Proposal

Project Name: Advanced Media Production in the Humanities: Creating Opportunities and Expanding Access to the AMPLab

Proposed by: The AMPLab Committee (Eric Berlatsky, Adam Bradford, Papatya Bucak, Wendy Hinshaw, Tammy Knipp, Julia Mason, Gerald Sim, Lisa Swanstrom)

We seek support from the tech fee fund so that we can increase the usage of our College’s Lab for Advanced Media Production (aka the AMPLab/AL240).  We proposed the AMPLab in 2013 as a shared space for instruction, production, and collaboration within the College of Arts and Letters. Our tech fee grant application was successful, and with the cooperation of the English Department’s Writing Committee, which voted to provide us with the space, we opened the AMPLab in 2014. So far professors from English, VAAH, and SCMS have taught in the lab, and we encourage other departments to make use of the space as well. In spring of 2016, we will teach ten classes in the AMPLab and plan to offer open production time and drop in hours when these classes are not in session. 

We hope to offer more classes in AL240, but we require more equipment to maximize the lab’s potential. We can currently fit 20 students comfortably, but we would like to expand our usage to 27 in order to be able to teach WAC, DTD, and IFP courses that would benefit from this media-rich environment. (WAC caps, for example, are 27 for 2000-4000 level classes and 22 for 1000 level.) Even with creative and flexible seating and work arrangements, we require additional equipment to achieve this goal.

In particular, we are asking for more computers, specialized equipment that will allow us to mix traditional hands-on artistic practice with digital production, and related software.  Our educational objectives with this expansion are threefold: 1) we would like to continue to offer ways for our students to think critically about social media and interactive narratives, including games, documentary film, electronic literature, and digital art; 2) we want to increase our students’ access to the modes of production required to create and critique these things; and, most crucially, 3) we want to be able to teach more classes in the space and hence allow more of our students to think about—and work within—the burgeoning field of emerging media in general. 

In addition to providing classroom space, our digital production lab also serves other important functions: it provides a space to conduct skill-building workshops for students and faculty—for example, we have made tutorials for iMovie, as well as 3D printing and digitizing, and are scheduled to make more resources available for learning popular and in-demand technology, such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Wikipedia, and/or Final Cut Pro (see the AMPLab’s YouTube channel for a list of these) and plan to include more of our students in our events and planning. The lab also serves as a place to share research (in the form of lectures, seminars, and exhibitions of student work); and as a site of interdepartmental collaboration among students and faculty. For example, last year we held 11 different workshops as a part of our Digital Humanities and Social Justice series, which focused explicitly on pedagogy and supported faculty and student engagement with the lab. In all of these efforts, AL240 aims to support FAU’s larger pedagogical objectives.

A shared humanities production lab serves FAU’s larger educational goals on many levels.  In the first place, the AMPLab aids in professionalization by helping to prepare our students for a variety of careers, offering them hands-on research experience, and hence helps streamline their progress towards graduation.  More generally, given the increasing prevalence of computing technologies in the workplace, classes taught in this lab space also help to improve our students’ technological literacy.  The New Media Consortium characterizes 21^st century literacy as

the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual, and digital literacies overlap. These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms. (New Media Consortium, 2005, p. 2)

This lab fosters this very technological literacy that is necessary to be successful in these targeted majors and careers. And although this is a humanities lab, it serves the many students who take our classes but who are not humanities majors, per se.  It additionally serves the objectives of our recently implemented (and WAC-sponsored) Professional Writing Certificate Program, which draws from students across the university.

In our experience as educators, working with new media technology both enhances our quality of instruction and helps to prepare our students in the humanities for the professional workforce.  The importance of technological literacy—for students and faculty—within the humanities has been affirmed on numerous occasions within recent pedagogical and scholarly discourse.  For example, The Chronicle of Higher Education has created an entire section on its website devoted to discussing the complexities of the “Digital Campus”; the organization HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) has created several scholarships and workshops for digitally-enabled humanities research; and the National Endowment for the Humanities has recently created a new division devoted to funding and promoting digital humanities research. Additionally, the University of Michigan Press continues its Digital Humanities series with the 2015 publication of three scholarly monographs and one edited collection from germinal scholars in the field (Brown’s Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software; Eyman’s Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice; Dougherty’s & O’Donnell’s Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning; and Klein’s Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field).

