Digital Gallatin

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StoryMaps in the Classroom

by Duncan Yoon
Fall 2022

One of the things I like the most about some of the Gallatin concentrations that I advise is that they combine a practical skill set with significant critical thinking. This was in the back of my mind when I started using StoryMaps in the classroom; it gives the students a chance to gain some new technical knowhow while at the same time do some heavy conceptual lifting. I also like how its platform encourages the students to present their narratives and/or arguments in a multimedia format. So instead of writing the same old end-of-the-semester term paper, something that can easily disappear into the recesses of a file cabinet after they finish, the students now have the start of a digital dossier—something they can easily share with friends, family, and even potential employers. Simply put, when asked what they did in that crazy sounding Gallatin seminar, they can send over an easily accessible piece of their NYU career.

See student Emilie Meyer’s Storymap project, Sculpture of the Absurd: Alberto Giacometti and Samuel Beckett.

StoryMaps is a platform that is meant to narrativize maps built using the extremely robust ArcGIS program. However, using StoryMaps as a substitute for a traditional term paper does require some extra work. Throughout the semester, but especially at the beginning, I feature a series of workshops in conjunction with the Digital Studio at Bobst Library in order to give the students a primer on the software. In the syllabus, I identify this as an introduction to the Digital Humanities. These workshops introduce the students to ArcGIS by teaching them how to create map layers using existing data sets as well as create simple maps themselves. While this introduction is only dipping a toe into the deep water that is ArcGIS, it does help demystify one of the most sought after digital competencies in the workplace. My hope is that after this introduction, students will be motivated to take a whole class on ArcGIS, which would cement practical skills that they can use not only while they are still at NYU, but also after they graduate.

I could even envision a year-long course that explicitly combines ArcGIS with one of my courses, Thinking Diasporically: Postcolonialism and Migration. Because one of the main themes of this course is mobility, it would sync nicely with the mapping and visualizations provided by ArcGIS and StoryMaps. In order to do it correctly would require some team teaching so that both the practical and conceptual expertises are conveyed effectively. By having the sequence be a year long, with one semester devoted to the course material and one semester devoted to acquiring digital competency, I think that the final projects could be easily incorporated into an end-of-the-year showcase wherein the students present their projects to Gallatin and the wider NYU community. Such an in-depth process would also give students a real chance to wade into the complexity of their concentrations by equipping them with both the conceptual and digital tools necessary to not only grapple with big ideas, but also to express themselves and their ideas in a way that resonates with our increasingly digital world.

Explore more Storymap projects in the ArcGIS Storymaps Gallery, find out how to access Storymaps at NYU, and contact Jenny Kijowski at jenny.kijowski@nyu.edu to find out more about how you can use StoryMaps in your courses.

Which Screen Recording Software is Right For You?

There are a lot of ways to capture and record your screen or to send video messages out to students. We’ve compared four solutions to help you make the best choice.  

  Express Capture Kaltura Capture Screencast-O-Matic Vimeo Record Loom
Built Into NYU Stream Yes Yes No No No
Where do you access it? NYU Stream NYU Stream Screencast-O-Matic Website Chrome Browser Extension Loom.com, Desktop Application, Chrome Browser Extension
Browser Compatibility (Safari, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc) All All  All Chrome All, but the Chrome Extension will Only Work in Chrome
Do I need to download and install any software? No Yes (Separate Program) No Yes (Chrome Extension) Yes, the desktop environment has more robust features.
Can I record both my screen and myself? No (Webcam Only) Yes Yes Yes Yes
Does it work offline? No Yes No No No
Where does the video live after I’ve recorded it? NYU Stream Private NYU Stream Media Library Your Screencast-O-Matic account Vimeo Account Loom Account
Where Can I Read More About These Tools?  Find out more about Express Capture Find out more about Kaltura Capture Find out more about Screencast-O-Matic Find out more about Vimeo Record Find out more about Loom 

Progressive 3D Asset Library

by Carl Skelton
Fall 2018
Teaching-with-Technology Grant Awardee
 

3D models for digital media applications take an awful lot of skilled hours to make—more hours than students typically have available to complete media art, interactive, or architecture projects within a single semester. Like professionals in those fields, they legitimately seek out pre-made 3D “assets” online from free file exchanges, model marketplace sites, and commercial asset libraries.
 
Unfortunately the quality, consistency, and complexity of those assets often create more problems than they solve: tree models made for architectural renderings are likely to be huge files suitable for overnight rendering at professional service bureaus, but totally unworkable for interactive uses, especially with the hardware and production mojo to which individual students have access. 
 
It can be very frustrating, especially for students whose expectations have been set by their experience of big-budget commercial production. 

The idea for a progressive 3D asset library came out of several years of teaching and workshop experience at Gallatin and around the world, from summer participatory workshops in Germany to youth empowerment on First Nation lands in Canada. Too often, workshop participants would get bogged down trying to populate models and interactive media with people, vehicles, and plants downloaded in a rush from swap sites or the 3D warehouse—files too big to run in their applications, assets with wildly inconsistent levels of quality or look-and-feel, and images with irrelevant demographics (way too many trolls, orcs, and Sailor Moons, not nearly enough cultural variety).

“For Pasan to represent [the South Asian] community without trying to construct a generalized set either to or against stereotypical expectations of what that might look like, he had only to model real people as he knows them.”

The scope of this project was to produce a pilot or proof-of-concept. For the first set in what will hopefully be an expanding asset library, we erred on the side of low-poly figures, with a view to making it practical to populate large scenes, with an emphasis on outdoor activities: sports, recreation, social activities.

