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Douglas Morgenstern, Alex Chisholm, Edward Baron Turk, and Elizabeth Garrels
Engineers and economists may have been the architects of the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI), but humanists from both sides of the Atlantic have clearly made known their intentions to be included in this important collaborative effort.
As a followup to a visit to the University of Cambridge (CU) by several members of MIT's Foreign Languages and Literatures Section in January 2002 and additional spring and summer visits to Cambridge by members of MIT Comparative Media Studies (CMS), faculty and administrators from the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oriental Languages, Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies, and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities attended a workshop at MIT in late September that prepared the way for several joint efforts and projects. The Workshop in Language, Film, and Technology was hosted by both Foreign Languages and Literatures (FL&L) and Comparative Media Studies and included presentations as well as class visits on subjects ranging from online projects in French, German, Spanish, and Japanese to Web archives dedicated to the study of Shakespeare and Moby Dick, to the history of comics in the U.S. and the design of computer and video games in education.
The September workshop was, by size and scope, the largest CMI workshop to be hosted within SHASS (School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences) thus far. The two participating faculties found that, in spite of the marked differences between their institutions as well as their language programs, they had much in common. The interest and desire to explore the current and potential uses of a wide variety of media – from audio to video to interactive – in research and education across a wide variety of disciplines – from teaching language to exploring film history to understanding globalization – proved an important element of many presentations and discussions. Indeed, one of our goals in planning the workshop had been to demonstrate the strong coupling of "theory" and "practice" in the way we at MIT develop content and pedagogy for use in our media projects.
CU faculty were particularly impressed with both the degree to which the humanities and technology development are integrated at MIT and the ease with which MIT students engage in team work, both in CMS research groups and in FL&L classrooms. For example, in an intermediate French class that works with Cultura, a telecollaborative project that joins students with their counterparts at a university outside Paris, CU visitors witnessed students explore online archives and cooperate to discover underlying cultural patterns that form the foundation of each culture's perspectives on social, psychological, political, and moral issues. In an intermediate Spanish class, visitors saw several teams of MIT students working (all in Spanish, of course) with audio, photographic, and digital video segments of a Spanish horror film as a prelude to developing hypotheses about its structure and content.
Participants agreed that there were both real interest and practical justification for planning CU-MIT faculty collaborations in terms of pedagogical materials development and research. For example, CU French teachers will pursue the idea of spinning off a three-way project using the Cultura framework, while German faculty will explore ways to use MIT's Berliner sehen, an interactive video archive, to develop CU-specific teaching tools. CU students will participate in the MITUPV Exchange, an ongoing online multimedia community which currently links MIT, the University of Texas-Austin, and Spain's Polytechnic University of Valencia; in addition, a CU faculty member will shoot new footage in Spain, adding an important dimension to MIT's Immigrant Voices video project. CMS's Virtual Screening Room, a project that explores the theory and practice of film editing, will provide an opportunity for CU faculty to enhance their jointly-taught course in "contemporary European cinema."
Apart from individual projects, CU has expressed interest in MIT's MetaMedia Project, a digital archive platform for collaborative teaching and research across many disciplines. We anticipate that these efforts will lead to results of value to the greater academic community, such as a proposed electronic multimedia monograph series that would include introductory essays, carefully-edited print versions of commonly-taught texts, contextualized portions of films, and resources to enhance the critical capacities of undergraduates.
We expect that the transfer of skills and methodologies between both institutions can take place among students as well as between faculties. CU participants noted the excellent integration of CMS graduate students in project development and the success of the UROP model in general at MIT; they would like to see which features and structures are exportable to Cambridge. A first step will be to send UROP students to CU through CMI, where they can help train their undergraduate counterparts. Faculty visits and exchanges, as well as a series of planned inter-university conferences on topics such as "The City and Film" and "Cultural Consequences of the 1929 Wall Street Collapse," will provide a means for effective transfer of knowledge and skills and for the enhancement of our respective programs. Finally, beyond the possible collaborations between the participating counterparts at CU and MIT, an additional positive outcome of the September workshop was that FL&L and CMS strengthened their ties, which augurs well for the continued collaboration of these two academic groups within SHASS.
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