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OpenCourseWare Update

Unintended Consequences
"Notoriously unwired" educator taps into electronic potential of OpenCourseWare

John W. Dower

In the fall semester of 2002, Professor Shigeru Miyagawa and I introduced a new undergraduate seminar titled "Visualizing Cultures." For me personally – notoriously unwired – this was a plunge into unexplored virtual terrain. And, almost serendipitously, it led to an exceptionally fruitful collaborative relationship with MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative.

In recent decades, historians have devoted increasing attention to social and cultural developments at popular levels. Here "texts" tend to be more diffuse and less formal than the documents relied on in traditional histories focusing on politics, institutions, prominent individuals, and "high culture" in general. And one of the most vivid and engrossing vehicles for exploring popular consciousness lies in the visual record – in materials such as prints, paintings, lithographs, engravings, photographs, postcards, posters, advertisements, cartoons, lampoons, and in recent times, films.

As pedagogy, it is difficult to surpass the intimacy and immediacy of such materials. Over the years, many of us have built up slide collections to use in the classroom – and learned, in the process, that the graphics tell stories that words alone fail to convey. They enable us to teach students of the rapid-fire "MTV generation" how to slow down and analyze what passes before them. They facilitate not merely discussion of who is creating any particular image, and for whom, but also analysis of the particular mediums being used (how the "reportage" of a woodblock print or engraving, for example, differs from that of a photograph). Through artful presentation and juxtaposition of historical graphics, we can capture sentiments and nuances and contrasts that, as the old cliché has it, make history "come alive."

Until recently, the great challenge has been how to make such resources available in sufficient quantity and quality to engage students – not only at MIT, but everywhere – and enable them (or inspire them) – to develop projects of their own. For Professor Miyagawa and I, OCW was the answer. With essential support from the OCW staff, we designed a pilot project for "Visualizing Cultures" that pushed the envelope for all of us – interweaving hundreds of historical graphics (all in original color) with a substantial analytical text. Students began the semester by developing their own short PowerPoint presentations based on this core exhibition. Then, using the pilot project as a model, they moved on to substantial "visualizing culture" research projects of their own choosing – tapping graphic resources they themselves identified.

The pilot project, developed with generous financial support from the Alex and Brit d'Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in MIT Education, focused on the 1853-1854 mission of Commodore Matthew Perry that culminated in the opening of long-secluded Japan to foreign intercourse. Our project entailed assembling historical graphics from some 30 or more public and private sources in Japan and the United States (intellectual property rights are not so problematic before the twentieth century). It enabled us to visualize the same events from multiple perspectives on both the Japanese and American sides – in ways never ventured before. And it turned out to have an unintended consequence that delighted our Web designers as an unprecedented venture into "reverse engineering." Our OCW site, in short, has led to the creation of a real, solid traveling exhibition titled, "Black Ships and Samurai, 1853-1854."

It helps that this year and next mark the 150th anniversary of the Perry mission. Be that as it may, the planning and design of the OCW site enabled us to create a flexible display of 10 panels (ranging from 8-x-4 feet, to 9-x-3 feet), that premiered in Newport, Rhode Island, this summer and is presently scheduled for display in Los Angeles, Honolulu, Boulder, Minneapolis, and several other potential sites. One of the very special features of this exhibition – also incorporated into the OCW site – is the reconstruction of a 30-foot long "Black Ship Scroll" dating from 1854 that unfolds onscreen and can also be explored interactively. One hundred and fifty years after it was painted, this scroll is now available to the world for the first time through OCW.

In these various ways, vistas have opened that we hadn't even imagined when our collaboration with OCW began.

You can see Professor Dower's OCW copurse, "Course 21F.027J: Visualizing Cultures" online at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Foreign-Languages-and-Literatures/21F-027JVisualizing-CulturesSpring2003/CourseHome/index.htm. If you would like to participate in OCW, please contact Jon Paul Potts, the OCW Communications Manager, at jpotts@mit.edu or 2-3621.
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