We worked with Jee Won Kim, an architect (and firm) with extensive experience in crossover situations between architecture and media arts, and Pasan Dharmasena, a Gallatin student. In the image above, Pasan is the one on the left, standing next to his sister and parents, with an unrelated tennis player in between. The strategy here was simple enough: if Pasan happened to be South Asian, there was no better person to represent that community on the modeling team. For Pasan to represent that community without trying to construct a generalized set either to or against stereotypical expectations of what that might look like, he had only to model real people as he knows them. The big surprise for me wasn’t the fact that his dad is a doctor—even on the weekends, apparently—but the similarity of dress between his mom and his sister.  

Will we be able to use this family group in Wikwemikong next time we’re up there, and have everybody there assume they represent a contemporary Anishanabe family? Oh, probably. Will the next South Asian student who contributes to the library have other ideas, or grandparents and toddlers to add? We hope so.

Another asset category that has been a chore to deal with effectively in short-form modeling and interactive projects has been low-poly flora and furniture with definable performance characteristics for sustainable development/redevelopment scenarios: community garden plots with specific capacities and volumes of soil; wheelchair-accessible variants; solar panels with known capacities and efficiencies; and vehicles with defined carrying capacities, ranges, and rates of fuel/power consumption.

3D fauna in planter box

Accordingly, most of the other models are being built with equally efficient/sketch-level geometry, but full metrics: the SUV gets 15 miles to the gallon, the birch is of a particular age and trunk girth, the seating capacity and average speed of the electric trolley is defined. 

3D vehicles

I’ll be working with Jee Won on certain components of the project through the fall of 2019, and making this first selection of assets available to students in my “Making Virtual Sense” undergraduate arts workshop course in the fall. My goal is to stimulate some dialog about what should be added next, both as prompts to critical consideration of projects at their onset, and as resources to produce and complete projects on time that don’t drain creative resources in the home stretch of production for individual students and small teams on tight schedules.

Stay tuned,

-Carl

How to Use Google Assignments

The Google Assignment Tool (BETA) is a tool created by Google which allows instructors to create, grade, and provide feedback on assignments through the familiar Google Drive interface. Students can create new documents, or select existing documents and files, from their NYU Drive account and submit to the Google Assignment Tool (BETA) for grading and feedback.

Watch the video demo below to see how it works!

Indigenous Futures: Decolonizing NYC—Documenting the Lenape Trail

by Jack Tchen and Noa Fuller
Spring 2018
(Teaching-with-Technology Grant Awardee)

Decolonizing the Classroom: New Tech & Critical Pedagogy

Indigenous Futures is a class that addresses the ideas of regional and global colonization—and the myriad possibilities of decolonization—in the content and materials, but with special focus given to our pedagogical approach. We sought to have the structure of the class, the technology we used, and the experiences of the students challenge the traditional Western, “high senses” (sight & sound) text-heavy approach. Instead, we built the course around leaving the classroom to walk sites related to Indigenous histories, emphasizing the “lower/base sense” (touch, taste, smell), and building off of the personal experiences and ideas that the students carried with them.

“The core question wasn’t how do we fit the class into the tech, but how does the tech allow us to challenge linear approaches to storytelling.”

Technology played a vital role in the classroom, beginning with the opening up of the idea of technology to encompass a range of historical mediums for storytelling; from ancient cave painting as the original 360-degree experience, to oral traditions, to virtual reality (VR) headsets. The core question wasn’t how do we fit the class into the tech, but how does the tech allow us to challenge linear approaches to storytelling. By being in conversation with the medium of VR throughout the semester, we were able to imagine new possibilities for how the students could take their research and knowledge gleaned in the class and pass it on in unique and viscerally affective ways. At the end of the course the students developed three different immersive VR experiences tied to unique sites in the region.

The semester itself was divided into three sections. The first was spent on individual projects, called Mini-Artifact Projects, which focused on personal reflection, with each student beginning to understand and reckon with their connection to colonization. This work, which involved the students triangulating between themselves, their artifact, and Lenapehoking (Land of the Lenape), gave the class a chance to ground themselves in the material and understand the ways we are all colonized subjects. The students then developed creative non-fiction projects tied to this self-reflection using any form they felt best reflected their approach. Projects included timelapse GIFs, sculptural pieces, digital collage, maps, and VR.

Early in the semester we also initiated a series of walks that would continue throughout the Spring, as well as visits with Indigenous knowledge bearers. On our various trips, the students used Ricoh cameras to learn how to shoot in 360-degrees, and knowledge bearers offered feedback and reflection on how we could develop our VR projects. We did extensive work and collaboration with interdisciplinary new tech artist and thinker Alexandre Girardeau, who led five sessions exploring VR as a storytelling medium.

In the second part of the course, the students divided into groups focusing on three key Lenape sites in the region: Inwood Hill Park, Collect Pond/Werepoes Village (modern day Foley Square area), and the Passaic Eel Weir near Paterson, NJ. Each group of 5-7 students was responsible for doing a deep research dive into their area, examining the Indigenous history over the past 400 years and modern connections to issues of climate justice and dispossession. Interdisciplinary ecologist, author, and researcher Kerry Hardy helped the students create multi-layered maps of their sites, which became the foundation of their VR projects.

The final section of the class was the production period for the collaborative VR experiences. Working in their site groups and building off of their individual projects, intensive research, walks, readings, and knowledge bearer visits, the students scripted, designed, filmed, edited, and produced three VR pieces. Over five weeks the groups, working closely with us, refined their ideas, played with the headsets, and pushed themselves to produce final works.

Each project was deeply unique: the Passaic group imagined the experience of an eel traveling on the river in both past and present; the Collect Pond group had the viewer go down a drain into the hidden water below the street where they explored a collage of words and images; and the Inwood group created constellation-like figures of humans and animals that once inhabited the area and reacted to the viewers gaze. At our final class, several knowledge bearers joined us for food, presentations, in-depth conversation & feedback, and a chance to try out the VR experiences in the headsets.

