The 2006 ~FAST Tex projects
College of Liberal Arts

Title:
The History of Mystery: European and American Traditions

Faculty Client:
Zsuzsanna Abrams, zsabrams@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developers:
Nicole Auxier
Melanie Conrad

Project Description:
Film versions of texts read in class can effectively illustrate key theoretical and literary ideas and demonstrate how sound, camera angles and other cinematographic devices can achieve (or not) the effects the authors describe in their texts, for example. Because technology may help engage students in the course material better, it can foster a highly effective learning environment that promotes higher-order thinking skills. This project digitized a variety of printed materials, videos, and audio tapes to create a library of supportive lecture materials for the GRC 323E course. Assistance from DIIA’s TEL audio/video staff was also provided.

Title:
Digitizing Audio and Video for Class Library

Faculty Client:
Katherine Arens, k.arens@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Leah Ross

Project Description:
This project digitized a closed collection of approximately 300 audio tapes and 50 video tapes making them useful as CD/DVDs for the Germanic Studies department. These are academic fair-use materials provided over the years by InterNationes for classroom use; they range from literary readings to general cultural journalism.

Title:
The UT-Austin NLP Software Suite

Faculty Client:
Jason Baldridge, jbaldrid@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Alexis Palmer

Project Description:
There are many free software packages for working with human languages available on the Internet. Their quality varies widely, both in their implementation and their documentation. The student developer identified and integrated the best packages from a range of natural language processing tasks and provided essential documentation. This will enable students to learn about and use the applications and resources without having to deal with their idiosyncracies and incompatibilities. This integrated suite is installed in the computational linguistics lab along with a CD distribution that can students can use on their home computers.

Title:
"Introducing German!” - German Outreach Program to Local Schools Phase II

Faculty Client:
Kirsten Belgum, belgum@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developers:
Rong Li
Amal Banerjee

Project Description:
The German Outreach Program is a set of conference courses (GER 149T, 249T, and 349T) that are offered each semester to UT Austin undergraduates who have completed third-semester German (GER 312K) or above. The undergraduates are trained by experienced AIs in foreign language pedagogy, teaching techniques for younger learners, and the existing instructional materials of the German Outreach Program. The students then teach an entire German unit in local schools (8-20 lessons per unit depending on grade level of learners). This project completed the second phase of the Introducing German! Website where administrative features were added allowing Dr. Belgum to easily add schools and student projects.

http://dev.laits.utexas.edu/introgerman/

Title:
Prehistoric Texas

Faculty Clients:
Stephen Black, sblack@mail.utexas.edu
Susan Dial, sdial@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developers:
Charles Lucier
Derek Carlin

Project Description:
Web development for an ongoing expansion project for Texas Beyond History (TBH), the virtual museum of Texas' cultural heritage published by the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory since 2001 in partnership with the Department of Anthropology and others. The goal was to create a series of illustrated online educational exhibits organized into Texas’ eight biogeographical regions. This project redesigned the exhibit section, redeveloped the South Texas Plains exhibit in Flash to be used as a template for other exhibits, and added an XML component that allows administrators and editors of the site to easily add new content with minimal additional Web programming and design.

Title:
Building German FrameNet

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

Student Developers:
Mario Guajardo
Sumeet Rao

Project Description:
This project is the second phase of the German FrameNet project funded by ~FAST Tex last year. Its goal is to build an on-line lexicon for German verbs, nouns, and adjectives, that include semantically annotated corpus sentences from a very large electronic corpus of German. The on-line lexicon is to be accessed by German language and linguistics students to help them learn the different contexts in which words may be used.

Title:
Digitizing Poetry and Prose

Faculty Client:
Douglas Bruster, bruster@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Arlen Nydam

Project Description:
This project developed first-stage content for presentation in a large survey of British Literature, English 316K. The student developer animated and enhanced various textual passages (for example, stanzas from poems; sentences from novels) for overhead presentation in a lecture hall. PowerPoint is good at presenting information (words as facts), but less good at focusing on style (words as words). The final presentations make the language of literature visually compelling in the classroom.

