Category Archives: Previous Project Years

Japanese Prints

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Instructor: Allen Hockley, Art History; Mayumi Ishida, Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures

Overview: The Hood Museum of Art possesses a collection of Japanese prints, which Hockley uses on a regular basis in courses he teaches every academic year. The Hood makes every effort to accommodate classes for viewing and study sessions, but access is limited in several ways. Hockley and Ishida would like to produce a website that would circumvent the limitations of the study-storage facility and thereby increase student access to the Hood Museum’s print collection. The website will be designed to meet specific pedagogical needs. In particular, its interactive and self-study components will offer students learning experiences that are impossible to replicate in the classroom.

The website will have four components, each of which will feature material and activities that will enhance users understanding of various aspects of the Japanese print tradition. The components include: (1) Print production, to acquaint the students with the process of Japanese woodblock print; (2) The Tokaido Highway, offering students a way to ‘navigate’ the highway and examine the ways print artists conceptualized its famous places and spectacular views; (3) materials to assist the study of the Kabuki version of Chushingura: The Tale of The Forty-Seven Ronin; (4) annotated versions of illustrations of the interior of a kabuki theater.

Courses in which this material will be used include: Art History 16: Special Topics in Art History or the senior seminar Art History 83; Art History 60: The Arts of Japan; Art History 3: Monuments of Asian Art; intermediate Japanese language courses (31-32-33 sequence or the 41-42-43 sequence).

Instructional Designer: Barbara Knauff

Site: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~ukiyoe/

Improved Efficiency in Elementary Anatomical Learning

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Instructor: Professor Martha D. McDaniel, M.D., Department of Anatomy, Dartmouth Medical School

Project: Medical education is in a period of dynamic change worldwide. Students of medicine in the 21st century need both to learn and to integrate more factual information than their predecessors, and to acquire skills that will facilitate their continuing learning after they leave medical school. Historically, medical students have attempted to learn human anatomy by cadaver dissection, supplemented by utilizing a variety of atlases and textbooks and faculty guidance in the form of lectures and small group sessions. We at Dartmouth feel that this is still a fundamentally sound approach. However, we also feel that the time spent procuring atlases and other learning materials (e.g. radiographs), assembling them in a location that is conducive to thoughtful assimilation, and searching for the appropriate pages is not time well spent. We believe that posting of well cross-indexed (linked) materials (including the use of rollover-images, pop-up text windows, and image links to enlargements) on a web site would greatly improve learning efficiency for our students.

Resources will include photographs of prosections, anatomical models, bones, radiological images, appropriately credited atlas drawings, and short videos outlining the steps to be taken in the assigned dissections and covering selected topics in a more advanced or detailed manner than can be done in class. Still images will be made interactive by using mouse-over scripting to create various textual messages that will explain and identify structures and allow linking among relevant images. The site will be searchable by category. We also plan to incorporate on-line image-based quizzes. Required material will be clearly delineated from optional, supplemental material.

Project Site: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~anatomy/

Field work utilizing global positioning systems

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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.

The Brothers Karamazov Web Site

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Instructor: Karen Gocsik, Director of Composition and Chair of English 2-3

Overview: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov is often taught at Dartmouth. In English 2-3, the program which I chair, three out of six professors use the book to teach our first-year students reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. One first-year seminar (ENG 7) teaches the book as its primary text, and several courses in the Russian department list it as required reading. We have long felt that we would like to create a Web site in which we could consolidate existing materials and develop new ones that will assist our students in their writing and research. We also plan this site to be an evolving teaching tool. Students taking courses in which the Brothers Karamazov is required reading would have the opportunity to assist in developing materials for the site. We envision a Web site that would grow to be the definitive site on the novel, linking to other relevant sites, providing a bibliography, and excerpting and annotating sections of the text, both in Russian and in English (akin to what Tom Luxon has done on his Milton Web site). Finally — and perhaps most important to meeting Venture Fund requirements — is that we will attach to the site a MOO that professors and students can use to enhance their understanding of the novel.

Instructional Designer: Barbara Knauff

Digital Linguistics Analysis

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Instructors: Ioana Chitoran and Lindsay Whaley, Program in Linguistics and Cognitive Science

Overview: Any student of linguistics can attest to the gulf that separates an understanding of linguistic theory and the ability to undertake one’s own analysis of language data. For this reason, the stronger linguistics programs around the world include significant hands on experience in carrying out linguistic analysis for their students.

To date, most of these opportunities have come in the form of doing problem sets in various classes. While these exercises are valuable, they are impractical to create for some sub-fields of linguistics (e.g. acoustic phonetics), and even when they can be created, they are extremely artificial. The solution to these shortcomings is for students to be doing their own linguistic fieldwork and dealing with data that they themselves collect from native speakers, in its ‘raw’ state. We want to be able to assign class projects which employ computer-based tools, and make the tools available to all of the students who take these classes, rather than just the self-selected few who choose an independent study or an Honors Thesis. Support from the Computing Technology Venture Fund permits us to increase our laboratory capabilities, which in turn enables us to take these next steps.