Poster Presentation/Demo Abstract
Visualizing Cultures is an innovative website that opens windows on modern history by integrating graphic images, expert commentary, elegant design, and substantial databases in ways that have become technologically possible only recently. It can be accessed at http://mv.ezproxy.com.ezproxyberklee.flo.org Launched at MIT in 2002, the site has focused topically to date on Japan and Asia in the modern world. The principal investigators are MIT professors John W. Dower, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose scholarship includes close attention to visual materials, and Shigeru Miyagawa, who holds a chair in Japanese language and culture and is a pioneer in the production and use of digital media for education.
Description of activity, project, solution, and outcome
We regard Visualizing Cultures as a conceptual model for incorporating visual materials as “texts” integral and essential to understanding in the humanities and social sciences in general. This builds on our increasing fascination with the dynamics of society and culture at popular or grass-roots levels; with constructions of “self” and “others”; with the multiple manifestations of “modernity,” particularly as seen comparatively across time and place; and so on. Visualizing Cultures is not art history, and the visuals we draw on run the gamut: lithographs, engravings, woodblock prints, paintings and drawings, photographs, posters, advertisements, cartoons, and fine art as well. These are integrated with original scholarly commentaries, as well as written texts from the time.
Importance or relevance to other faculty, staff, students, departments, and programs
With its base in MIT, Visualizing Cultures is in the fortunate position of having ready access to cutting-edge innovation (and innovators) in online technologies. For example, our two-year collaboration with the technologists in the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) at MIT has led to promising pilot work on the development of online application tools to improve the organization of digitized images, allow users (scholars, for example) to add “wiki” metadata to any visual in the collection, and facilitate “federated” searches across multiple institutions or collections. The spin-off potential here seems very promising, but there is still a great deal of refinement to be done.
Scott Shunk, Foreign Languages and Literatures Section, MIT
(Presented at MIT Educational Technology Fair 2009)
Topic Area(s)
2. Finding and integrating digital content into the curriculum
4. Incorporating visualizations and simulations to deepen student understanding
5. Open educational tools and resources