In his 1996 acceptance speech, Vice President Al Gore enthusiastically reminded us that we need forge ahead with plans to have all classrooms connected to the Internet, as it "makes the world of knowledge available for students to absorb." Through exemplars, I posit in this website that both "the world of knowledge" and "absorption" are misdirected ways of thinking about the web. In particular, digitizing, in some form, existing major museums and libraries seems only an elementary view of how the web might permit us to reshape geographical and social spaces for learning. By careful selections and rearrangements, and the creation of new spaces for dialogue, online libraries and museums could serve purposes well beyond the simple translation of the material-textual world into digital form. In the exemplars that follow, I have selected museums and libraries that attempt such reconfigurations, that create new digital-social spaces and learning potentials.
WebMuseum was created by Nicolas Pioch, a computer science teacher at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, France. This art museum project is not supported by grants, but has relied instead on the cooperation and support of a number of partners from industry and academe, and chiefly, upon Pioch himself: “I decided to start working on this exhibit because I felt more artistic stuff was needed on the Internet, so the WebMuseum took over my free time (nights and weekends) since mid-March 1994.” (One hopes this is still not the case!) WebMuseum’s popularity (currently over 200,000 visitors a week) and critical acclaim is likely due to a number of factors. First, the quality of the reproductions is high. The site displays “thumbnail” prints which, when clicked, are enlarged to fill the screen with a quality images. In addition to the images, the written documentation of the works, artists, and historical contexts provides valuable background to the student or non-specialist. WebMuseum also includes a linked glossary of terms to clarify specialized vocabulary, a valuable pedagogical resource.
Perhaps the most impressive feature of WebMuseum, however, is that it has digitally created a space to present art treasures unlike any physical space that existed previously; it is a virtual “traveling” exhibit that draws from many permanent collections and is always available. In the Famous Paintings Collection, for instance, one can view and read about works ranging from Botticelli’s Madonna of the Pomegranate, to over a dozen impressionist works each by Edouard Manet and Mary Cassatt, to David Hockney’s pop art rendition of “A Lawn Being Sprinkled.” While students can and should visit the Vatican’s or the Louvre’s collections online, WebMuseum’s eclectic assemblage of significant works from many collections permits the art novice to cross periods, genres, and geographical locations with relative ease, with no expense, and without sore feet. (I’d still rather be in Rome and Paris, however.) Be sure and see the site’s unique exhibit of Les Tres Riches Heures, a wonderful series of illuminated manuscripts commissioned by the Duc de Berry and painted by the Limbourg brothers in the early 15th Century.
Perseus was developed through the Department of Classics of Tufts University. Gregory Crane, Associate Professor of Classics at Tufts, is the Editor in Chief and Director of the Project. Originally developed (and currently available in most complete form) as a CD-ROM stack, Perseus is described by its creators as an “interactive multimedia digital library of Archaic and Classical Greece.” More recently, the project has expanded to include an array of resources for study of the Roman Empire as well. The project is a fine example of how distinctions between libraries and museums tend to break down in many web environments. Like a library, the site features texts in Greek and in translation, secondary sources, and its own searching tools. However, like a museum, Perseus also contains 14,000 images of vases, coins, sculpture, architecture and archeological sites in the ancient world, and is expanding to include panoramic photos and the rotation of objects in space through Quicktime technologies. As exciting as its vast size and breadth is the kind of interactivity that Perseus permits. All entries are extensively cross-indexed, and a powerful “Perseus Lookup Tool” provides sophisticated interaction between different types of information. One can be reading an English translation of the Odyssey, and in becoming interested in Poseidon, follow links not only to other texts, but to representations of Poseidon on ancient vases and in sculpture. Alternatively, one could move from the text or vase to explore temples to Poseidon through an online atlas, and view satellite pictures of the current state of these archeological sites. Without question, Perseus has set many standards in the development of multi-media digital libraries for scholarship and teaching. Significantly, the project is also committed to thinking about how such collections and tools might be best used in teaching. Be sure to follow the site links from “Teaching” and browse the syllabi and class notes from diverse subjects, the evaluation materials, teachers’ help guides for students, and professors’ reflections on their classroom experiences. The perspectives come from a number of different educators located in various situations, and are helpful not only for thinking about Perseus, but for the difficulties and potentials in using any digital media within education.
The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia
The Electronic Text Center of the University of Virginia is a valuable and easy to use repository of a large number of digitized texts in five different languages (English, French, German, Latin, and Japanese). Especially valuable is its Modern English Collection (AD 1500-present), comprised of 1,398 titles including 4,035 manuscript and book illustrations. Importantly, the digital library has sought to retain and publish illustrations with texts as an important part of the reading experience. Additionally, the digital texts have been encoded through SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) which, for the reader and researcher, means that structural features of the texts such as title pages, scenes, stanzas, chapters, etc. have been preserved (rather than stripped away, as they are in some digital transformations of texts). For research purposes, the site contains an user-friendly searching tool that will conduct key word, compound words, or phrase searching of the texts. Additionally included is both information and valuable pointers to further resources for those interested in either creating or studying electronic texts.
When I taught Jr. High and High School English, like many teachers I had a large box of oversized index cards on which students could write reviews of books they had read. The cards functioned to contribute to an atmosphere of reading and talking about books; as much as indexing books the cards “indexed” a small social network of valuing books and choosing some over others. Students would pick through the cards, or carry some with them as they trekked off to the library. Book Nook carries on this same function over the web for students in grades K-12. It is included here as an example of a digital library because libraries are much more than just collections of resources--like Book Nook they are social spaces in which we discuss search categories and individual works, make recommendations, wince at certain titles, and re-tell stories. Further, this a library “by kids for kids” by existing entirely of student reviews of books. Book Nook helps students develop their reviews by making suggestions of possible books (the “Lonely Books Club”), by providing models, and by supplying an on-line relatively open-ended form for the report. The project has also begun an interactive conference area to promote ongoing chat about books. As a student-centered “co-library,” Book Nook promises to be an excellent resource to promote a culture of thoughtful reading and valuing texts among students--without which neither on nor offline libraries would be needed.