Instructor: Joy Kenseth, Art History Department

Overview: Faculty members spend a considerable amount of time explaining art history terms to students by drawing diagrams and searching for appropriate illustrations in the art historical literature. Even though glossaries can be found in textbooks, they are often less helpful, because terms are poorly defined or there are no accompanying illustrations. A far more helpful and efficient way of making this information available would be to have an on-line glossary. That is what this project will create. All entries will have a verbal explanation (including phonetic pronunciation, etymology, definition) and visual examples. The glossary will benefit students in the Art History survey courses as well as in upper lever courses.

Instructor: Jeremy Rutter, Classics Department

Overview: The Department of Classics is using its grant from the Computing Technology Venture Fund to create a series of visual image sets (maps, artifacts, scenes drawn from ancient works for art) which, by being accessible through DCIS, would enable students to undertake more challenging and rewarding coursework. Initially, these images will be employed most frequently in ancient history (Greek and Roman Studies [GRS] 20,22) and archaeology(GRS 6, 50-56) courses, but they should also be of use in courses on Greco-Roman mythology and religion (GRS 4,12) and on various aspects of Greco-Roman culture such as linguistics, economics, athletics, and warfare (GRS 11). At least four members of the departmental faculty (Rutter, Stewart, Ulrich, Whaley) are already committed to making use of these images in their courses. The initial phase of the project will make available via DCIS images of roughly 150 Greek coins for student analysis in term papers. Some twenty maps of Greece, Italy, the eastern Mediterranean, Sicily, Spain, France, Britain, and the Mediterranean basin will be made available on the PUBLIC file server. Student assignments with these maps will include illustrating the course of historical events (such as the growth of the Roman Empire, stages in the progress of a particular military campaign), illustrating the spatial distribution of a particular artifact type, or illustrating dialect differences in both grammar and orthography as part of a paper exploring the reasons for specific kinds of linguistic change.

Instructor: Lenore Grenoble, Russian Department

Overview: The goal of the project is to create a set of programs that will be distributed to every Russian language student at Dartmouth. Essentially, the project over the next year would consist of three distinct portions: (1) to create a database, which would contain complete translation, lexical, and morphological information for a basic word list of several thousand Russian words, (2) to create a package of reference software to manipulate the above-mentioned database, including such items as a dictionary, verb-conjugator, and grammar tables; and (3) to create a basic set of exercises, building (as will be described below) on some of the previous experience at Dartmouth. Beyond the obvious English-Russian vocabulary drills, students will be able to obtain their own tables showing all the forms of any word with which they are having difficulties. On a more advanced level, it will be possible for students to work on drills that test specific forms they are studying (or to review forms that they have studied earlier).

Instructor: Lynn Higgins, French & Italian Department

Overview: The program Philippe, developed at MIT and published by Yale University Press, is an interactive, multimedia environment intended for second year French curriculum. The French & Italian Department, with support from Computing Services and the Language Resource Center (LRC), will modify Philippe in order to make it part of the Department’s curriculum. This will entail digitizing the 30 minutes of video and placing it on CD-ROM. The SuperCard stack that controls the video will be modified to use the digital video resources. Stations equipped with CD-ROM players will be set up in the Kiewit Instructional Center and the Language Resource Center. Initially, Philippe will be used in French 8, a course that combines practice in the active use of the language with an introduction to major aspects of French society. This project is being done in collaboration with MIT and Yale University Press.