Lydia Brandt 
(ARTH 340)

Traditionally, art history educators have evaluated students’ knowledge with slide comparisons and memorization. Students memorize the titles, dates and creators of paintings, sculptures and architecture in order to understand the development of artistic movements and place them in their historic context. Brandt plans to replace such quizzes and exams in her ARTH 340: American Art and Architecture to 1812 course with a series of alternative digital assignments using Google SketchUp.

Students will select artworks studied in class to create a three-dimensional digital gallery. They will organize the works in the virtual space, considering both chronology and formal and thematic relationships, and then write accompanying text to justify their curatorial choices.

These assignments, Brandt predicts, will provide students with a more engaging means of contextualizing works of art and foster critical thinking about course concepts. Ultimately, she hopes to adapt this new assignment format to other 300-level art history courses.

Brandt

Mark Garrett Cooper
(FAMS 300)

Cooper will use the stipend to incorporate new digital tools and methods into FAMS 300: Film and Media History. This course introduces students to major events, actors, and issues in the history of media while helping them to develop basic research and interpretive skills that media historians use in their work.

Cooper’s project focuses on three major course assignments. In the first, students will use primary sources to develop online histories of movie-going in Columbia from 1907-1919. In the second, they will use data visualization tools to analyze media coverage of celebrities. In the third assignment, students will use open source courseware to compare 1950s television programming in Columbia and New York. Learning how to use these tools and methods, Cooper believes, will be essential for the next generation of media historians.

Cooper