By Leslie Intemann
Nine Cornell graduate students in the humanities will break out of their regular study routines this summer to spend an intensive week immersed in new technologies.
From June 9 to 13, they will join 30 humanities graduate students at Princeton University for the second annual New Tools for Teaching and Research (NTTR) program in Princeton, N.J. During that week, the students will engage in hands-on training with technologies that can assist them in scholarly research and instruction, and they will learn how to incorporate this research into their teaching. After completing the first year of the three-year program in 1996, Princeton invited Cornell to send 10 graduate students to participate in the 1997 seminar.
The New Tools in Teaching and Research program is a working
model of collaboration among three separate divisions of Cornell
and their counterparts at Princeton. The Academic
Technology Center, a program in the Academic
Technology Services division of Hilary Ford, Cornell's assistant dean and director of graduate
admissions, said the students chosen to attend are primarily
in their first, second and third years of graduate study. "A
student in the fourth or fifth year of a Ph.D. program has already
selected and completed much work on his or her dissertation.
Thus, if we want to incorporate computer tools into research
and teaching, we want to solicit students in their first three
years of study so that we can help them conceptualize their dissertation
topics and think about research opportunities that are available
through technology -- opportunities that aren't available through
regular library or other methods of research."
Among those chosen to participate this year from Cornell are
Yiyi Chen, Near Eastern studies; Matthew Abramovitz, history;
Sarah Benson, history of art; David Galloway, Slavic studies;
Greg Umbach, history; Wendy Martin, communication; Abby Sandor,
communication; Jolisa Gracewood, comparative literature; and
Brent Bingham, Romance studies. The NTTR program centers on graduate
students in the humanities, because, unlike students in the sciences,
they are less likely to have had prior experience with scholarly
tools and methods made possible by new technologies.
On May 20, Michael Tolomeo and Diane Kubarek, two trainer/consultants
with CIT's Academic Technology Center, and Michael Engle, Cornell's
electronic text librarian in Olin Library's Electronic Text Center,
all of whom will teach at NTTR, hosted a preliminary training
session for the students.
Once at Princeton, the students' education will include how
to use the Web in a variety of ways; how to digitize photographs
for use over networks; and how to use the latest electronic resources
available through the library. The library component will focus
on how scholarly resources in the humanities are organized, accessed
and used in this era of print and electronic materials, and on
how to find that material (using catalogs, indexes and search
engines) and pull it into Web pages. The library component also
will explore methods of marking up texts so that they can be
searched, analyzed and displayed in their original format.
Joan Falkenberg Getman, manager of the Academic Technology
Center, stressed the benefits of NTTR for the humanities graduate
students. "Our students will meet other researchers in their
fields at NTTR, and they will learn the basics about these technologies
where distance shouldn't matter in the long run for their research.
They will be able to contact people and do research over networks."
The ATC will host a weeklong seminar for humanities faculty
over spring break in 1998 to introduce faculty to the NTTR experience.
For more information, see the official NTTR
Web site. Cornell Library is planning a related series of
colloquia for the coming academic year that will include presentations
by humanities scholars who integrate these technologies into
their work.