To: Ronald W. Tobin, Associate Vice Chancellor Academic Programs
2150 Kerr Hall
Fr: Patricia Fumerton, Director, Early Modern Center
Re: Proposal for Instructional Improvement Grant, July 1, 2003-June 30, 2004
Abstract:
The English Department's Early Modern Center requests funds to expand
its digital archive in order to enhance its undergraduate specialization
in early modern studies. The Center has already established the basis
of a large, fully-searchable picture gallery, with slideshow feature (mostly
through an Instructional Improvement grant for 2001-2002). We now plan
a three-pronged continuation of the Center's archive:
a) further work on the Picture Gallery: completion of the slideshow feature;
addition of more images together with their full identification and keywording
(not only from the slide collections of English department faculty but
also from the holdings of other Humanities faculty in early modern studies,
beginning with those of the History department); and quarterly instruction
to all interested UC early modernists in the use of the gallery database
and slideshow feature.
b) Ballad Archive. Funds would be used to gather ballads from microfilm
and the EEBO and organize them by theme. This is preparative to mounting
three undergraduate classes over a three-year period devoted to modernizing,
editing, and mounting the ballads online, as well as to composing and
mounting online introductory materials about the ballads. The result would
be an early modern ballads archive usable by early modern faculty in many
courses, especially the large English Department survey courses, 1500-1800.
c) British Theater Archive, 1500-1800.
Narrative:
The English Department's Early Modern Center, established in 2000, is
the first of the many such proclaimed "Centers" on the web to
create a space for collaboration between faculty, graduate students, and
undergraduates in the advancement of cultural studies of England, 1500-1800,
through state-of-the-art computing resources. I should emphasize that
the work of the Center (as of most of the English Department's faculty
these days) is to advance cultural studies, that is, studies of literature
in the context of cultural phenomena (painting, architecture, politics,
religion, and the like). Such cultural study characterizes the very cutting
edge of literary criticism today and is, by definition, involved in an
interdisciplinary enterprise that often involves other campus departments,
such as Art History and History. What makes our Center unique is the sheer
number of faculty in the English Department engaged in such studies of
the early modern period (no less than 10), our timely extension of the
term "early modern" to include Renaissance as well as Eighteenth
Century, and our placing the faculty and their students together in a
facility that puts at their disposal the most advanced electronic equipment
and databases available in the profession to date. But we do not aim merely
to provide a "lab" for computing and collaborative work. We
aim to provide (and have already laid the groundwork for) a large and
deep archive of electronic resources that will continue to grow and be
used by faculty and students for years to come. Our web page can be found
at http://emc.english.ucsb.edu/. Since parts of the site, such as the
Picture Gallery, are password protected, I have created a temporary username
and password for reviewers of this grant, so that you may view the full
site when you login. The username you may use is "senate" and
the password is "grant03." Since you may not have a computer
in front of you as you read this proposal, I have also printed out some
of the pages from the site, to give you an idea of the kind of archive
and services we provide (these printouts include the EMC homepage; the
Faculty page; the Undergraduate Specialization page; the Events page;
the Picture Gallery search page; a sample product of a gallery search;
a sample Slideshow manager page; and a sample page of a slideshow viewing.
I have also included letters of enthusiasm for the Gallery from Professor
Sears McGee in the History Department and from two distinguished faculty
members from outside the UC system to whom I have extended temporary teaching
use privileges (Professor Heather Dubrow of the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, and Professor Meredith Skura of Rice University).
a) Picture Gallery:
In 2000 the EMC was awarded an Instructional Improvement Grant of $7,471.84
in order to advance its 2001-02 theme of Early Modern Visual Culture (every
year the Center mounts courses and events around a chosen theme, which
culminates for undergraduates in a spring conference; at this conference
undergraduates deliver presentations arising out of the theme courses
they took that year). Part of the grant monies went toward mounting course
syllabi, creating online readers, and developing online resources for
the students' use on Visual Culture. All these materials remain in the
EMC archive. But more importantly, in advancing the Visual Culture theme,
the majority of the Instructional Improvement Grant went toward the creation
of a searchable database of images, 1500-1800. The idea behind the creation
of this database was to begin the process of housing, in easily searchable
form, all images used in courses and research by UCSB early modern faculty
and graduate students. The English department was and is in a unique position
to do this because we alone, among the Humanities departments, have our
own Server (Windows not Unix), which supports the sophisticated database
program SQL Server 2000. It should be noted that, while LSIT would house
images for a department or individual faculty member, it will not support
and maintain a database. Our Server is maintained by a full-time staff
person, Brian Reynolds, as well as by the faculty member Alan Liu and
a small group of technologically-advanced graduate students. So the English
department has the special means to answer the pressing call for a searchable
database of images. It should also be noted that the demand for such a
database for use in instruction is high. Our images cannot simply be accessed
from other sites on the web because they represent the corpus of images
our individual faculty and students use in their individual courses. My
teaching of literature and visual culture, for instance, draws in one
week on about 50 of the sketches made by Inigo Jones for the court masques
of seventeenth-century England. Only a few of these images are available
via other web sites and, even if I were only to need those few images,
skipping around from one to another link would be cumbersome and time-consuming.