A core lesson from teaching Indigenous Futures is the critical role of integrating new technologies across the University. These don’t need to be specialist tools for only those interested in coding or computer design. Instead, they offer wonderful promise for getting outside the traditional pedagogical approaches and placing students directly in conversation with the materials and subjects they are learning about. Our goal was not to create flawless VR experiences ready for public consumption, but to understand how the process of developing these kinds of projects can bring out new, unique ways of encountering challenging ideas and immediately putting them into practice.

Finally, a special thanks are in order to Jenny Kijowski and the Curricular Development Challenge Fund Grant for giving us the tools and the funds to explore an unfamiliar medium.

Chartist Fiction Online

by Greg Vargo
Site Launched August 31, 2018

Chartist Fiction Online is a web-based, searchable catalogue of fiction and fictional reviews appearing in periodicals associated with the nineteenth-century British protest campaign known as Chartism. The database includes over 900 entries for stories, novels and reviews, thus opening a window onto the literature of the largest mass movement in Victorian Britain. The website marks the first attempt to gather together evidence of the full range of fiction and criticism of fiction in Chartist publications, providing an extensive resource allowing scholars and students to explore the role of literature in the movement.

The first civil rights campaign in Great Britain, Chartism was a political mobilization focused on winning universal male suffrage at a time when voting rights were restricted to the propertied elite. It also encompassed a broad cultural mobilization, as activists built a thriving counter-culture, which included schools, discussion groups, “Democratic chapels,” theatre clubs, and most of all a periodical press. Publishing not only news, these journals, which were some of the most read papers of the 1830s and 1840s, also fostered a diverse canon of poetry and fiction, which grappled imaginatively with the economic inequalities and political exclusions that defined British society.

Chartist Fiction Online came into being over a period of seven years and involved many different stages. My collaborator Rob Breton (of Nippissing University in Ontario, Canada) and I first catalogued fiction and reviews in the complete run of nearly thirty-five Chartist periodicals. This work involved visiting libraries in Manchester, London, Toronto, and New York, as well as using a number of digital and microfilm collections. Having entered our data into an Excel spreadsheet, we were unsure how to present the material in a way that would make it coherent to users. Jenny Kijowski recommended Omeka as a platform designed to support academic projects, and she helped us design and build the site. In Spring 2017, the project was fortunate to receive a Gallatin Faculty Enrichment Fund grant, which enabled us to hire Charline Jao as a research assistant to transfer data from our spreadsheet onto the Omeka platform as well as to develop new visual elements. Working with Charline, we created a timeline that places Chartist literature in the context of contemporary political developments and canonical literature and a map (using the program StoryMapJS) to graphically represent the extent of Chartist print culture.

“The vast majority of Chartist fiction remains difficult to locate....This database aims to start to fill the gap by providing a much fuller sense of the scope and range of Chartist fiction.”

It is our hope that our website will serve a number of inter-related functions. First, although significant scholarship about Chartist literature has appeared over the last two decades, substantive difficulties locating and accessing Chartist fiction still confront would-be scholars or teachers of the genre. The vast majority of Chartist fiction remains difficult to locate, buried among pages and pages of newspapers available on microfilm or occasionally online databases. Still more texts are accessible only in rare book libraries. And nothing approaching a comprehensive bibliography has previously existed. This database aims to start to fill the gap by providing a much fuller sense of the scope and range of Chartist fiction.

Second, we wanted users to be able to explore this corpus in a number of different ways. Beyond including standard bibliographic categories (such as author and publication date), we divided the stories into a number of subgenres and identified their temporal and geographic settings. These features allow users to search, for example, for all fiction set in Ireland or the United States or for all examples of historical fiction. Third, the site attempts to make Chartist literature approachable for students and other non-specialist readers. We not only reproduce a number of short stories and reviews and provide links to others, we also offer a view of the broader world out of which this literature developed.

Finally, beyond providing a resource for scholars working in this field, the database itself marks a scholarly intervention. Where most previous studies and all anthologies of Chartist writing select work based on authorship and thematic content, we did not limit the index to works written by known Chartists or written specifically for Chartist papers. Our criteria, rather, was simply the inclusion of a story or review in a Chartist periodical. We believe an approach using the periodicals themselves to define the Chartist canon allows a fuller understanding of Chartist culture; Chartist fiction encompassed a wide-range of popular genres, including adventure stories and fables, some of which have been overlooked. Second, by including listings for non-Chartist fiction republished in the Chartist press, excerpts from novels by Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, we hope to further the understanding of the complex interplay between more mainstream authors and the literary world of a working-class radical movement. Finally, we hope the inclusion of the latter material will make the resource useful for students and scholars working on topics beyond the radical press or Chartist fiction.

Shadow Lines

by Eugenia Kisin
Spring 2018
(Teaching-with-Technology Grant Awardee)

Shadow Lines is a digital database and mapping project that traces the movement of Native American-made objects into collecting institutions and between communities. Expanding on objects as the material of social relations, Shadow Lines explores the relational cultures of collecting, and how these intersect with complex histories of settler occupation, resource extraction, and knowledge production across ancestral and unceded Indigenous territories and within the discipline of anthropology—mapping, for instance, Penobscot landscapes, stories, and objects that trace a river’s movement in relation to a history of struggle over hydroelectric dams.

Shadow Lines is also itself a relational project. It was conceived in collaboration between NYU anthropologist Jane Anderson, UC Santa Cruz historian Amy Lonetree (Ho-Chunk), and UMass Amherst archaeologist Sonia Atalay (Anishinabe). So far, the project’s archival and community-based research has been carried out in collaboration with the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, and Karuk tribes. It has also involved undergraduate and graduate students across the collaborators’ institutions in both research and data entry, as well as in the larger theoretical questions about how to do geospatial research in a decolonizing framework, given that mapping is so often deployed as a colonial technology of rule.

