Projects

Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has just released "BOUND BY LAW?" - a comic book on copyright and creativity -- specifically, documentary film. It has been published under a Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/). The comic, by Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins explores the benefits of copyright in a digital age, but also the threats to cultural history posed by a “permissions culture,” and the erosion of “fair use” and the public domain.

WebArchivist.org is a research and software development group based at the University of Washington and the SUNY Institute of Technology that works with scholars, librarians and archivists interested in preserving and analyzing materials created for and distributed on the Web. Expertise areas include creating Web-based tools for digital scholarship, assisting with project design and procedures, and developing institutional policies necessary to complete these tasks.

 

FastApps for research applications management developed in collaboration with the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) and deployed for UCOP, an i-Dataware (integrated data management system) developed for National City Collaborative Family Resource Centers and similar applications for a NU/AmeriCorps Professional Development program. All of these applications involve a relational database.

 

The Video Annotation System (developed by Vincent Dorie) is a web-based video annotation tool that allows users to add commentary to streaming video by attaching text to a time-stamped location in the video. Because the commentary is structured as threads, this allows users to provide additional commentary on the same topic or start a new thread at the same location in the video. Applications for this tool range from research to teaching; currently, the video annotation system is being tested in the fields of biomedicine and nanotechnology to explore potential societal and ethical implications within laboratory work settings.

 

Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular is a new, international electronic journal dedicated to expanding the potentials of academic publication via emergent and transitional media. While not a journal about new media, Vectors brings together visionary thinkers with cutting-edge designers and media artists to propose a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content and mobilizes emerging technologies for the productive convergence of new ideas, forms and audiences in a global context. Vectors is founded on the belief that the academy must actively confront and participate in contemporary media culture, investigating new modes of expression and meaning-making and staging new points of contact between the arts, humanities and sciences. While adhering to high standards of quality in a peer-reviewed format, Vectors also aims to engage readers across traditional disciplinary boundaries and beyond the borders of the university.

 

 

Developing a head camera and research protocol to study how people learn in humanities museums. Led by Sam Wineburg, Professor of Psychology, and Susie Wise, doctoral student in the School of Education, both Stanford.

 

The September Project is a grassroots effort to encourage civic and campus events on freedom, democracy, and citizenship on or around September 11. Built over a digital network (the Internet) and organized through a social network (public and academic libraries), the September Project in 2005 collaborated with over 655 libraries from 34 countries to sponsor events that encouraged reflection, discussion, and dialogue about the meaning of freedom, the role of information in promoting active citizenship, and the importance of literacy in making sense of the world around us.

 

This seminar series, organized by Michael Warner (English, CCA) will analyze the ways different norms and aesthetic canons—including property and piracy, but also related conceptions of originality, quotation, etc.—govern and regiment the circulation of cultural goods.

 

 

This collaborative technology is based on the capability of semi-real time imaging in physical activity of two or three people. We have built a laboratory equipped with 48 cameras in UC Berkeley and 10 cameras in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The software accompanying these images reconstructs and displays complete 3D data representing the physical activities of the people in the laboratory. The display is a stereo display so that when viewed through stereo glasses the viewer gets true 3D impressions. We are exploring the connectivity through long distance and planning to examine the effect of what it means to meet in Cyberspace.

The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project is a multi-year research project involving University of Washington students, faculty, community, and labor organizations. Designed to generate new research on the links between labor and racial justice campaigns in Seattle, the project’s Website offers a vital connection for multiple publics such as former civil rights activists, current union members, students, and teachers. Historical timelines and narrative overviews anchor materials including student research papers, rare photographs, activist publications, and streaming video excerpts of oral history interviews with movement actors.

 

 

The goal of the Science Exploratorium Project is to create a multi-user persistent educational community that is both fun to play-in and educational as well. The initial target audiences are kindergarten through 12th graders. To achieve the project goal, we will be building a Science Exploratorium game world where students can login from the Internet and explore/play with their friends the many activities designed to simulate educational growth. The success of this project will be measured by the continue play of existing player base and the rate of growth of new players.

 

This working group, headed by Prof. Greg Lastowka and Prof. Ellen Goodman (Rutgers Law School, Camden) will examine the different interests that govern the production, appropriation, and circulation of textual and informational forms. Under what paradigms have individuals, corporations, states, and other parties asserted their own claims and principles.

