Instructor: Robert L. Welsch, Department of Anthropology

Project: Anthropology students have watched documentary films and videos about the world’s exotic peoples for many decades. These carefully edited films illustrate different ways of life and different cultures. But such documentaries rarely allow students to observe how anthropologists actually conduct interviews, sift through contradictory interview data, or reach conclusions. This project was designed specifically to address this limitation in existing ethnographic and anthropological videos.

During a month-long research field trip to Papua New Guinea Welsch interviewed Papua New Guineans about a variety of different topics. These interviews were videotaped on mini-DVs with the assistance of Kellen Haak (Registrar of the Hood Museum) and Sebastian Haraha (Senior Technical Officer at the PNG National Museum and Art Gallery) who accompanied Welsch on the field trip. With the assistance of Alice Matthias ’07 who served as video editor, Welsch used Blackboard to distribute several 15-30 minute clips, allowing students in Anthro 1 (Intro to Anthropology), Anthro 3 (Intro to Cultural Anthropology), Anthro 17 (Anthropology of Health and Illness), and Anthro 38 (Peoples of Oceania) to see some of these interview clips and make sense of this raw anthropological data.

These video clips show how anthropologists conduct interviews in difficult and exotic settings. They illustrate how anthropological informants can disagree with one another, and how a single informant can draw upon a complex mix of explanations. These video clips allow students to try to reach conclusions from confusing, ambiguous, and conflicting informant statements in much the same ways that professional anthropologists do in their own research. The project demonstrates the utility of using field video clips in the classroom, and the effectiveness of Blackboard as a means of providing student access to these materials.

Instructor: Francis Magilligan, Department of Geography

Project: With the ever-expanding sophistication of satellite imagery and other remote sensing technologies, it becomes increasingly critical to expose our students to these new styles of acquiring, expressing, and analyzing spatial data sets. Our department wants to expand our use of spatial imagery. Funding from the Venture Fund for the acquisition of four Global Positioning Systems (GPS) units is critical for our expansion. GPS provides specially coded satellite signals that can be processed in a GPS receiver, enabling the receiver to compute position, velocity, elevation, and time. GPS can be used in at least eight different classes within our current curriculum, from the introductory to the advanced level, including our human and physical geography classes. These GPS receivers are mobile, hand-held units that can be used in the field for single node mapping (e.g., a ground control point (GPC) for geo-rectifying an aerial photograph, location of a single tree or house, etc.) or for three-dimensional mapping of topography and other geomorphic applications. For human geography courses, these spatial data from the GPS receivers can be linked to existing data sets, such as TIGER files and other Census Tract data, and can also be integrated into a GIS.

Instructor: Diederik Vandewalle, Government Department

Project: This project will be developing two resources. First a set of digitized, color-coded maps of the Middle East will be developed. Much of this work has already been accomplished in the computer labs in the Geography department. Second, software will be written that will enable the “delivery” of these maps over the network to students and faculty. Initial course applicability will be Government 46, 52 and 88.