I joined the Shadow Lines team in 2017, hoping to expand the research on this project with Gallatin students. Jane and I were awarded a Gallatin Teaching-with-Technology Grant to hire a team of student research assistants and a data consultant to work on several prototypes, with the goal of producing several different database and digital interface possibilities for representing our research on objects, people, landscapes, and the links between them in a decolonial way.

“Over the course of the semester, I was struck by how the students worked with the data in ways that also extended the collaborative spirit of the project.”

In my Material Practices in Museum Anthropology graduate elective, students in Gallatin and Museum Studies, including two Gallatin undergraduates, worked with our data sheets and prototypes to propose future directions for Shadow Lines. As an anthropologist who works with First Nations and Native American artists on the Northwest Coast of North America as they engage their work in social and environmental struggles, I was (and continue to be) particularly interested in how the removal of objects from communities for museums might be related to the expansion of infrastructure for transportation and resource extraction, through the actions of particular collectors or through settler expansion into Indigenous-controlled territories. As with most Digital Humanities projects, these are scholarly questions of interest to anthropologists and historians; however, the geospatial tools are powerful and public ways of visualizing them with students and communities trying to reconnect with their cultural property.

Students in Museum Anthropology took these questions and digital applications on enthusiastically. Working in teams of four, students decided on a theme on which they wanted to focus a technological and museological intervention. These were: “Belongings,” a focus on the social lives of collections from the viewpoint of communities of origin; “Narrative,” which involved moving beyond geospatial data to focus on the relationships between anthropologists and institutions; “Accessibility,” which focused on building more accessible technology for Elders and users with disabilities, particularly visual impairments, through SmartScribe technology; and “Extraction,” which was centered on issues of representing trauma and affect in European collecting institutions around the forced removal of cultural heritage.

Over the course of the semester, I was struck by how the students worked with the data in ways that also extended the collaborative spirit of the project. For example, the “Belongings” group assembled a toolkit for future student research with museums that would facilitate the archival research process by listing the kinds of questions one should ask an archivist, and how to navigate the different departments in such institutions (e.g. the registrar’s office, library, special collections, etc.) to triangulate different lines of evidence; similarly, the “Extraction” group responded directly to our Penobscot collaborators’ calls for more research in Europe, and carried out initial catalog-based research with collections held at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris that had been misattributed to Abenaki peoples—a significant archival find that also emphasized the value of collections-based research in digital projects.

Jane and I will continue to teach with Shadow Lines as our partnerships with our collaborators deepen. We also have plans to link the project with other research and teaching: Jane’s project Local Contexts, a system of TK (Traditional Knowledge) labels and legal resources that Indigenous communities may use to mark and extend existing protocols around the digital access of cultural materials; and Eugenia’s interests in contemporary artists’ work with collections as a practice of cultural resilience, exemplified in Penobscot artist, anthropologist, and educator Jennifer Neptune’s reproduction of a beaded ceremonial chief’s collar held in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Shadow Lines has been a useful teaching tool for activating such relations around museum collections, as we grapple with what decolonizing digital pedagogy can be in the context of the university.

Media & the Humanitarian Impulse: #ThisClassWillSaveTheWorld

by Lisa Daily
Spring 2018
(Teaching-with-Technology Grant Awardee)

The idea for the class emerged from my own burgeoning research in the field of humanitarianism and digital media, especially with a critical interest in this idea that virtual reality is the “ultimate empathy machine”—technologies that finally enable spectators to realize their true empathetic potential to care for suffering distant others. To study this current fascination with VR/AR in the humanitarian-sphere, however, required that students first understand several interrelated histories: that of humanitarianism—its institutionalization, its paternalism, its decision-making processes and messy politics—and developments in technologies of representation and circulation. Thus, the course was as much a historical survey of humanitarianism as it was about the technologies of representation that serve to document, bear witness, inform, and advertise humanitarian crises.

After an opening 4-week unit on histories of humanitarianism, the course focused on visuality as it develops within capitalism to address issues of scopic regimes, attention, and the subjectivity of vision in the modern era. Next, the course turned to a unit on The Violence of Looking/ Looking at Violence in order to begin thinking about issues related to suffering, what it means to bear witness, photographing atrocity, collective memory, and “the famine formula.” While our texts did not explicitly historicize images, through lectures I discussed the transition from painting to early photography (especially with the case of photography in the Congo Free State), and then on to film, documentaries, social media, celebrity involvement, and concerts such as the 1985 Live Aid concerts. This unit also brought up the idea of “compassion fatigue” and the ways in which markets and competing humanitarian organizations must vie for this attention from potential spectator-consumer-donors. The final unit, Digital Cultures & the Age of Solidarity, critically engaged with shifts in donor-responses to humanitarian appeals, what Lilie Chouliaraki deems a “new emotionality” of the “ironic spectator.” This unit examined case studies such as KONY 2012, hashtag activism and other social media engagements, celebrity interventions, and then virtual and augmented reality.

Technology functioned in the course in a variety of ways: the course had a Web Publishing site for readings, blogging, and news sharing; students partook in a semester-long digital media archiving project; three students worked with digital content through embedded internships at Human Rights Watch, WITNESS, and Shared Studios, a fascinating tech-portal company; several students opted for a creative final project that sought to ‘intervene’ in some way to existing media discourses of particular humanitarian crises; and we engaged with numerous virtual reality “experiences” using cardboard VR goggles.

