Projects

“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.

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.

 

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.

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.

 

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.

 

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).

 

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.