Humanities faculty make use of digital technologies through CU Library

Several Cornell humanities faculty members are actively engaged in projects that explore new frontiers in digital technology in collaboration with Cornell Library staff. Here is a look at just a few of these:

· Timothy Murray, professor of English and director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video: In working with Murray, Cornell Library has become the publishing home of Ctheory Multimedia, a groundbreaking journal of international digital art. The library hosted a workshop and launch for Ctheory this past weekend.

· Salah Hassan, associate professor of African art and Diaspora art history and visual culture at the Africana Studies and Research Center: The center, through Hassan, recently received a $300,000 Ford Foundation grant to support contemporary African art and culture. The Ford grant also will help Hassan and Cornell Library expand the library's database with images of works of more than 800 contemporary African artists, which will be available to the public via the Internet and in CD-ROM format. The Cornell Institute for Digital Collections (CIDC) designed and maintains Hassan's African Artists database.

· Tamara Loos, assistant professor of history in Southeast Asian studies, teaches a course in which students identify and critically analyze web sites. Cornell Library has provided instruction for students in this class for three semesters. Additionally, Loos and Allen Riedy, curator of the library's Echols Southeast Asia Collection, are submitting a joint proposal to digitize 19th and early 20th century Western travel accounts in the Echols Collection. Loos will be structuring a class around these digitized texts that will demonstrate the advantages of teaching and learning about artifacts through electronic media.

· An-Yi Pan, assistant professor of art history, co-taught a course titled "Friends of the Cold Season," with Ellen Avril, curator of Asian art at Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. The course made extensive use of software acquired by CIDC for campuswide collection and classroom use, and the Museum Online Collection, created and maintained through a joint library-museum project.

· Laura Meixner, chair and associate professor of art history, is director of a project called Projecting America, a new effort developed by the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Architecture, Art and Planning in cooperation with CIDC. The library collaborated with Meixner in classroom use of the online art collection created through CIDC's participation in the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project, a collaboration of seven universities and seven museums supported by the Getty Foundation. In Meixner's Art History 270 course, titled "Mapping America," students created web pages using resources from a variety of sources, including several art collections available through the library. Additionally, a number of her students have used the Uris Library CreationStation Lab to create their own web pages.