 

Building a Digital Archive

Whether it be monitoring media coverage of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria or following the ongoing crisis of the Rohingya, the purpose of the digital media archiving project was to track a particular humanitarian crisis broadly conceived through its online media coverage as well as the circulation of related images, modes of representation, hashtags, humanitarian organization action, state actors, and so forth. Students were asked to monitor how a particular event/crisis was being discussed online, who was having those conversations, where, and in what context. Additionally, students pursued independent research so as to learn about the historical, political, economic, and social context(s) of the crises, their emergence(s), and conjunctures. While the digital archive is never complete, students were asked at the conclusion of the semester to review their archival content and offer a reflection on its findings and limitations. To track archives, most students used a pre-made Google Form (thanks to Bruno Guaraná!) and others established Tumblr pages. The openness of the assignment allowed students to pursue particular themes, events, and places of interest to them; projects were wide-ranging, from solitary confinement to queer humanitarianism, from the Puerto Rican recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria to conflict minerals in Democratic Republic of the Congo, from the South African water crisis and Day Zero to The New York Times coverage of the Syrian war since 2011.

For most students, these archives then resulted in a final project that was creative or research-based. For instance, one student offered a comparison between Colombian news and how American news talked about Colombia (especially noting its stereotype as the land of Narcos and now narco-tourist destination). Her final project, “The Gap,” is a creative project using Sutori software and provides a timeline for these comparisons. Another student, Rayyan Dabbous (Gallatin sophomore), analyzed NYT coverage of the Syrian war, noting key terminology in the news spectacle of how Syria was discussed. Impressively, this final paper, “A Syrian Game of Thrones: infotainment and New York Times’ Spectacular Coverage,” was subsequently published in Salon Syria (May 18, 2018) and reprinted by Open Democracy. 

 

Virtual Reality

“One of my goals in the class was to encourage students to not only think about VR as a spectator (as with the goggles), but also to think about that which is not seen through the content itself, such as the infrastructure of the technology, its production, and economic relations.”

As a cultural studies scholar, I firmly believe that understanding a particular object of study must come before any analysis. Thus, to teach critical thinking—about media, virtual reality, humanitarianism, or any other field—first and foremost requires that students are able to describe the object of analysis: its usage and circulation; the ways in which it is talked about and by whom; its cultural and historical context(s), its economic, political, and social factors; its construction and infrastructure; and any ideologies that are placed upon the object (and by whom). Towards this end, students needed to engage with the technology itself. One of my goals in the class was to encourage students to not only think about VR as a spectator (as with the goggles), but also to think about that which is not seen through the content itself, such as the infrastructure of the technology, its production, and economic relations.

With funds from the Teaching with Technology grant, I bought cardboard VR goggles for the class so that students could experience virtual reality. We watched (“experienced”) approximately 10 films, including numerous films produced for United Nations, International Refugee Committee, The New York Times, and Aljazeera. I included two films that might be considered not “humanitarian,” although this is a term we sought to complicate throughout the semester: “After Solitary,” by PBS’s Frontline, which focuses on prisons and solitary confinement; and, “Across the Line,” by Planned Parenthood, which tries to convey what a woman walking into a Planned Parenthood might feel as protesters shout at her. Both films are quite different than most humanitarian virtual reality films and thus, I wanted students to have a comparison to different modes of engaging VR.

With the virtual reality unit not occurring until later in the semester, many students were already thinking critically about how and what is represented within humanitarian disasters and were aware of the shifting content of representation—away from images of those suffering (in-crisis) and towards the joy they experience upon receiving the support of humanitarian intervention (post-crisis). Students acknowledged the compelling stories of the VR films, but easily identified curated content that had come up in previous discussions (a primary focus on women and children; stories of individuals rather than masses of, for instance, refugees; little contextualization—visually within the space as well as in terms of the crisis itself). We also discussed the intended spectator of the films—were we the ideal viewer of these films, as scholars in the field? Students suggested that an unknowing subject was more likely the intended viewer with the VR offering a compelling and emotional introduction to a crisis. Finally, we thought about our own positionality within the virtual reality experience. Unlike 2-D representations on our phones, a newspaper, or a gallery wall for instance, the spectatorial body is supposedly embodied within the world of the image’s subject; it is “more natural” than other regimes of representation. Hence, part of the experiment with bringing virtual reality into the classroom was to engage students in affect—their own feelings and their own bodily reactions to this type of watching. Notably, and as expected, several students got motion-sick from the virtual reality. The majority of students discussed their awareness of the technology—that it was not as neutral as one might assume as compared to our phones or a photograph. One student mentioned how the cracks in her phone screen served as a constant reminder of the technology, as did particular moments of disruption—a text message ping or a news alert. Partly, these effects might have been because of the cardboard goggles, which are somewhat awkward and cumbersome to hold as students watched several films in a row (40 minutes or so). Arms grew weary. Emotional (& motion-sickness) breaks were needed. Those of us who have used permanent goggles (Oculus, etc.) discussed the differences between the two types of screening and its possible effects. Goggles that are strapped to the spectator’s face—a technological extension of the human body—provide a more streamlined viewing and proffer less opportunity for the technology to insert itself (cracked screens, text message notifications, advertisements on YouTube, for example).

By way of conclusion, I’ll turn to a student reflection about the VR experience, “dizzy but also enlightened.” As reflected in student evaluations and self-reflections, the incorporation of technology into the course was a great success, although also a total experiment that I’ll continue to refine in future semesters.

How to Embed a Timeline

Have you created a beautiful timeline and got stuck on how to share it with peers? Try embedding it on a website such as Web Publishing or Omeka. The instructions below are tailored specifically for TimelineJS but can be applied to a number of other timeline platforms. 

