publications type," and "subject type." Within these broad headings are more specific delineations, such as "prehistoric," "art education," "artist's book," "Africa," and "architecture/urban planning/historic preservation. The category selections are extremely difficult to determine. Initially created by a reference librarian who is also an art historian and refined by the CAA.Reviews editorial board and its field of editors, the list has been sent to CAA members (via an article in the newsletter) to ask for their input. The books database is scheduled to be launched this winter. - Elaine Koss Visual & Media Studies Writing Across the Curriculum Clearing House Several years in the making, the WAC Clearing House offers a wealth of resources to support those universities interested in establishing or maintaining WAC programs. Among the resources are an excellent overview of WAC (its history and current key issues); links to dissertations and master's theses, articles, studies, bibliographies, journals, listservs; and academic. writing, the journal housed at the site. Instead of having to go to a huge number of sites to collect information relating to WAC, I now need only access this one site to find what I need. - Gail Hawisher Language & Literature Making of America: University of Michigan and Cornell University This collection is impressive for several reasons: its bulk; its effort to establish best practices for handling history primary source materials using an imaged page option; and the development of middleware which allows the welding of imaged pages with background ocr, now used in other sites such as the JSTOR journals repository. - Virginia Kerr Visual & Media Studies The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) Web site provides access to over ImageBase, a searchable image and text database of 75,000 objects from the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor)."The ImageBase is an expression of the Museum's mission to provide Along with the Carnegie Mellon English Server, Postmodern Culture, and a few similar sites, The Voice of the Shuttle helped define the humanistic interest in the World Wide Web. VOS has consistently provided an outstandingly good set of links and thus a first-rate humanist's portal to the Web, but it also offers the thinking of Alan Liu and others involved in one of the more important emerging digital humanities programs in the U.S. Stuart Moulthrop Language & Literature -Visually stunning site, including both opinionated reviews of recent books and groups of essays investigating particular issues in electronic culture and new media. - Marie-Laure Ryan Language & Literature -Edited by Joe Tabbi, ebr is the only on-line journal devoted to literary scholarship. Its special focus is electronic literature and culture, and its reviews are extensive. Now in its tenth issue. - Charles Harris Language & Literature Central gateway to resources in electronic poetry and poetics at SUNY-Buffalo, where the site is hosted, and elsewhere on the Net. Focuses on contemporary experimental and formally innovative poetry. A diverse site, with audio as well as visual resources, helpful lists and directories, and useful links. - Charles Harris Language & Literature A portal with modest aims, but with a functional infrastructure for delivering Web resources devoted to a well-defined subject, and the commitment to maintaining the resource over time. - Bernard Reilly Visual & Media Studies A most useful collection of links to documents concerning print and digital literary texts.- Marie-Laure Ryan Language & Literature An extremely useful “one-stop” reference tool for the study and teaching of art history; available by subscription. Link to Bridgeman Art Library Web site provides a fairly wide variety of related images. (current interface is quite weak) - Murtha Baca Visual & Media Studies a listing of theatre websites (especially useful for its list of "image collections") - Mark Pizzato Performing Arts Great resource for info on film & TV titles, artists involved, plot summaries, etc. - Mark Pizzato Performing Arts Hamlet on the Holodeck: Companion Web site to Janet Murray's book Gives access to many of the digital works discussed in the book-works that cannot be quoted in print form. A very successful example of how print and digital technology can work together.- Marie-Laure Ryan Language & Literature I hesitated in listing my favorite search engine, but I don't know what I'd do without it. Without a good search engine (and we could argue that none to date are really adequate), I'm reduced to relying on word-of-mouth recommendations or sheer luck. - Gail Hawisher Language & Literature |
to foster a new style of refereed scholarly publications in the humanities not only of interest to specialists but also -- and just as importantly --accessible by design and choice of medium to wide public audiences.