The Horseshoe: Heart of the University features contemporary pictures, old photographs, and detailed text outlining the history of the nine buildings on the University's original campus. The CD-ROM also offers a glimpse of a typical student's room from the early 1800s to today, and readings of letters written by students and faculty during the past two centuries. The CD-ROM, which costs about $15, is available at bookstores across the state in both Macintosh and PC formats.

The CD-ROM grew from a desire to present the University's history in a new way, said Thorne Compton, a theater professor and chair of the Bicentennial Commission Executive Committee.

"I was interested in the possibility of using state-of-the-art technology to look at the past," he said. To begin, Compton put together a team of creative people--Jim Hunter, a lighting designer in theatre, speech, and dance, and Harry Lesesne, historian and associate director of the Bicentennial Office--and they sat down and started brainstorming.

For about a year, Compton, Hunter, and Lesesne went through all the material they could find on the Horseshoe--everything from blueprints of buildings to historic photos--with help from Elizabeth West of University Archives. From those resources, which grew as the project progressed, they put together a timeline for each building. But, at the same time, the team wanted to make the CD very personal so that people could connect with it.

"We wanted the CD to be not only about buildings but also about the people who lived and worked and studied in those buildings," Compton said. "We decided we wanted to show how one room might have looked to people in a variety of times."

To make the re-creations as accurate as possible, the team photographed a contemporary student's room in Rutledge, completed in 1805 as the first building on campus, and then built a replica on the stage in Drayton Hall. Then they asked two scene design students in the theatre program to dress the room as it might have looked in the early 19th and 20th centuries, the 1920s, 1940s, 1960s, and today. They borrowed books printed in the early 1800s from Thomas Cooper for desks and items from alumni who lived in Rutledge in the 1940s to add detail.

"One of the students told me, when she finished her MFA, that the project was the most useful project she had been involved in," Compton said. "It was a different learning experience. It taught the students not only about design but also about the place where they had studied and might not have thought much about. It really made her take an archaeological approach to her work."

To add voices to the people who lived and taught in rooms on the Horseshoe over the past two centuries, the team asked student actors and faculty members to read excerpts from student letters and other documents in Carolina Voices, a new book by Carolyn Matalene, English, and Katherine Reynolds, education. One of the letters describes the University's first graduation. In another from 1819 that could have been written today, a student writes home for what every student needs most: money.

"As the project emerged, it became less a walk around the campus and more a biography of the buildings that contained the lives of real human beings," Compton said. "We hope that's what people will experience when they view the CD. Created as a University project entirely by students, faculty, and staff, the CD really represents what USC is."

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