Our goal, first and foremost, was to build an archive of images that would
be quickly searchable and specifically suited to UCSB English Department
courses.
During the grant period, we came a long way to doing just that. A graduate
student computer programmer worked in SQL Server to create a robust database
for holding and searching images, and other students worked on scanning
in slides and book illustrations, which they stored on our Server. Over
1,000 images were mounted in 3 different sizes (thumbnail for quick viewing,
medium for more detail, and large for up-close viewing). Every image was
identified by artist, title, date, location, media, and keywords, and
is searchable by these categories individually and in combination. Products
of a search produce thumbnail images which include an ID number. If clicked
on, the thumbnail presents a medium-sized image with full information
about the picture, and if that image is clicked on the large-sized image
appears. Though we began to run out of time and money by the end of the
funding period, the programmer managed to put together a rudimentary interface
by which slideshows could be created from the resulting Picture Gallery.
In the course of the year 2001-2002, the gallery and its slideshow feature
were used for teaching in their courses by Lee Bliss, Bob Erickson, Patricia
Fumerton, Richard Helgerson, Mark Rose, Elisa Tamarkin, and Anna Viele.
I presented the EMC website at a session of the Renaissance Society of
America Conference in Spring 2002 and it was enthusiastically received.
A programmer for the important Medici project in Italy came up to me after
the presentation and told me that it was the best database she had ever
seen. However, the slideshow feature that was mounted in 2001-2002 was
a rushed job on depleted resources and needed revamping. In the course
of 2002-2003, with about $2,500 in funding from the English Department
and the College of Letters and Science, the EMC was able to create most
of a new slideshow feature, which includes within it a search engine that
draws on the gallery database. This is an extraordinarily sophisticated
interface, which allows instructors to create digital slideshows in a
matter of minutes. Though incomplete, it has already been used for undergraduate
teaching by myself, Claire Busse, Laurie Ellinghausen, Cassandra Gniady,
and Diana Solomon. As the attached email letters from Professors Heather
Dubrow and Meredith Skura indicate, the EMC picture gallery and slideshow
feature are receiving national attention and praise. These are just a
few of the emails I regularly receive about the site.
The next phase of the Picture Gallery archive, for which the EMC is now
requesting funding, involves, first, completing the slideshow feature.
We want to include in the slideshow feature the ability to show dual as
well as sequential images. Dual projection ability is very useful for
comparison and contrast in teaching. We also need to increase security
of the site. Our intent is to restrict full access to the gallery and
slideshow to UC faculty and students who are using the database primarily
for instructional purposes (with occasional permission extended to faculty
outside the UC system on a temporary teaching basis). At the moment, no
one can access the entire gallery without a password. However, since the
slideshow feature was hurriedly added on late in the creation of the site,
anyone can view the created slideshows. We need to password protect the
slideshow viewing as well as the general gallery. Our policy for handling
security is to create three tiers of access: level 1, for administration
of the site; level 2, for faculty and graduate students; and level 3,
for undergraduates (this lowest level allows viewing access to all areas
of the site for the period of one academic year). Fortunately, one of
the graduate students in our department who is expert in SQL server is
also specializing in early modern studies, and she is both able and willing
to complete work on the gallery's slideshow.
Once the slideshow feature is complete and secure, we intend to continue
to build the gallery, adding more images digitized from the slide and
book collections of English Department faculty and graduate students.
(This process requires less technological sophistication than the creation
of the database itself and so can be tackled by a larger number of students.)
I would estimate that the 1,000 images we have so far digitized represent
only about 1/5th of the images used by the EMC faculty via conventional
media (slides and xeroxes). As part of the process of completing digitizing,
student assistants may often be asked to locate images by seeking them
out in the Art library, since faculty often know of images they want to
use in teaching but do not own them. In my budget, I do not separate out
this retrieval activity from that of mounting images in the picture gallery
since both locating and digitizing images are time-consuming. The labor-intensiveness
of both activities explains the large number of hours I have allocated
to the tasks. As an example, I myself mounted about 30 images in the picture
gallery in order to set a template for my student assistants to follow.
