iCampus: Projects: Visualizing Cultures



	Visualizing Cultures: A Visual Learning Environment

Dates

June 2005 — May 2006

Principal Investigators

Shigeru Miyagawa and John Dower

Problem

Our years of experience with the educational visualization project, “Visualizing Cultures", has taught us that students are better at using visuals if they are able to create compelling “visual” narratives. The typical suite of productivity applications, such as Microsoft Office, already provides powerful tools for creating narrative. Word, to create narrative with words; Excel, to create narrative with numbers; and PowerPoint, to create narrative with images (as well as with words). Of these three, words and numbers have stayed fairly constant in the digital age. There has not been any fundamental change in their nature and we continue to use them in a similar fashion from before. On the other hand, the digital age has brought about a fundamental change in the nature of images. All of a sudden, we have access to virtually an unlimited supply of them. This will no doubt have an immense impact on education and on our lives.

Goal

Through Visualizing Cultures, an OpenCourseWare project about visualizing events and people in history, we have dealt with tens of thousands of culturally and historically significant images. The goal is to teach students to create compelling visual narratives. We have taught the course (http://visualizingcultures.mit.edu) twice at MIT, in which students created 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, a unit in the class, we have established “teaching sites” for junior and senior high school teachers and students at the National Archives in Washington D.C., Boulder CO, Tempe AZ, Honolulu HI, and San Francisco. John Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa received the 2004 MIT Class of 1960 Innovation in Education award for Visualizing Cultures.

Overview

We propose to develop a dynamic visual learning environment. This application takes advantage of the recent availability of massive amount of digital images — on the Web, digital photography, etc. The design will address the limitations of existing applications for visual images (e.g., PowerPoint), being guided by our years of experience with the educational visualization project. We call the proposed application “VCID” and it will be used at the levels of K-12, college, and beyond. Our starting point will be a set of non-proprietary, open-source applications developed to the Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I) specifications. This pilot, which is being funded separately (d’Arbeloff, National Endowment for the Humanities), is being created in collaboration with Academic Computing. While the pilot was originally intended simply as a proof of concept – the project with d’Arbeloff/NEH is content development -- it is our belief that, with the iCampus funding and collaboration with Academic Computing, it could be developed into a dynamic visual learning application that can be widely disseminated. We will deliver the final product, “VCID” within 12 to 18 months from the inception of the proposed project.

Central to this project will be the support for “plug-ins” which will allow users to easily extend application functionality by allowing it to perform federated search and retrieval of image content across an increasing number of supported repositories.

Visualizing Cultures Image Database

The Visualizing Cultures Image Database – VCID – now features 5 online units with a federated search tool that enables unified, one-step access to collections 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. Students working with the Visualizing Cultures course units can use VCID to conduct research on images from both the project’s local and remote partner collections from one search within VCID. The OKI federated search tool has been successfully adapted, tested and integrated into VCID to allow for both individual and cross-collection searches, giving users the greatest flexibility with their search results. Search keywords now talk to one, two, or all collections with ease, giving students thematic results that allow for image comparisons that are vital to teaching Visualizing Cultures.

Custom metadata has been developed by the authors of Visualizing Cultures with particular attention to themes that are exposed enabling students and researchers to better find threads of study within collections. “Walled gardens” have been created within the large collections of partner institutions, such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for example, conscribing a relevant subset of 378 images (for the “Throwing Off Asia” unit) and 1903 images (for the War Postcards unit) prescreened by Visualizing Cultures, from the Museum’s more than 450,000 images. Consequently, the database becomes more efficient and accessible to users. This effort is partially in response to educators developing K-12 curriculum for Visualizing Cultures, who indicated a strong desire for smaller subsets of relevant data. In a model for future partnerships, one collection, the Visualizing Cultures selection within the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, is bi-lingual, available in both English and Japanese.

Successful development of VCID with federated search, custom “walled gardens” and metadata will now enable the Visualizing Cultures team and Academic Computing to take the next step and design and integrate an authoring tool that will allow students to manipulate images from their search results as authors.

Recent news

Visualizing Cultures’ collaboration with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum was recently featured as part of an event where, along with the Mayor of Hiroshima, the launch of Visualizing Culture’s Ground Zero 1945, based on drawings by the survivors of the atomic bomb, was announced.

A model curriculum for the Black Ships and Samurai unit is now available. The curriculum, targeting K-12, offers a full complement of standards compliant lessons and will soon be available for all of the Visualizing Cultures units. The lessons provide teachers and students a pathway to becoming active historians and knowledgeable readers of images.

Visualizing Cultures has created an online channel called VCTV with a growing repository of short clips related to the units. An extensive collection of Visualizing Cultures video is also being developed as part of MIT’s iTunes U.

An exhibition based on the Black Ships and Samurai unit has toured extensively in the US and Japan marking the 150th anniversary of US-Japan relations. Highlights included stops at the National Archives where the exhibit’s interactive kiosk, the Black Ship Scroll, was added to the permanent collection. Imagery from the exhibition was also featured as part of a Broadway performance of Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures.