Visualizing Cultures: A Visual Learning Environment
June 2005— May 2006
Using new technologies, Visualizing Cultures weds images and commentary to illuminate social and cultural history in
innovative ways. A narrative “Core Exhibit” not only gives the historical significance of the images, but also addresses issues such as genre
and medium. Each unit comes with a comprehensive curriculum and carefully annotated digital archive of images from public and private sources. Through
Visualizing Cultures, we are teaching students to create visual narratives on Indian culture, the Mafia, early photography, the Olympics, and so forth.
Also, as part of our traveling exhibit of Black Ships and Samurai, we have established “teaching sites” for junior and senior high school
teachers and students at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.; Boulder, Colorado; Tempe, Arizona; Honolulu, Hawaii; and San Francisco, California.
The National Endowment for Humanities has also selected the Black Ships and Samurai site as one of the best online resources for education in the
humanities.
Visualizing Cultures is a gateway to seeing history through images that once had wide circulation among peoples of different
times and places. We do historical research this way as scholars to better understand how people saw themselves; how they saw others, including foreigners
and enemies; and how, in turn, others saw them.
As a result of iCampus support, the Visualizing Cultures Image Database was developed and now features five online units with
a federated search tool for easy access to the images collection in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C.; the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Japan.
Investigators:
Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa of Linguistics and of Foreign
Languages and Literatures
Prof. John Dower of History
Jeff Merriman
Additional Information:
http://icampus.mit.edu/projects/VisualizingCultures.shtml
http://blackshipsandsamurai.com
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Creating the Global Classroom
December 1999 — November 2000
The mission of enabling the truly global classroom requires international partnership. Building on the existing Singapore–MIT
Alliance (SMA), the Singapore project was initiated to identify, test, and evaluate alternative pedagogies and the technology required to support them.
The Singapore project helped prioritize promising experiments and pilot tests that could be conducted as part of SMA and
further its existing methodologies, with a major focus on the design of rich asynchronous content and interaction for distance education courses.
Investigators:
Prof. Richard Larson, Dept. of Civil and Environmental
Engineering
Jesse Heines
Melinda Cerny
Additional Information:
http://icampus.mit.edu/projects/Singapore.shtml
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