still image project

I just attended THATcamp here at the University of Alabama, a two-day marathon of sorts that allowed me to see the possibilities of bringing digital technology into my teaching and research. Being there with others interested in similar possibilities - students, faculty and staff from institutions, educational ones and otherwise, around this state -  helped me think through the aims of one assignment in this course.  Toward the end of this course (and presumably after they have learned much), the students will randomly select a building that existed on or off this campus during the nineteenth century, capture it visually via a photograph and complete a short research paper on it. Their photos and findings will be reformatted into a short movie that presents some of the key ideas in this course. The students will learn about resources at a campus' digital media production center, which will aid our ability to complete this project. We will post it here and may present it publicly on campus. We will be very attentive to what it means to think about space and place "historically" (i.e. we will look for the how's and why's of moments when things and people change). The students will essentially think deeply about how "the nineteenth century city" is still with us. They will hopefully find meaning in why some structures are located in various places in this city. What we learn could be interesting because Tuscaloosa was rarely thought of as a city during the nineteenth century. Even today, some people might call it a "town."  As an aside, this morning a National Public Radio report on the power of still images of "a world at war" affirmed for me the ways in which the act of taking a simple picture can capture much about what is happening around us across time.