 

This working group, headed by Prof. Paula McDowell (English) will ask how scholarship in the history of the book (on copyright, authorship, and codex-based forms of textual property, earlier “new media”) can help to understand the new formal mediations of digital culture, and vice versa.

 

Created by the National Science Foundation, the NSDL provides organized access to high quality resources and tools that support innovations in teaching and learning at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. The rapid acceleration of information available via the Internet makes locating high-quality, accurate, and truly useful educational resources challenging for teachers and learners. Educators, in particular, need efficient and reliable methods to discover and use science and math materials that will help them meet the demands of instruction, assessment, and professional development. Over 200 digital library projects and major institutions have contributed to and collaborated in developing NSDL.

 

This project is a distributed curricular and research initiative which Michigan has developed in collaboration with The Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France, the University of Cologne, Germany, the University of Campinas, Brazil, and the Centro Juan Marinello in Cuba. Students from these institutions may participate in Internet courses taught by faculty from all sites and participate in online discussions of readings on the topic of law and slavery in the Atlantic world. The research agenda is set by faculty who work on slavery, law and emancipation in regions from the American South all the way down the Atlantic coast to Brazil, and conferences are mounted at various sites, the next major conference being "Slavery, and Freedom in the Atlantic World: Statutes, Science and the Seas,” co-sponsored by the University of Michigan and the University of Windsor and taking place in Spring 2006. The Law and Slavery Project is an environment in which north and south, Europe and America, generate knowledge jointly and share it with both faculty and students. Asymmetrical lines of knowledge production and dissemination are thus circumvented thanks to the project’s use of new technology, and the global south is recognized as an active and equal player.

 

 

Based in Stanford's Humanities Lab (SHL), a founding member of HASTAC, this project explores how video games shape local and global culture. Once the late-night amusement of nerds and hackers, video games and interactive media have emerged as one of the most vibrant elements of today’s entertainment and military industries. Massively multiplayer games bring into contact players from many countries, cultures, and age groups, challenging players to individually and collaboratively contemplate and manipulate the history and future of virtual worlds. Militaries are using similar platforms to develop strategy and train troops and ultimately create change in the real world. Despite the growing popularity and legitimacy of these games, the importance of the medium has all but eluded notice by most scholars. This project explores and documents the development and impact of such networked, interactive, massively multiplayer virtual worlds.

 

Developing a software system for intelligent search of a scholarly archive of digital data, representing the stream of recorded events of a personal scholarly life. Led by Dr. Edward A. Feigenbaum, Kumagai Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus, Stanford.

 

The collaboration brings together visual artists, librarians, historians, urban planners, with research scientists and engineers At the San Diego Supercomputing Center to analyze the lingering impact of historical policies on urban housing. The practice of "redlining" (institutionalized racial zoning, devised in the 1930s under various FDR New Deal initiatives) is visualized across time using GIS mapping, interactive 3D models, and data grid environments to support persistent archives and distributed repositories. The project dramatically illustrates the benefits from drawing visually enhanced relations between the past and present, with important policy implications. The San Diego Supercomputing Center is a founding member of HASTAC.

 

To provide a bridge between the Humanities, Arts and Social Science (HASS) Grid and collections of domain-specific data, the University of California Humanities Research Institute in collaboration with National University Institute has created a Grid and Portal application. This system allows the user to build a layered information portal and deploy a group digital library to support terabyte-scale storage for information and data transfer between individual researchers and/or research groups within HASS domains. Consistent with the HASS Grid architecture, the system is compliant with emerging Grid standards, currently incorporating API's for SRB and commodity gridbricks. Several research groups are currently testing the HASS portal and grid infrastructure, including groups studying the history of Jews in Los Angeles and the objects of media studies.

 

Data grid and computing grid plus Access Grid for communications. Such technology will be used for HASTAC and the Latin American Grid Alliance initiative for an online GridSTART training program.