  1. Make sure your timeline can generate an iframe embed code. 
  2. Make sure your website supports the embed code:
    • if using Web Publishing, activate the iframe plugin: from the Dashboard, click on “Plugins,” search for “iframe,” then click “Activate.”
    • if using Omeka, make sure iframe is included in the allowed HTML elements for the site by visiting Settings > Security. You can also choose to disable HTML filtering altogether by unchecking the appropriate box. 
  3. Copy the embed code generated by TimelineJS. (If using a different platform, find its sharing settings and select “embed.”
    Embed code from TimelineJS

    • If using Web Publishing, paste the embed code into the text editor, making the following alterations: Replace the carrot brackets <> with square brackets [], so that your embed code should begin with [iframe… and end with a closing square bracket (instead of the original <iframe><… and >).
    • If using Omeka, click on the HTML icon the text editor’s toolbar to open up the HTML Source Editor. Find the location you’d like your timeline to appear and paste the original embed code from your timeline. Click on “Update” to close the HTML editor and then click on “Save Changes.”HTLM icon in toolbar
  4. Preview your page or post to verify that the embed code is working properly. 

How To Use Medium In The Classroom

Whether you use it for a group project, or solicit your students to submit assignments through its interface, Medium can be a great addition to your academic toolbox. With its WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, Medium pushes the focus to content creation rather than form, simplifying the publishing process if compared with traditional blogging platforms.

Amongst other things, Medium gives you the ability to:

  1. Receive prompt and punctual feedback from the public at large, or from anyone you share a published story or a draft with;
  2. Publish an unlisted story to share only with your peers or students for a more focused exchange of ideas;
  3. Encourage collaborative annotations and relevant comments from your peers or students, by way of an assignment or relevant discussion;
  4. Create a unique tag to catalog all of your course’s work and easily find posts created by students;
  5. Create a publication, in lieu of a tag, to collect all of your students’ work. Publications can group stories together by many authors, managed by one or several editors. 
  6. Follow specific authors and/or collections that can be relevant to the course (instructor’s profile, guest lecturers’, students’, or even a specific topic);

Although a lot of this can be done in seemingly more private ways through a shared Google Doc by using the comment feature, Medium’s interface privileges a multimedia output and looks less static than word-processing softwares do. Medium’s layout makes readers’ comments relevant to specific sections of your text without visually interfering in it.

Medium's Publication interface
Medium’s Publication interface

While Medium’s global interface centers on streams, individual stories and their authors, we suggest managing a course by using Publication. 

Create a publication for your course, customize it, and add students as authors or editors (depending on how much publishing autonomy you’d like to give them). This is especially useful if you would like your students’ work to be accessible to the public (just be mindful of FERPA), as Medium has the potential to reach cross-over audiences, even across Twitter (i.e., users who follow the publication as well as users who follow its individual authors). For more information about Publications and tips to perfect it, click here. 

See this article on Medium.

Africa, China, and Globalization

by Duncan Yoon
Fall 2017

Africa, China, and Globalization was a First Year Interdisciplinary Seminar taught by Professor Duncan Yoon in the Fall of 2017. Over the course of the semester students combined traditional humanities and social science curriculum with the software platform, Story Maps—an ArcGIS (Geographic Information Systems) presentation software that harnesses the power of digital mapping and other multimedia visualizations. In conjunction with Data Services at Bobst, and the expertise of Himanshu Mistry and Michelle Thompson, students took workshops that trained them in the technical skill set necessary to run Story Maps. These workshops also introduced students to the larger world of digital mapping and “spatial reasoning.”

“These projects are not only visually stimulating, they are academically rigorous in the spirit of Gallatin’s commitment to interdisciplinarity.”

In the seminar, students chose an African country and topic linked to Chinese involvement upon which to focus. They compiled an annotated bibliography that included both traditional scholarly sources as well as multimedia. The semester’s research culminated in a digital project. Instead of a classic term paper, students created a Story Map of 2500 words and at least 15 multimedia visualizations. These projects are not only visually stimulating, they are academically rigorous in the spirit of Gallatin’s commitment to interdisciplinarity. Students now have an example of both a technical skill and their critical thought, which they can store in their E-Portfolio for future career aspirations.

Social Theory and Curatorial Practice

by Eugenia Kisin
Spring 2017

Caring about Curating

What is a curator? From the Latin curare, which means both “to cure” and “to care for,” curators are people who make choices about how to display things—and sometimes the things called art—for others. Both “caring” and “curing” are integral to this work, as “caring” involves considerable expertise to establish what is worth caring about; the work of assemblage may also be remedial, jolting us out of previous understandings through unexpected juxtapositions. And, like all public forms of display, curatorial projects are always constrained by time, space, money, and also by murkier questions of what one can reasonably expect of an audience—how to best ensure that they also care.

In my “Social Theory and Curatorial Practice” seminar at Gallatin, I wanted my students to experiment within this role in practical and theoretical terms: assembling, displaying, and making an argument with some of the things that are important to them. Through consultations with Jenny Kijowski, Gallatin’s Educational Technologist, a final Digital Humanities assignment for the seminar was born: a digital curatorial project in which students would develop a curatorial statement, didactic label texts, and a digital gallery showcasing 4-6 digital objects—expansively delineated in the assignment as “original works (yours) or preexisting things,” to make room for students’ diverse creative practices. Predictably, the openness of the assignment resulted in a wide variety of projects and mediums: audio tracks arranged over an interactive map of Manhattan to articulate the singer’s attachments to place; hand-written dance scores paired with their interpretation in performance to ask about the circulation of ephemeral works; a series of Etsy wishlists curated to reveal different aspects of the curator’s racial and gender identity over time in relation to consumer capitalism. Over the second half of the semester, students critiqued their galleries in groups, and wrote reflections on the process.

