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The 2003 ~FAST Tex projects
College of Liberal Arts

Title:
Texas German Dialect Archive

Faculty Client:
Hans Boas, hcb@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Erik McMillan

Project Description:
This project produced for classroom instruction an improved Web-based multimedia archive of Texas German, a native dialect of Texas that is expected to go extinct within the next 25 years. The archive will be used to teach students how to conduct independent linguistic research online. By delivering online audio, video, and print data simultaneously for each recording of 50 hours of interviews with native speakers of Texas German, students are able to interact with primary data repeatedly in order to describe and analyze the relevant linguistic features of a corpus of spoken-word interviews. Combined delivery of linguistic data over the Web enables students to conduct research not only as a part of structured exercises in the classroom, but also outside of the classroom. The centerpiece of the Web site is a database that will allow students to search for interviews (or sections thereof) by using sociolinguistic variables (age, gender, education, place of residence, etc.)
http://www.tgdp.org

Title:
Personalized Screen Readers for Improved Listening Comprehension

Faculty Client:
Jane Lippmann, j.lippmann@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Brian Mattern

Project Description:
This ~FAST Tex project is intended to help students improve their aural/oral skills in French. Short written texts, sentences and short paragraphs, were converted into sound files and placed on the Web. The files contain formal and informal prose and poetry, and are designed to help students learn to recognize and use different French sounds in context. The team made a concerted effort to have all French sounds represented and to include activities of varying difficulty.

Most of the modules teach practical conversational French covering useful topics that students could use on a trip to France. Some of these modules will include using the telephone, getting a hotel, and eating at a restaurant. Additional modules are planned for future development.

After listening to a sound file, students are asked to transcribe the sounds they have heard on a computer, using a Text-to-Speech synthesizer. They then listen to what they have written as it is spoken by one of the "voices" associated with the application. Various groups will use different "voices" and compare the results, including comments on sounds that could not be reproduced or even approximated.

Title:
Classical Utilitarianism Web Site

Faculty Client:
Paul Lyon

Student Developer:
Cristina Escutia

Project Description:
This ~FAST Tex project upgraded an existing Web site in use by several UT Austin government and philosophy courses, but which is also available, and is used, Web-wide (over 1000 hits per day, at present). It is intended to provide one model of how to set up a scholarly hypertext.
http://www.la.utexas.edu/cuws/

Title:
The Sister Arts: Painting, Poetry and Gardening in Britain, 1700–1832

Faculty Client:
Lisa Moore, llmoore@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Madeline Lavrentjev

Project Description:
“The Sister Arts: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening in England, 1700-1832” is a “virtual museum” focusing on eighteenth-century and Romantic representations of the British landscape. The site is organized to allow students to visit exhibits focusing on five well-known British landscape gardens. Four of these gardens—Stowe, Stourhead, Rousham and West Wyckham—are still extant and students can learn about them through recent photographs of the sites as well as period drawings and literary descriptions. The fifth garden, Mary Delany’s Delville, no longer exists in the real world, so students will encounter it via a three-dimensional animated flythrough as well as through eighteenth-century drawings, paintings, and literary descriptions of the garden. In addition, students may visit displays defining (through literary examples, landscape paintings, and photographs of architecture) six important aesthetic concepts used by poets, painters, and garden designers in the eighteenth century: the neoclassical, the Romantic, the sublime, the beautiful, the picturesque, and the gothic. “The Sister Arts” Web site will itself exemplifies the eighteenth-century concept of the interrelation of the arts of painting, poetry, and landscape design.

Title:
Oral History: Engaging/Reaching Audiences Through New Media

Faculty Client:
Martha Norkunas, m.norkunas@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Judy Siegel

Project Description:
This ~FAST Tex project involved transferring analog oral history material to video. It is intended to teach graduate students new methods of using oral history materials on the Web for museum sites, and for community-based projects. In addition, it helps to train students in how to best deliver materials to the general public.

Title:
Closed Captioning for the Web: Accessibility in the Curriculum. Rhetoric & Composition

Faculty Client:
John Slatin, john_slatin@forum.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Matt Casserly

Project Description:
This project is part of a broad-based effort to enhance the accessibility of resources and services across the full UT Austin Web. The team developed resources that can be used by instructors and students in a wide range of academic disciplines as well as by technical staff; the materials are usable in academic courses as well as technical training classes. Initial pilot-testing was conducted by instructors in the Rhetoric Division's Computer Writing & Research Lab; as materials are developed for additional disciplines, work will continue with the Substantial Writing Component program office in the Rhetoric Division, which supports SWC faculty across the campus, to disseminate the modules and provide training for faculty interested in using them.

Title:
Proof-of-concept for a Plug-in to Support Aural Cascading Style Sheets

Faculty Client:
John Slatin, john_slatin@forum.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Arjun Banker

Project Description:
This ~FAST Tex team created a working prototype for a plug-in that will add support for Aural Cascading Style Sheets to Internet Explorer 5.x and above. The availability of such a plug-in makes Aural Cascading Style Sheets a valuable resource for instructional Web designers and other Web developers, creating a significantly richer auditory experience of Web-based content for learners and faculty who are blind, visually impaired, or learning disabled as well as for auditory learners and others who might benefit from the combination of visual and auditory information.

Title:
Enhancing Undergraduate Pedagogy: Quiz Tool

Faculty Client:
John Weinstock, weinstock@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Erik McMillan

There are never enough classroom hours to accomplish what one would like to in a typical undergraduate course. One way to alleviate this is to employ more efficient pedagogical methods and do it in such a fashion that the learning experience is enhanced. This ~FAST Tex project continued the enhancement of two classes that have large multimedia components: People of the Midnight Sun, a course on Sami culture and civilization, and Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung.

Students can read the poem in the book, but seeing it animated and hearing it – read by the author – makes it much more meaningful. It can show them how reindeer migrate, dominant vs. submissive animals, grazing patterns, and much more. Students then take an online quiz to see whether they have indeed understood all that is in the poem, and get a sense of the visual rhythms that are replicated in the verbal ones.