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Cultural Objects 1
INTRODUCTION
The five projects included here were created in the Spring of 1995 in a
capstone course for American Studies students here at The University of
Virginia. The topic of the course was American Icons, objects, persons,
or events that were perceived to be representative of American cultural
values, beliefs, or ideas. Of the fifteen students enrolled in the course,
seven chose the option to present their work as web projects. Given the
state of the web at that time -- Mosaic and Netscape had just appeared,
serving up long lists of pointers to sites virtually empty of actual content;
browser standards stood at 1.0 and no one knew when 2.0 might arrive; scanners
were interminably slow, graphics software fairly crude; and nobody, including
myself, had any sense of the various ways in which this new medium might
work.
In this context, the reticence of the majority of students to serve
as guinea pigs for me seems quite reasonable; the courage of the students
represented here altogether remarkable. Looking back to that time from
1998, the projects seem primitive as web documents; at the same time, the
analysis of each project is sound, useful, often original, often unusually
articulate.
All in all, then, a fair beginning for the kind of hands-on learning
that has since become the hallmark of the American Studies Programs at
The University of Virginia.
Alan B. Howard
abh9h@virginia.edu
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