On the technical end, Jenny trained students in NYU’s Web Publishing platform, which the majority decided to use to create their galleries. This was an important part of the process, as contemporary imaginings of the role of the curator often use the language of “digital content curation.” I wanted to integrate knowledge of this work and the technical skills it requires with a critique of why curation has gone from a somewhat arcane practice associated with the figure of a white-gloved art specialist to something that is increasingly framed as a marketable skill in the digital world; Jenny’s workshop gave students the tools to develop both their digital skills and critical language for talking about new forms of curation online.

Many students’ projects were thematically ambitious, using artworks as original sources in innovative ways. In his gallery Pluriversal Currents, Patrick Bova (Gallatin 2018) brought together work by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists to explore the meaning of “decolonial aesthetics” beyond its recent ubiquitous status in the global art world. Drawing on artists’ land- and water-based practices of decolonization, Patrick showed how this understanding and its ecological stakes sit in tension with the institutional definitions and spaces of the art world. In her project Revisited, Ana Lopes (Global Liberal Studies 2018) staged a digital rearrangement of works from a well-known 2004 exhibition at El Museo del Barrio in New York called MoMA at El Museo: Latin American and Caribbean Art from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Ana’s criticism of the 2004 exhibition hinged on what she interpreted as a decontextualization Latin American and Caribbean works, which were celebrated only in relation to a narrative of Western modernity that results, in her words, in “a social and political sterilization of their histories.” Both of these projects, and many others, used techniques of assemblage in the digital gallery to ask art historical questions that could not have been arrived at merely seeing reproductions of the works in books or exhibition catalogs.

“...their digital galleries had provoked them to re-imagine their subject...”

In their self-evaluations, students reflected on what they had learned and what they would change about their projects if time and resources permitted, and often noted that the project had opened up further questions; rather than serving as an exhaustive statement on the given theme, their digital galleries had provoked them to re-imagine their subject, and given them new perspectives on the limits and possibilities of their emerging curatorial authority: a power to care and, perhaps, to cure.  

How To Make a GIF

The Digital Public Library of America is an organization that aims to gather the resources and archives of American libraries and museums to make them freely available on the internet.  The DPLA recently held two workshops about making GIFs, short web animations, with tools freely available on the web as well as professional image editing software.  The webinars aim to encourage use of public domain and archival images and video in the creation of GIFs.

GIF-Making 101

GIF-Making 101 introduced participants to techniques and methods for making GIFs through freely available web services.  These services take a short video or series of photos and turn them into an animation ready to be embedded on the web.  Links and resources can be found on the workshop page.

Advanced GIF-Making Techniques

The workshop for advanced techniques focused on methods for creating GIFs using Adobe Photoshop, the industry standard in image editing, and GIMP, an open source alternative.  While these methods may not be as fast as the free online services demonstrated in the GIF-Making 101 workshop, they allow for much more creative freedom and a more efficient workflow for complex projects.  Links and resources, including example files, can be found on the workshop page.

Reading the Faces of Ancient Cultures

by Hallie Franks
Spring 2017

I have tried in the past to incorporate class presentations as part of students’ work for the semester. As much as we emphasize critical reading, writing, and participation in class discussion at Gallatin, it has always seemed important to me to hone students’ more formal oral presentation skills as well. But in-class presentations were consistently disappointing: students tended not to prepare sufficiently (perhaps because they see these presentations as an extension of their classroom participation?); in part as a result of this, time was impossible to manage; and while I suspect that the lack of preparation for some stemmed from comfort in speaking to the class, it remained the case that for others, “public” presentations are a truly terrifying prospect. 

The idea for having students do “presentations” as videos came out of discussions with Gallatin’s Educational Technologist Jenny Kijowski about how to use digital technologies to engage students with visual material. In my “Ancient Faces” class, my students now do a final “oral presentation” in the form of a video project that asks them to present an object of their choice from a local museum. The assignment itself is fairly flexible in that students can choose any pre-modern image of a human and they are in full creative control of the aesthetics of their video. But this happens within specific parameters: 
  • The video must offer a brief formal analysis of the object (a skill that we work on throughout the semester and that involves close description and interpretation).
  • The video should focus on specific visual details that are important for interpretation.
  • The video should include details of contextualization, comparison, or scholarly analysis that contribute to the student’s interpretation of the object.
  • The video cannot be more than 5 minutes long.
  • The narration must be in the student’s own voice.
I am clear that grading is based on content, not on skills in video editing. A student can upload a single recording of their voice with one image that lasts all 5 minutes—which is how I recorded my own “sample” video. But most choose to drop in at least a couple of details or comparison images. We set aside a class period a few weeks before the video is due, so that Jenny can come to the class and explain the basics of iMovie. If students don’t have access to an iPhone or computer, they can rent Gallatin recording equipment. 
 
The videos are uploaded to NYU Stream to a closed channel, so that students can access my sample video and each others’ videos, but no one is required to make their own video public. 
 