It took me about 45 hours to do so. The process involved me first scanning
in a slide, then modifying the image in Photoshop, and then creating three
different sizes. I then loaded the image in its different sizes into the
database. But I wasn't done yet. The images then needed to be identified
as completely as possible, including in each case artist's name, title,
date, issues of content and/or provenance, size, medium, and location.
Finally, I needed to think through a list of consistent keywords for each
of the images. For most of the 30 slides I mounted, I had to hunt through
several art books in order to find all the information I needed. This
is onerous and time-consuming work. But once in the database, the image
and all its details are instantly available on command. I should add that,
though the Art Slide Library and the Department of Art History are engaged
in their own projects of digitizing images, the EMC early on decided to
go its separate way because we wanted to maintain independence over our
image use, because images relevant to literary studies are often different
from those that interest art historians, and because we wanted to complete
our image database with a slideshow feature.
However, the EMC is very much devoted to extending the scope of its picture
gallery beyond the English Department, precisely because our interests
are interdisciplinary at heart and because we recognize that other departments
do not have the technological resources we have to create their own gallery
and slideshow feature. In addition to expanding the gallery with images
important to the English department's faculty and students, therefore,
the EMC intends to extend its embrace to include images of interested
early modern faculty across the humanities. As the attached email from
Sears McGee, professor of History, testifies, many early modernists in
other departments do work that intersects with the cultural work of the
English department's early modern faculty. Many, like Professor McGee,
would be interested in our store of images and have relevant images of
their own that they would want digitized and accessible through our searchable
slideshow database. Professor McGee has himself already had his collection
of some 5,000 images digitized, but he does not have a sophisticated database
for searching his images and he has no slideshow function. Like many faculty,
he is currently usually PowerPoint to show his images in his classes.
But PowerPoint is a labor-intensive and inflexible way of handling images,
as Professor McGee readily acknowledges. The EMC slideshow feature offers
a much faster and elastic way of making and changing slideshows. With
Professor McGee's blessing, we intend to begin our reach beyond the English
Department by mounting his slides in our gallery. In order to do this,
we will need to convert his digitized images into 3 sizes and add complete
information and keywords for each image. Of course, there are many other
early modern faculty and graduates students in the history department
and other departments who will benefit from our gallery and slideshow
feature (Simon Williams from Dramatic Arts contacted me just this week
expressing interest in our database). But Sears McGee's already-digitized
collection seems the best place to begin. As time and funding allow, we
then plan to reach out to other affiliated faculty as well. We also intend
to offer regular demonstrations of the gallery and slideshow database
to interested early modernists across the humanities disciplines.
As I hope is evident, the EMC gallery and slideshow feature has the potential
to reach and affect in significant ways the instruction of thousands of
undergraduates at UCSB. In terms of the early modern courses likely to
be affected within the English department alone, they include the 5 large
lecture courses (of 200 students each)--English 15: Introduction to Shakespeare;
English 101: English Literature from Medieval Period to 1650; English
102: English and American Literature from 1650 to 1789; English 105A:
Early Shakespeare; and English 105B: Later Shakespeare–as well as
the many courses of 35 students and the senior seminars of 15. This year,
for instance, early modernists will have fielded four English 197s of
15 students each and eight courses of 35 students each: English 128: Satire;
English, 151JA: Jane Austin; English, 151SP: Swift and Pope; English 157:
English Renaissance Drama; English 160: Milton; English 165VA: Literature
and the Visual Arts; and English 172: Studies in Enlightenment. As the
pioneer of the new slideshow feature, I myself by the end of the year
will have used the database to teach English 105A (200 students), English
197 (15 students), and English 165VA (35 students). As professor McGee
points out in his email to me, his early introduction to the database
has readily revealed to him images he intends to use in his teaching this
year of History 4B (Wester Civilization, 1050-1715; 383 students), History
140B (Tudor Britain; 55 students) and History 140B (Stuart Britain; 50
students)–courses he regularly repeats. Without exaggeration, the
likely impact of the EMC Picture Gallery and Slideshow on undergraduate
teaching is enormous.