Digital humanities discourse has also encouraged researchers and teachers to complicate traditional objects of study.  In Rhetoric in the Digital Humanities, Doug Eyman and Cheryl Ball (2015) call for an expansion of digital humanities to include “the development of collections of new cultural materials that are ‘born digital’—that is, texts that are authored to use affordances of screen-based interactions and new media technologies” and “the development of methods and methodologies for both studying and producing these new forms” (p. 74-75).

The AMPLab responds to this call, facilitating faculty and student development of approaches, platforms, and works that contribute to our collective knowledge about the production and consumption of texts, and allowing us “to carefully consider the intellectual, social, and technological support structures that need to be used in the construction and dissemination of scholarly multimedia work” (Eyman & Ball, 2015, p. 75).

Several of us within Arts & Letters have already successfully integrated digital production into our course curricula in a way that complicates and expands traditional humanist study.  The students in Dr. Wendy Hinshaw’s ENC 6930 course in Spring 2015, for example, created digital arguments in response to rhetorics of incarceration that they explored during their graduate seminar. Students in an earlier ENC 1930 course with Dr. Hinshaw analyzed visual, aural and written public rhetoric, which then provided a framework for them to produce audio narratives and video public service announcements (PSA).  Students in Dr. Julia Mason’s ENC 4930 Writing for Social Media course examine the rhetorical forms that emerge from and are shaped by digital mediation in Web 2.0 environments and participate in critical production and consumption of knowledge via social media platforms. In ENC 4138 Principles of Research Writing students use tools and technologies of contemporary research, writing, and publication to inquire into topics of their choosing, engage in informed conversation with other writers, and publish their own new media texts. In various literature courses, Dr. Lisa Swanstrom’s students have created multimedia projects designed to engage with different approaches to textual analysis. In her current ENC 1930 course, Dr. Claudia Amadori is using the lab to teach her students to make use of—and critique—multi-modal rhetoric. 

The AMP Lab also enables students in SCMS courses that focus on new media (e.g. Gerald Sim's current graduate seminar, MMC 6715 "Studies in New Media," and Alison Vande Bunte's MMC 4713 "New Media Narrative" in spring 2016) to encounter and engage with digital texts in their native format and platform. The latter course, where students learn to write scripts for web-based series, will also use the workstations to workshop their assignments. In his current documentary film course, Dr. Stephen Charbonneau is using the resources of the media lab to continue his course’s conversation on new trends in documentary media.  Particularly his students are using the media lab to curate or produce their own experiences as “digital archivists” or “digital documentarians.” A selection of work that students have created in AL240 is available on our website, in the “Made in the Lab” section. 

Students in VAAH also benefit from the lab (there are 600 art majors in VAAH--over 300 of these are in graphic design).  Currently several sections of Digital Design make use of AL240 and, in the spring, VAAH will offer a variety of digital design courses, such as Digital Design and Interactive Design, as well as courses that blend traditional artistic practice with digital technology, such as Advanced Printmaking and Typographic Design.  Additionally, Professor Tammy Knipp, who received a curriculum grant from OURI to purchase an eye-tracking device for her design classes, will use the lab to facilitate this project for GRA4932.  The eye-tracker is already set up and functional—and because it is in this shared location, we’ve been able to test it out for other classes as well. Several of us in English, for example, are interested in tracking the way that our students read traditional, linear texts in contrast to the way they read graphic novels or other works that blend text and image (see our “Made in the Lab” section for an example of this work).

A shared space for interdisciplinary work within the humanities is a boon for anyone in Arts & Letters who values multi-media production and collaboration.  It has been an important and timely addition to our resources. With the support of a tech fee grant, it will be able to serve a greater number of our students more effectively.