I’ve found that this has been a really satisfying replacement to the standard oral presentations in class. 
  • Students are forced to be focused and to prepare what they say because the length of the video is set at a (very short!) 5 minutes. (In addition to my sample video, I also distribute the script that I read from, so that they have an idea of how few words can fill 5 minutes.)
  • My sense is that the format, which results in a kind of permanence that the classroom presentation does not (even if it is not publicly shared), encourages students to think more about polish and presentation. But because they are recording themselves, they can do a variety of takes or edit their presentation, and so feel they have more control over how they present themselves than they do in a “live” presentation. 
  • Although one of the significant points of the course is that engagement with objects in person and in the museum context is a different experience than working with photographs, students interact in really interesting and unusual ways when they are photographing and videoing an object for a project like this. They often discover details that they didn’t notice even when looking in person, or they pick up on how different viewing angles change the perception of the object. 
  • The space for creativity is larger here. I am clear that grading is based on content, but students who really enjoy and are skilled in video production—or who want to experiment with it—have produced some lovely, creative, engaging, hilarious videos that speak more to their individual approaches to the material and presentation than a traditional presentation would.
“...one of the crucial aspects of using digital technology successfully is that it should help in accomplishing specific goals without detracting from that learning experience with too steep a technological learning curve...”
To my mind, one of the crucial aspects of using digital technology successfully is that it should help in accomplishing specific goals without detracting from that learning experience with too steep a technological learning curve (shifting grading from form to content is key here, as is making clear that Gallatin’s Office of Educational Technology is there to help them!). This project has really helped me to incorporate and underline for students the importance of formal oral presentation while bypassing the pitfalls that had made in-class presentations so unsuccessful in past semesters. And seeing their classmates through their own videos is a much less stressful and more entertaining way to end the semester than making sure everyone has time to present! 

Tinkering in Feminist Technoscience

by Cyd Cipolla
Spring 2017
(Teaching-with-Technology Grant Awardee)

“Tinkering in Feminist Technoscience” is an interdisciplinary seminar about feminist science and technology studies with an incorporated experimental “maker” lab. This course uses the concept of tinkering to explore the innate links between “maker” culture and feminist studies of science. Something more than novice, but less than expert, a tinkerer is one who tests boundaries and innovates through fresh perspective, often working outside of a professional context. Students in this class learn the theoretical tools of feminist technoscience studies, noting how the topics of scientific research are guided by, and tacitly reinforce, sexist stereotypes and assumptions, and question whether it is possible to change the methods and the ideas that justify scientific knowledge itself. Along the way, students become tinkerers in a literal sense by completing a robotic, wearable technology, or coding project of their own. Together, we consider the radical potential of building from scratch in the digital age, the ethical imperative to re-write the world around us, and the philosophical experience of tinkering with knowledge itself. For in feminist critical theory, it is not enough to take things apart: we must also put them back together. 

The course itself meets three times per week. Two of these course meetings are a traditional discussion-based seminar class. The third weekly meeting is a lab period. Students take tinkering as the primary method of engagement with the assigned reading and as the guiding principle for a semester-long technology project. The project, and the larger idea of the “maker” lab, has three aims: 1) to encourage and explore engagements with material cultures, 2) to provide a space where students can build a new thing, and 3) to use the process of building, not as a means to an end, but as a metaphor for engaging theory, specifically, in this case, feminist theories on science and technology. 

Why pair what is a fairly standard humanities seminar with a lab? 

As a class adviser at Gallatin, I see many many students who embrace the “artist-scholar” model of Gallatin, who are open to incorporating arts or writing workshops into their concentrations even if they do not have aspirations to become professional artists or writers. At the same time, I see students who are very wary of taking science courses. So this course was imagined as a space where I could teach students to see science and engineering the way they already see art: an area for expression, a compliment to learning, where they could grow regardless of formal training, prior experience, or innate talent.

Central to the idea of the course is that the texts we are reading, the so-called “learning content,” is in humanistic and social studies in science, so unlike a science laboratory class, the lab is not a space for formally testing or demonstrating the “facts” we have learned in the classroom, but rather an integrated space that encourages students to think differently. 

And, finally, the lab helps students learn the intellectual value of frustration – that is, to develop not only a tolerance for frustration, but the ability to see frustration as a useful and illuminating step on the way to understanding and discovery. I think there is a connection between the ready availability, in a sense the tyranny, of user-friendly devices and what I see as a decrease in students’ ability to engage in the more difficult and time-consuming aspects of intellectual engagement (archival research, dense and decidedly non-user-friendly texts, crossing boundaries of time, language or culture). Tinkering demonstrates, in a concrete way, that sometimes in life you get directions that are unclear, incomplete, or inadequate, and that forging ahead anyway is not only rewarding but, in many cases, necessary – necessary for change, certainly, but for some, necessary for survival.  

And why feminism?

Spending time building in a lab environment gives purchase for feminist explorations of science and technology in two important ways. First, it contextualizes some of the questions and ideas posed by practicing scientists (e.g. Marta Wayne, Evelyn Fox Keller) who draw from their own lab work to think critically about feminist theory. Second, and more abstractly, feminist science studies, politically, is deeply devoted to the democratization of science – empowering amateurs, tinkerers, and critics alike to engage in the process of scientific knowledge formation – to understand, to ask questions, and to tinker. It also, as a field, challenges the norms of both science and feminism. Science is not a dead, sterile thing, nor is feminism a critical theory that revels in dismantling alone. 

“...students not only gain a feminist lens through technology, but see technology as a formative, generative feminist tool.”

The technological emphasis in this class and its link to a coding and robotics lab is meant to highlight how breakthroughs in engineering, and in particular computer and small electronics engineering, still come from basements, backyards, and garages. Students engage with these forms of prototyping technology as a way of connecting to technology not as an inaccessible process, but as something to be molded – paralleling the feminist invective that cultural roles are not things to be accepted, but systems anyone can understand, challenge, and change.  And by engaging feminism not as a secondary or tertiary form of critique, but as the foundational lens through which we examine techno-sciences, we take, head-on, the significant gender biases that exist within STEM, and particularly within computer science and engineering. So students not only gain a feminist lens through technology, but see technology as a formative, generative feminist tool.

Finally, one of the goals within a specifically feminist “maker” lab is actually to disrupt the word “maker” itself as it is currently used. Through our class, students examine how and why the overtones of “making” and “DIY” are whiter, more middle class, and more Western than those of “hacking,” “kludging,” or “crafting.”

 

View Cyd Cipolla’s presentation at the Teaching-with-Technology Symposium.