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

Overview: With the advent of technology, both the process and the products of undergraduate scholarship are changing.

Our students are now faced, while composing, with a plethora of research challenges, and so need to develop information literacy skills that enable them to identify their information needs; to locate information sources; to assess the credibility of information; and to use information for their own academic interests and purposes.

Furthermore, student scholarship is no longer limited to composing “papers.” Increasingly, faculty have been asking students to produce multi-media scholarship that incorporates images, audio, and video, or that uses advanced applications in the sciences.

Because the scholarly challenges put to our students have become increasingly demanding and complex, our students require a more ambitious and comprehensive student support service. Accordingly, the Composition Center, the Library, and Academic Computing have collaborated to create RWIT: the Student Center for Research, Writing, and Information Technology. RWIT is a centralized service that integrates writing, research, and IT tutoring to produce a complete and systematic support effort for Dartmouth students. Such a service is the first of its kind, thereby establishing Dartmouth as a leader in what is sure to be a trend in multi-media composition and integrated student support services.

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

Instructor: Steven Swayne, Music

Overview: While music is fundamentally an aural art, much of the sound and history of any particular piece is inextricably linked to the time and place of the piece’s creation. One can distinguish various pieces of classical music by recalling the features of a map and remembering the music associated with various places on a map. What Swayne hoped to explore in this Venture Fund project is how to link the sounds of music more closely to the locales of its production. He wanted his students to be able to look at a map of the world and instantly think of the sounds associated with the places they see. Call it a musicalized map.

His project began rather simply, as students created websites about musicians, technologies, histories and philosophies that interested them. In these websites, students made links to visual and audio files that help illustrate their chosen topic. In addition, students were encouraged to “locate” their topic, that is, their website would take into account that their musician lived somewhere (or several somewheres), their technology was developed somewhere, and so forth. Parallel to the development of these student websites was the development of interactive maps that direct a user to this information about music. For example, a user who clicks on Paris would find text and audiovisuals about the composers who were active in Paris at various times. Indeed, the maps are designed to be time-sensitive; borders and music information change based on the century (or decade) chosen.

Given that the history of music covers a great span of time and that the world is a big place, Swayne has limited his attention to nineteenth-century Europe. There is the desire, however, to encompass more locales and more history over time, with the concept of the musicalized map being one more gateway for students to master the history of music.

Instructor: Kevin Reinhart, Religion

Overview: With the advent of technology, both the process and the products of undergraduate scholarship are changing.

Students have vivid images Middle East and Islamdom, most derived from television, some from movies. Many of the most significant moments in Islamic history have happened in the full glare of the newsreel and the television camera – the Iranian revolution, the 1967 war, rise of Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Turkish War of Independence, the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X.

To balance students’ limited recollections, we have begun collecting video clips that illustrate Modern Islam’s recent past. The idea is to give Modern Islam a history, so that it is not just Bin Ladin, but also Ataturk, and Hasan al-Banna who is vivid in students’ minds, not just the World Trade Center attacks, but also the First World War in the Middle East and the end of the Ottoman Empire. The archives of British Pathé, and the Lumiere Brothers have recently become available and images from these will be selected first for in-class presentations, and then later on a web site so that students may refer to them after lecture.

Instructor: Lewis Glinert, Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures

Overview: As Jewish and Hebrew studies and the study of music develop at Dartmouth, Jewish musical and spoken voice recordings must figure prominently in the curriculum. For example, the Hasidic melody was at the heart of Hasidism and its profound influence as a modern Jewish revivalist movement. In addition, Israeli folk music has played a central role in the creation of the new Israeli identity, and Yiddish and English Jewish humor are a core element in American Jewish identity.

The goal of the Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive is to provide students and scholars, both within the College and outside, with (1) Web-based access to recordings that are not commercially available; (2) related information that can aid in the study of Jewish music and culture, Jewish society, and the history of Jewish recording. The archive will span some 70 years of recording, with the oldest records dating from around 1910-1920 and the most recent material coming from LP’s issued in the 1970′s.

The Sound Archive will be a major element numerous courses and in the regular Hebrew language program: (a) HEBREW 10 ‘Intro to Hebrew Culture’; (b) AMEL 7 ‘Jerusalem: Vision and Reality’; (c) HEBREW 61/JEWISH STUDIES 40: ‘Intro to Israeli Culture: Literature, Music, Film’; (d) HEBREW 1, 2, 3, 21, 31.

In addition, the Sound Archive will make it possible to include Jewish music/spoken voice as a major element in the Jewish Studies and music curriculum, and possibly in history and anthropology courses: (a) JEWISH STUDIES 11 ‘History and Culture of the Jews’; (b) HISTORY 58/JEWISH STUDIES 37 ‘Representing the Holocaust’; (c) MUSIC 4 ‘Music of non-Western peoples’; (d) MUSIC 41 ‘Music, ceremony, ritual and sacred chant’; (e) JEWISH STUDIES 15 ‘Jews and Hollywood’.

Site: http://djsa.dartmouth.edu/

Instructor: Doug Moody, Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies

Overview: The design of this project consists of an interdisciplinary approach to a social science program (LALACS), and presents collaborative opportunities between the humanities and social science divisions at the college. LATS 41, “Representations of Latinos in the Media and the Arts,” focuses on three electronic media — radio, film/video and the internet — and several art forms associated with the Orozco Project and exhibition, which will occur in the spring term of 2002 — mural art, performance art and museum installations. Another objective of the project is to investigate the viability of synchronous internet-mediated communication for courses (MOOs), wherein students communicate with experts and professionals, who are involved in these art forms and media, and yet who are located at remote sites. Ultimately, the students will co-produce digital video archives and ethnographic webpages, which showcase their final projects for LATS 41.