Title:
Canzoni: An Anthology of Italian Songs

Faculty Client:
Irene Eibenstein-Alvisi, iea@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Anthony Maggio

Project Description:
In Italian language courses the emphasis is on grammar and communicative skills. In fact, seeing a grammatical rule embedded in a song–i.e. a form of real communication–makes it more relevant to the student and easier to remember, thanks to the captivating nature of music. Students and faculty in Italian may now benefit from the online availability of an ordered catalogue of more than 750 Italian songs: both MP3s and all relevant song information (artist, album, year, song, etc.). The Canzoni Italian Songs Collection was a collaborative project with LAITS and is posted on their Digital Archive SErvices site (DASE).

Title:
Gendering Jazz, Performing Poetics and Visual Politics in African American

Faculty Client:
Meta Jones, metadj@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developers:
Jin Wu
Xiaoliu Bai

Project Description:
What is the relationship between poetic form, visual perception, reading and writing practices in African-American poetry? How might the teaching, learning and writing process around poetry improve once our students can concretely consider the role of the poet's speaking voice and visual performance as instrumental in the formal development of their poetry? The answers to these two crucial questions are pedagogical and technological. This project digitized all and parts of audio tapes, CDs, VHS tapes, and DVDs and organized them onto a custom DVD media collection in which students can listen to, review, and respond to a series of recorded performances of poets reciting and performing their poetry–with and without musical and visual accompaniment.

Title:
Translating Interactive Logic Tools from C++/Pascal to Java

Faculty Client:
Robert Koons,koons@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Bhalchandra Agashe

Project Description:
In the mid-90's, the UT Austin philosophy department created three innovative, interactive tools for learning symbolic logic, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, that have demonstrated their value over the years. These programs were recreated from their present Windows/Mac versions to platform-independent, Web-based applications, to ensure long-term durability.

Title:
Mapping the Latino Borderlands: Regionally Linked Mexican American Archive

Faculty Client:
John McKiernan-Gonzalez, tulua@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developers:
Blake Grugett
Ya-Wen Yang

Project Description:
Mapping takes advantage of instructors’ overlaps in regional coverage, course themes, and research subjects to build a linked visual database built from established period maps, MAS syllabi, lectures, and fair use of copyrighted imagery. This Web site helps eligible undergraduates, instructors and faculty place their teaching lectures, along with links to different syllabi. The site employs a variety of historical maps, from 1500 to the present, as the access point for PowerPoint presentations generated by instructors in Mexican American Studies, Latino Studies and other associated disciplines. Undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty will use this Web page as an early research guide.

Title:
Online Digital Atlas of Paradise Lost

Faculty Client:
John Rumrich, rumrich@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Edith Whitsitt

Project Description:
Because Milton’s exotic place names and hedging between astronomical systems are difficult to explicate in notes, this project developed a new section of the Web-based audiotext of Book Nine of Paradise Lost using Macromedia Flash (http://www.laits.utexas.edu/miltonpl) with maps of the Earth and the Universe as Milton envisioned them. Each of these maps feature a key with place names and terms from the text. When the user selects a place or term, the view zooms to the corresponding location and more information is provided. These dynamic, interactive maps were created using digital reproductions of Renaissance and modern era maps. In addition, a 3-D animation illustrating a passage of Paradise lost was created in order to help students visualize the movement of the Devil across the Earth.

Title:
Systematic Conservation Planning: An Online Tutorial

Faculty Client:
Sahotra Sarkar, sarkar@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developers:
Sumit Srivastava
Eric Seufert

Project Description:
This project developed online tutorials and quizzes for the design of conservation area networks to protect biodiversity and other environmental services. This instruction section will supplement class lectures and will come with datasets and other materials, all of which will be used to give students hands-on experience with protocols and methodologies introduced in the lectures. Completing the tutorial will be a requirement of the course. DIIA’s TEL Web developer also provided support by creating an administrative component of the site to allow content administrators to easy add and modify tutorials and quiz content.

Title:
Using PowerPoint presentations for Japanese Language Teaching

Faculty Client:
Naoko Suito, n.suito@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developers:
Tan Nguyen
Mathew Stern

Project Description:
By utilizing the technology available in classrooms, the teaching materials (currently in black-and-white transparencies and drawings) can now be more attractive, interactive, and easily modified to meet the needs of the instructors, TAs, and our students. The student developers upgraded an enormous amount of teaching materials used in language practice sessions of the first-and second-year Japanese courses into PowerPoint format and combined them with a large amount and variety of other media. For the 2006 season, materials for JPN507 and 412L were upgraded.