References

Bogost, I. (2008). The rhetoric of video games. In Salen, K. (Ed.), The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning, 117-140. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.117

Bobley, B. (2008). Why the digital humanities? (National Endowment for the Humanities). Retrieved from http://www.neh.gov/files/odh-resource_why_the_digital_humanities.pdf

Eyman, D., & Ball, C. (2015). Digital humanities scholarship and electronic publication. In Ridolfo, J., & Hart-Davidson, W. (Eds.), Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities, 65-88. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Summary (Detailed breakdown follows)

1. Computers + accessories

2. Gaming systems + games + accessories

3. Printer + ink

4. Digital Die-cutter, electronic binders + accessories

    

   TOTAL REQUESTED = $38,541.92

Summary (Detailed breakdown follows)

Software requirements = $20,662

1. Adobe CC

2. Flip PDF Pro for Mac

3. 3D design

4. Writing tools

5. Video editing

6. Organizing, Planning, Mind-mapping

7. Misc. Freeware 

Itemized Requests

SOFTWARE

1. Adobe Creative Cloud Subscription

Estimate provided by JourneyEd

30 computers (28 Macs + 2 pcs) for three years:

$525/device * 3 years

= $15,750.00

2. Flip PDF Professional for Mac (2 licenses)

One-time fee, unlimited conversion

$299/license

            = $598

3. 3D Design = $0

Google Sketch-up Pro
0$/license for educators * 14

            =$0

Maya

$0/license for educators * 14

            =$0

123 DMake

$0/license for educators *14

            =$0

Autodesk-3DSMax * 1

http://www.autodesk.com/products/3ds-max/overview-dts?s_tnt=69291:1:0

 =$0 annual subscription

4. Writing tools = $1,747.50

Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die 2

http://writeordie.com/

$20/license * 30

            =$600

Scrivener for writing, organizing, revising

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

$38.25 (educator’s rate) / license * 30

=$1,147.50

5. Video editing

Korsakow, open-source application for creating web docs and other kinds of nonlinear, interactive narratives.

$50/license * 14

= $700

                        Final Cut = $299 * 1 (for the instructor’s station)

6. Organizing, planning, mind-mapping service

Scapple

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scapple/id568020055?mt=12

$14/installation * 30

            =$420

7.  Misc. Freeware

Mou 0.8.7 (beta) Markdown editor for developers

http://25.io/mou/

$0/license * 30

            =$0

Neatline, telling stories with maps and timelines

http://neatline.org/

$0/license * 30

            =$0

Scalar, Digital Publishing Platform

http://scalar.usc.edu/

$0/license * 30

            =$0

Slack, collaboration management software

https://slack.com/getting-started

$0/license * 30

            =$0

Textwrangler—free text editor for web authoring

http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/

$0/license * 30

            =$0

Twine—open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories

http://twinery.org/

$0/license * 30

            =$0

Zotero 4.0 (standalone)—bibliographic management system

https://www.zotero.org/download/

$0/license * 30

            =$0

Total requested software support = $20,662

Personnel costs

None

Other

No other monies are requested in this proposal. 

Proposed timeline

The room will be updated in the summer of 2016 in order to be ready for classes in Fall 2016.

Resource Matching

The English Department has contributed $8,259 this year to support the AMPLab.  This amount has paid for a GTA and allowed us to continue the lab’s subscriptions to Adobe’s Creative Cloud.  We now seek funding from the Tech Fee for the Creative Cloud subscription, but the English Department is committed to continuing to fund a “Master Teacher” for technology selected from our pool of Graduate Teaching Assistants ($4500 / year of funding for ½ GTA).  The Master Teacher provides training and workshops on teaching with technology throughout the semester, orients new teachers to the computer classrooms, produces teaching materials to be used in these classrooms, and serves as the contact person for any technical issues that need to be reported and resolved. Additionally, a VAAH graduate student will be doing her professional service hours in AL240 in the spring of 2016, which will help us provide technological support for our students and pedagogical training for our faculty in a cost effective way.

Organization