STG’s Faculty Grants Program will advance seven projects with advanced technology

by Kate Bramson

Brown’s Scholarly Technology Group (STG) is poised to help faculty members create an online literary journal, an electronic book to examine 1960s popular culture in West Germany and technology to allow more sophisticated research of South Asian manuscripts.

Those and other projects have been selected for the second annual round of STG’s Faculty Grants Program.

Not monetary awards, the grants are gifts of time from staff members of the group, said STG interim director David Reville.

STG develops and uses advanced information technology to improve academic research, teaching and scholarly communication. Although STG works in all subject disciplines, it specializes in projects in the humanities, arts and social sciences.

Grant recipient Thomas Kniesche, an associate professor of German studies, plans to create either a Web site or a CD-ROM as a way to present his research and analysis of a West German science fiction television series that aired around the same time as “Star Trek.” He said he couldn’t tackle the project without STG’s help.

“There’s no way I could do this,” he said. “I don’t have the expertise when it comes to producing electronic texts or producing a format that works with links to various kinds of documents.”

Kniesche sees the series – “Raumpatrouille” (“Space Patrol”) – as a window into popular culture in 1960s West Germany. He’s intrigued by the depiction of the military, the reinvention of the German soldier in the postwar period, the 1950s Americanization in Germany and the anti-American sentiments that arose during the Vietnam War.

He expects his project to attract the interest of “Star Trek” or science fiction fans, anyone interested in 1960s popular culture in West Germany and people who want to learn more about the development of anti-American sentiments in Germany.

Work on the faculty grants projects will begin in July and will last one year. The projects range from the development of large infrastructure projects to smaller-scale consulting.

Although this year’s awards have no dollar amount tied to them, one grant recipient is well aware of their value.

“This is something that if we tried to go out and pay for, we’d be paying well over $100 an hour for services,” said Robert Coover, adjunct professor of English. “This is a genuine gift to the kind of project that demands expert help.”

Coover is part of a group in the Creative Writing Program that has received a grant to help them study the feasibility for an online literary journal, and then to develop the infrastructure.

Although the grant has been awarded to faculty in the English department, Coover said the journal would be impossible were it not for graduate student Noah Wardrip-Fruin, who is studying fiction writing.

“We’ll all be working on it, but the inspiration for it is his presence,” Coover said.

The journal is intended to take advantage of all the Internet has to offer, Coover said.

“Our effort is to design an online journal that looks completely different from any other online journal out there,” he said.

A committee including representatives from the Office of the Dean of the College and the Sheridan Center and a former STG grant recipient selected this year’s winners. The next grant cycle begins next spring.

Grant recipients and their projects

• Katherine Goodman, professor of German studies, received a grant for the design and production of a scholarly multimedia project focusing on the differences between the cultures of Danzig and Leipzig in the early 18^th century.

By applying text encoding to Goodman’s material on Luise Kulmus and Johann Christoph Gottsched, STG plans to make it easier to search the material. The grant will also help create ways for scholars to digitize documents without having to learn the details of text encoding.

• Thomas Kniesche, department chairman and associate professor of German studies, received a grant to develop and produce an electronically published study of the 1960s West German science fiction television series “Raumpatrouille” (“Space Patrol”).

STG will work with Kniesche to link his analysis of the TV series to various contemporary documents that relate to the series.

• Thalia Field, assistant professor of English; Carole Maso, professor of English; Robert Coover, adjunct professor of English; and John R. Keene, visiting assistant professor of English received a grant to study the feasibility and develop an infrastructure for a proposed online literary journal.

STG hopes to set up an infrastructure that can be used and modified without advanced technical assistance in the future.

• Julie Strandberg, senior lecturer in the Department of Theatre, Speech and Dance, received partial support to explore the possibilities of electronically publishing material housed at the American Dance Legacy Institute.

• R. Burr Litchfield, professor of history, received a grant to follow up on previous work he and STG have done to publish an online database of more than 81,000 records about office holders of the Florentine Republic during its 250-year history (1282-1532). STG will update the interface, incorporate new data and add new documentation in Italian.

• David Pingree, professor of history of mathematics, and Kim Plofker, visiting scholar of history of mathematics, received a grant that provides support to convert a bibliography of South Asian manuscripts into XML, a markup language that will allow for more sophisticated searching and manipulation of the collection.

• Kerry Smith, assistant professor of history, will receive consulting support for research, data storage and eventual publication of materials collected for a book about the history, aftermath and ramifications of the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake in Tokyo.