b) Ballad Archive, 1500-1800:
Blackletter broadside ballads represented the largest percentage of published
works in the early modern period. Printed on quickly degradable, cheap
paper, decorated with worn woodcuts (so that they were pasted up on the
cottage or alehouse walls as the poor man's oil painting), and sung to
popular tunes, these ballads were sold on the streets in quantity along
with other perishable items, such as fruit. Because of their cheapness
and fragility, most such ballads have been lost. But there are still about
5,000 extant ballads of the early modern period. About a third of these
can be found in the Early English Books Online database (EEBO; to which
UCSB subscribes). A large portion (from the Pepys collection) have been
published in near-unreadable facsimiles. The rest are available only on
microfilm. My goal is to make a significant portion of these ballads available
to undergraduates while at the same time teaching the students the value
and skills of modernizing, editing, and critiquing early modern texts,
and then mounting the materials online. Over the course of several years,
I wish to run a sequence of courses for undergraduates to do just that.
In the process, we will be building a ballad archive that will be available
to faculty teaching survey courses of the early modern period. But in
order to modernize, edit and critique the ballads in undergraduate courses,
a lot of preliminary work needs to be done. I had planned to teach an
undergraduate course titled "Ballad Art" last year, but had
to cancel the course when I discovered that the EEBO online database held
too few ballads. I cannot offer this course and its sequels without a
student assistant to help me locate the extant ballads and organize them
by theme, so that they can be presented to the undergraduates in manageable
units.
Once the materials are available in an organized way, I expect my series
of ballad courses will teach valuable skills to undergraduates: editing,
webwork, and critical analysis. The number of students that will be affected
immediately is not huge: each of my planned three ballad courses will
be capped at 35 students, making for a total of 105 affected. But the
product of these courses will be a ballad archive that could be used in
teaching our two introductory early modern lecture courses (of 200 students
each), English 101 and 102, in our many Shakespeare lecture courses (since
Shakespeare frequently cites ballads in his plays), as well as in other
early modern classes interested in popular or lower-order culture.
c) British Theater Archive, 1500-1800:
The EMC further proposes to begin the work of building a website on the
history of British theater during the early modern period, 1500-1800.
Currently, web resources exist for the earlier part of this period, particularly
concerning the Shakespearian theater of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
century. But no web resources adequately address the theater of the latter
part of this period (1660-1800), and the theater sites that do exist for
those years do not combine a study of the theatrical players with the
development of the theater as a physical and management structure. Most
importantly, no web resources treat the theater of the entire early modern
period in continuity. This web project breaks new ground in all of these
areas.
The website would trace the history of play production from 1500 to 1800.
It would include pictures of and articles about the development of the
physical theater building; play composition; playwrights; and actors and
actresses. Most importantly, it would demonstrate how these four factors
influenced each other to create distinct yet continuous theater productions
during the time period. The advantage of having such a history online,
replete with images, is that it can be readily drawn upon for lectures
by faculty and for course papers and exams by students. Mounting images
side-by-side of a Renaissance stage and an eighteenth-century stage, for
instance, would be most illustrative for understanding the developmental
changes of theater construction. Being able to type in the title of a
sixteenth-century play and find out when and where and by whom it was
performed over the course of the next 200 years would be wonderfully educational
and not something currently available on any web site (or in any printed
book for that matter).
As theater is an essential literary genre of the early modern period,
this website stands to impact hundreds of students enrolled in UCSB English
Department courses. The website would be utilized in the department's
lecture series, English 101 (English Literature from the Medieval period
to 1650) and English 102 (English and American Literature from 1650 to
1789), both of which are required for English majors and which are capped
at 200 students apiece. The website would also be used in related early
modern courses, including English 157: Renaissance Drama; English 197,
Women Writers, 1550-1700; every Shakespeare class, including English 15:
Introduction to Shakespeare; English 105A: Early Shakespeare; English
105B: Late Shakespeare; English 165VA: Literature and the Visual Arts;
and English 172: Studies in the Enlightenment. All of these classes have
approximate enrollments of 35 students. The approximate total of students
taught in the English Department that would be annually impacted by this
web site, therefore, is 645. In all likelihood the numbers impacted would
be even greater, however, since this site would clearly be of immense
use to faculty in Dramatic Arts as well. In fact, when Simon Williams,
Professor of Dramatic Arts, recently contacted me about the EMC's Picture
Gallery and Slideshow feature, he requested to participate in our project,
if funding for the Theater archive were approved. Dramatic Arts, he estimates,
holds about 2,000 slides of the English theater, 1500-1800, just waiting
to be digitized and stored in a searchable database. These images would
be incorporated into the EMC's Theater History for use by Dramatic Arts
(and other interested departments) as well as by the English Department.