 

Duke University's Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS) program has developed a First-Year Opportunity for Comprehensive, Unified Study (FOCUS) program centered on gaming. The FOCUS Program is an exciting opportunity for first-year students to participate in an enhanced educational setting by working closely with faculty in small classes, living in the same residence, and enjoying frequent contact with instructors outside of the classroom. The ISIS program will approach the concept of gaming from a number of disciplinary applications, including videogame design and development, the historical development of videogames and interactive simulations, the importance of game theory for economic/psychological modeling, and the ways in which interactive gaming models are transforming traditional modes of information science.

 

The Duke Collaboratory serves as a central node in a growing network of humanities scholars, designers, teachers, artists, and programmers interested in developing interactive multimedia approaches to collaborative academic research. The group, founded by Tim Lenoir and Casey Alt, is committed to providing simple but powerful digital media tools to further expand the boundaries of collaboration and innovation. As information sources and media formats continue to proliferate at an y accelerating rate, academic researchers face the daunting task of collecting, storing, and analyzing large corpora of multimedia documents. The Duke Collaboratory has approached this problem with a decidedly different philosophy - namely, to develop state-of-the-art data visualizations and content analysis tools to actively represent and conduct collaborative research in a new way. Two of the hpsCollaboratory's most well-received projects thus far have been online timeline and genealogy applications, which allow communities to collaboratively document their own history via flexible, graphically-mediated, data-driven web interfaces.

 

A project of the USC Annenberg Center for Communication and the USC Office of the Provost, the Digital Dissertations initiative supports three doctoral candidates as they develop a portion of their dissertations employing digital media to advance the scholarship inherent in this research. Once complete, the pilot program could lay the foundation for moving dissertations entirely from traditional to electronic media when appropriate to the research. In 2005, USC implemented a fellowship program to support the development of Digital Dissertations. The first three fellows are now in residence at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML).

 

 

The CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Builder is a system designed to allow researchers in the humanities to interact with 3-dimensional artifacts and related digital content inside of a collaborative virtual environment. The CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Builder, built on top of HP Labs' Croquet software, allows for group collaboration and interaction within the virtual space. Examples of interaction include discussion, annotation of artifacts, adding hyperlinks to artifacts, as well as introducing new items into the gallery and modifying the layout of the gallery and contents.

 

Arts/Ventures, a new grant program for undergraduate students initiated by Duke Performances and the Pratt School of Engineering, encourages arts students to team up with students in engineering and the sciences as well as to incorporate appropriate technology into their projects. Public performances of the first two Arts/Ventures student projects took place at the end of AY 2005: 1) For the multimedia event, "Elephant Pink and the Clockwork Kimono," a team of students from the art department collaborated with students from the Duke Robotics Club, along with students who composed and mixed digital sound tracks. Out of a Butoh-inspired centerpiece construction with a robotic-like figure at the top emerged , a stream of models wearing exquisite, hand-made costumes paraded down the runway and interacted with audience members before resuming their march back into the centerpiece figure 2) a collaboration between a Trinity senior and four Pratt School freshmen, all interested in the science of the voice and the recording process produced a 20-minute original musical composition entitled "Headlines," scored for multiple background voices, solo voice and spoken text, with recording-based instructions.

“Detroit Plays,” is a collaboration of the WSU Libraries and the Detroit Historical Museums. It centers on a toy collection that encompasses over 5,000 objects, including mechanical toys, dolls, doll houses and their furnishings, toy cars, wagons, bicycles, toy trains, and banks. The project’s website archive will facilitate studies of social history through the development of toys over Detroit’s 300-year history, illuminating the daily lives of people of all ethnic, economic, religious, and cultural backgrounds. The online exhibit is being built in part by student interns in a program aimed at bringing underrepresented groups into the profession of librarianship by working with senior librarians in the fields of systems, digital project development, metadata, digital archives, and museum management.

 

The "Herman Miller Consortium Collection," is an online database of historical products that unifies collections held by thirteen museums around the United States. Herman Miller, Inc. established the Consortium in 1988 to share the collection that had accumulated as part of its corporate archives in Zeeland, Michigan. The collection contained about 750 pieces of furniture and a large quantity of product literature. As the lead institution, the Henry Ford (museum) maintains the record of consortium holdings and performs the digitization, while Wayne State University provides hosting, website design, technical support, database and image loading, and consultation for the online database.