Literary Learning

The literary side of MetaMedia now includes an archive on American authors and one on Arab oral epic poetry, but it began with Donaldson's Shakespeare Electronic Archive.

Donaldson built his collection in the early 1990s as a quick way to compare different versions of Shakespeare texts-in particular, different early versions of Hamlet. He wanted to be able to read two text versions at the same time on the same computer screen, or to read the text while viewing images and films relating to it. He also wanted to be able to access all these media from the classroom. "What I really needed was specific scenes that would feed right into the spontaneous flow of discussion," he says. "So you would be talking about a passage, and I could say, Now let's look at how Olivier does it or how Mel Gibson does it-right now.'" Seeing different interpretations has given students new ideas about what Shakespeare was trying to say through his characters.

Today the Shakespeare archive contains the text of all Shakespeare plays and images of the original pages from the 1623 First Folio. It also includes 1,500 illustrations and film clips from Hamlet. Soon, users will also be able to annotate these materials, share collections of them with others, and upload additional Hamlet images they find.

Since the fall semester of 1995, students have used the archive to compose multimedia reports and presentations. They might, for instance, introduce a certain passage in class and show how it has been interpreted in various film versions. These assignments "transform not only [students'] understanding of the material, but also their ability to communicate what they understood to others," Donaldson says. "For me, it's shifted my teaching toward more coaching of students as they produce their own multimedia essays. The class is more of a community."

The Shakespeare archive serves as the model for other literary archives, including one on American authors created by Wyn Kelley, a senior lecturer in literature. Kelley uses a collection of images, video clips, and audio files relating to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick for classwork with entry-level literature students. Through it, students can learn about whaling industry practices, view 19th-century whaling images, and hear sound clips of people singing the sailing songs of the period.

Kelley's students frequently open classes with multimedia presentations. "The aim is to give students the background they need for talking about the work and get them excited and interested," she says. At first, she worried that the presentations might take time away from class discussion. Instead, she found that they stimulated it. "My students were doing what I often do to get the class going," Kelley says. "More and more, they were teaching the class themselves, and they got a tremendous charge out of that."

Kelley says the archive has changed the way she teaches. She no longer tries to cover all of Moby-Dick but instead concentrates on key parts, showing students how to read the text in a deeper way by understanding the allusions in it. For instance, the students learn what Melville was trying to say when he introduced old, scarred, one-legged Captain Ahab by comparing him to a sculpture of the mythological hero Perseus. When they see an image of the statue, they understand the allusion. "Maybe they lose the total picture in a certain sense, but they begin to master the details in a way that allows them to read more sensitively and creatively when they get to other parts of the text," Kelley says.

Arts Appreciation

The visual and performing arts are also represented in MetaMedia. Thus far, projects include archives dedicated to early American comic strips, films and filmmakers of the Beijing Film Academy, and Balanchine's ballet choreography.

Thomas DeFrantz, associate professor of music and theater arts, is the mastermind behind the Balanchine Dance Archive, which houses a range of materials relating to Balanchine's 1957 work Agon. DeFrantz's students can use it to create reports on particular sections of the ballet. They have access to film clips, "silhouettes" (shorter film clips showing specific dance steps), audio recordings of musical scores, critical reviews, photographs, and listings of ballet terms and online resources to draw on. Students can watch the ballet performance on one half of the computer screen and view a scrolling image of the musical score or a critical review on the other half.

DeFrantz says using the film recordings helps the students learn to write about dance. Such writing shouldn't be static, he says, but should evoke memories of specific actions in the dance. "Using these digital media and the Balanchine archive, students will be able to remind us of certain moments in the text [or dance] again and again by keying the portion of the video they're trying to discuss in their analysis," DeFrantz says.

These MetaMedia programs clearly embody a new approach to humanities education. "The projects offer a multimedia tool set for teachers and students," says William Uricchio, comparative media studies professor and MetaMedia's acting director while director and literature professor Henry Jenkins is on sabbatical. They facilitate "an active learning environment where exploration and sharing lead to the discovery of new insights, new connections, and new relevance for some of our most important cultural forms."