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As the universe of digital information expands exponentially, educational technology is taking humanities scholarship out of dusty archives and into vibrant online spaces.
At Boston College, a web-based application developed by a team of faculty and designers in the University’s Instructional Design and eTeaching Services (IDeS) office has placed BC at the forefront of this emerging era of scholarship dubbed the digital humanities.
MediaKron, an online database platform that allows faculty to build multimedia-rich archives, gives students access to an unprecedented array of materials and resources that support traditional classroom lectures and readings.
Ease of use and the capacity to expand and enhance projects as faculty and students contribute to this new form of scholarship were essential elements designers sought to incorporate when the project launched in 2004, says Rita Owens, executive director for Academic Technology.
Developed with the help of a 2006 grant from the Davis Educational Foundation, the MediaKron platform now boasts two-dozen projects, which are part of a rapidly expanding portfolio of web-based projects in the humanities at IDeS. Last semester there were a dozen active MediaKron projects in use by faculty and their students.
Emerging as a prime tool in the creation of digital humanities scholarship, MediaKron projects have covered topics including biology, Chinese culture, the Second Vatican Council, the art of Walt Disney studios, the death of Jesus, bilingual education, gender and religious images, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the history of public health, Irish studies, sculptor Michelangelo, the poet Dante Alighieri and the artist Albrecht Durer.
“Our intention early on was to fill a gap we found in commercial products that did not allow us to work with media-rich content to enhance scholarship,” Owens says. “We looked to the College of Arts and Sciences Honors Program and to the Davis Educational Foundation as partners to begin the creation of MediaKron.”
Working off the MediaKron template, faculty can customize the look and feel of their sites and use a range of tools – such as maps and timelines – to organize and present images, video, audio and text. Metadata tags allow students to follow multiple pathways through the materials as they explore their course topics. Some sites are publicly accessible, but some projects are password protected.
Tim Lindgren, an instructional designer with IDeS who has worked extensively on the MediaKron project, says there are similar public online tools faculty can use – such as photo archives on flickr or Picasa, wiki spaces, and Google maps – but MediaKron gives faculty a secure space where they can manage multi-media content in support of instruction.
“It’s really about having everything in one place for faculty members,” says Lindgren. “It allows them to focus on how they want to organize their content and spend less time worrying about the tool itself. It also provides them the flexibility to customize their site to their particular content.”
One of the earliest adopters, A&S Honors Program Director Mark O’Connor, is working on a project focused on four Polish artist-intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries.
“This project represents an important first stage in trying to conceive of my scholarship in ways that could speak at once distinctively both to American and Polish students,” says O’Connor. “The MediaKron format IDeS has designed makes feasible an investigation of the artist-intellectuals under consideration on a scale hitherto impractical – the image data base alone includes over 600 entries—a scale extremely rich for both individual and comparative case studies, offering an extended horizon for analysis and generalization.”
“Scholars need not be boxed into an application,” says Elizabeth Clark, director of Instructional Design and eTeaching Services. “The trend for the community to see and understand is that the humanities are not stuck in the past, but that digital technologies are allowing for new, creative ways of exploring and creating knowledge. It’s an exciting time for the humanities.”
Associate Professor of Fine Arts Stephanie Leone developed the MediaKron project “Roma: Caput Mundi” as a way to bring to life the history of the art and architecture of Rome. The site allows students to navigate a map and interact with monuments on a virtual tour of the Italian capital city during the Renaissance and Baroque eras.
“I think you have to understand the city in order to understand the art and architecture within it,” says Leone. “I found early on that students find architecture very challenging. It is tougher to understand three-dimensional objects – such as buildings or monuments – in space without seeing them. So this is a chance to get students as close to Rome as possible without bringing them to Rome.”
For some faculty members, the technology behind MediaKron has allowed them to expand the scope of their projects at each step. For one professor, the next step will be a mobile platform that will put James Joyce’s Dublin at the fingertips of users of wireless devices.
Joyce scholar Joe Nugent, an adjunct assistant professor of English, started with a project called “The BC Students’ Guide to Ulysses,” which has evolved into “Walking Ulysses,” a multi-media tour depicting Dublin in 1922, the year in which Joyce's masterwork, Ulysses, takes place. Students from his classes have helped conceptualize the projects, as well as collect and assemble materials. He says the technology makes his students active creators of knowledge, rather than passive recipients.
“I employ a horizontal rather than vertical, top-down, model of technology in my teaching,” Nugent says. “It’s best for students not to be in the business of absorbing knowledge, but to produce knowledge. This technology gives me the chance to let them use their own minds and to become manufacturers of knowledge.”
University Librarian Thomas Wall, whose staffers have worked closely with faculty and IDeS on MediaKron and other digital archive projects, says the technology is bringing more and more students into contact with the archives of the University, as well as collections from around the world.
“Our students are very familiar with digital content, but these projects can bring them into contact with primary source materials here at BC that they might not otherwise see,” Wall says. “Part of what MediaKron does is it allows students to see the depth of our collections and that is a great service.”
Click here for more information about Instructional Design and eTeaching Services projects.