Actors:
- Loman - An instructor of art at Carbon Hill, a two-year community
college
- Inna - A research associate at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary
Art
Background:
Loman has been lobbying the Carbon
Hill adminstrators to expand their curriculum with a new Art History
class, and has finally secured permission to do a trial run of the new
class during summer session, with the possibility making it a permanent
addition if the summer class generates interest. As a two-year
community college, Carbon Hill offers associates degrees in commercial
art production, printing, education, and computer science, but most
Carbon Hill students transfer credits to the state university system to
seek a four year degree, and Loman hopes that a background in art
history will be a popular differentiator for students interested in
improving their resume for transfer.[1]
Scene 1:
With little time to spare, Loman turns to MIT's Open CourseWare as a
source of inspiration for the new course. In doing so, Loman is
both learner and teacher; OCW represents a useful source of planning
and thought about a subject Loman has considerable interest in, but has
never before taught. Searching for 'art history', Loman finds 179
courses spanning Renaissance, Anthropology, Architecture, Music and
Theater. For his students, Loman picks out a course on 20th
Century Art[2] as the
most directly applicable to Carbon Hill students, and quickly downloads
the Syllabus, Readings, and Lecture Notes. But unfortunately the
course is incomplete -- much of the art described in the lectures is
still protected by copyright, and none of the slides referenced in the
lecture notes are available in the course materials.
Scene 2:
So the next weekend, Loman catches the train to Chicago to visit Inna,
an old friend who is a research associate for the Chicago museum of
contemporary art, to see if she can help him to locate the works of art
referenced in the course materials. There Inna introduces Loman
to SIMILE.
(SIMILE is available through the web, and the thus through the
University of Illinois - Urbana/Champaign computer accounts that Carbon
Hill has access to. SIMILE is administered as a joint project of
the University of Illinois and the Chicago MCA, and UIUC subscribes to
ArtStor, so that the resources Inna displays will also be available to
Loman after he returns to Carbon Hill.)
Together they quickly locate the course that Loman is interested in,
but this time when we view the course it includes cross references to
other resources. SIMILE enriches the OCW information by finding
and displaying links to other sources of information, including:
- Biographical Information (CIDOC)
- High resolution images of the referenced artwork (ArtStor)
- Photographs taken of several artists (ArtStor)
- Cross references by name of Artist that bring up the complete
available works of the artist (ArtStor)
- Works of other artists trained in the same school, or under the
mastery of the named artist (Getty ULAN)
With the additional links Loman is
able to quickly reconstruct the slide set described in the OCW source
materials, occasionally substituting another work by the same artist,
or from the same school of art.
At the same time Loman uses the extra links to learn more about the art
and the artists referenced in this course -- Biographical information
provides a quick overview of the artist's life and background.
With these resources Loman is also able to enrich sections of the
course with images of the artists at work[3],
Browsing the data it is demonstrated that the searcher can move quickly
and transparently between the data in one data source to data from
another.
- See
the statements by educators about how they use OCW
- 4.651
20th Century Art
- Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo