HOME PAGE. You will notice as you peruse these sites that these are not purely individual projects. Many of the web sites I have created are part of large collaborative efforts, mostly with the other participants in the American Studies Program at the University of Virginia. I point this out because projects like these are best created in workshop environments with input from team members. My home page, to the left is not part of a group project, but has benefited from skills that I've acquired in teamwork situations.
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1930s. In the Spring of 1999, the American Studies Colloquium turned its attention to the 1930s, with each of us focusing on an iconic moment or movement from that that tumultuous decade. My project, titled "Wish You Were Here... (maybe you are)... Dissemination of Order in Chicago's Century of Progress," considered the messages of the architecture, literature, and collectibles of the 1933 World's Fair.
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RADIO & FILM. No analysis of the 1930s is complete without the movies and radio programs that not only touched the lives of Americans, but also educated those Americans for the perspective offered by the Machine Age. Two projects are illustrated at the left that are quite similar to each other. The first is series of digitized audio files of 1930s radio shows. I chose Dick Tracy and The Charlie McCarthy Show. The second is a set of digitized film clips, also from the 1930s. My films were Black Cat, featuring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, and Stella Dallas, featuring Barbara Stanwyck.
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COMIC STRIPS. Also crucial in the 1930s were the comic strips. They were not just for kids. I created the cover page for this project, which links to several selections of great comic strips. Personally, I chose Dick Tracy, to work as a companion piece to my radio selection. All of these smaller projects are cataloged in the 1930s module.
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DOCUMENTARIES. The 1930s were the time of the documentary impulse, in photography and literature. For this project, the group looked at several of the attempts to catalog the images and emotions of 1930s America. Many of these feature WPA photography. My documentary, however, was Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return, a look at the movement in and out of America by young writers in the early twentieth century.
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FORTUNE MAGAZINE. The Fortune project began with an
assignment to scan in several covers of the magazine, and then analyze
them to see what sort of messages they could impart on the decade. The
project grew into a series of essays--part visual, part textual--that elucidate on the 1930s through the window of these magazine covers. My essay focused on the 1930s understanding of mass culture, as it is discussed in Walter Benjamin's now famous artwork essay from 1936.
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INCORPORATION OF AMERICA. In the Fall of 1998, the American Studies program reviewed Alan Trachtenberg's The Incorporation of America. We scanned in the text of Tractenberg's book to make it accessible on-line to University of Virginia students. For non-UVA students, we wrote synoptic versions of the text; I wrote a synopsis of Chapter 7 "White City." We then built a module that included not only the text and synopses, but also a set of 'extension projects.' I looked at the parameters of realism as they are illustrated by Thomas Eakins' paintings.
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WINESBURG, OHIO. As an early exercise in creating hypertexts, the students in the American Studies Program converted the text of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio into an electronic text using an ocular character recognition program. The creation of hypertexts makes documents more accessible for research and review. It also allows older texts that are on the verge of being forgotten to experience a new relationship with contemporary students via the medium of contemporary technology. For my part, I created the Table of Contents, Introduction, Preface, and Chapter 20 "Sophistication."
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YELLOW PAGES. The Crossroads web site of the American Studies program at the University of Virginia features a section called "Yellow Pages," in which we maintain several lists of links to web sites of interest to students in American Studies. Each page of links, divided by discipline or area of interest, includes descriptions of relevant web sites, and links to those sites. I maintained the list of Philosophy and Religion sites.
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CROSSROADS. During the Spring of 1999, I was the acting Professional Developer for the Crossroads web site. In this capacity, I focused my energies on learning the skills needed for successfully manipulating HomeSite, a web editor, and on teaching those skills to other students in my program. Having completed many web projects by hand-tagging HTML, it was nice to find a web editor that streamlined the process of creating professional web documents. For the Summer of 1999, I acted as the Marketer of the web site, submitting descriptions of the site to search engines, and responding to emails from visitors to the site.
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RRTC. I also spent the Summer of 1999 working as a web developer for Republic Research Training Center, a Charlottesville based company that specializes in Microsoft BackOffice and AutoCAD training. In this capacity, my role was to maintain a recently created web site, update the site regularly with new company information, and look for ways to make the site more consistent, more self-referential, and ultimately, more successful.
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