Grad Research: The End of Austin, a Collaborative Documentary Project

Here at AMS :: ATX, we're - perhaps not surprisingly - huge fans of academic projects that engage with the digital realm in meaningful ways. We're particularly excited by projects like the Archive of Childhood, which we featured last week, and other digital archives like these (among myriad others, naturally). Public access, multimedia, and interactivity all open up possibilities for innovation in research.But what about digital academic work of a different sort - those that blend the creative and the scholarly on a digital platform?One graduate seminar held this fall at UT had a chance to experiment with creating a digital scholarly and artistic project as a class assignment. Randy Lewis’s “Documenting America” class was charged with the task of creating a collaborative, interactive documentary project using the Tumblr platform. The topic? The end of Austin.Here’s what Randy had to say about the project’s inception and its future possibilities:

Our seminar on documentary had looked at cinematic "city symphonies" from the 1920s like Berlin and Rain, and I wondered if we could track a particular thread through the landscape of Austin. All I came up with was the thread—the idea of "endings" that evokes borders, walls, boundaries, eras, nostalgia, death—and the rest reflects the talents of grad students working within a tight schedule of 7 days.Students, especially grad students, work very hard each semester, but relatively little of their work appears "on view" anywhere public. So we all liked the idea of something enduring beyond the fall semester, rather than going into a file cabinet, and Tumblr provided a public, permanent location that could accommodate writing, photos, sound files, and video equally well. We could even add to it in future semesters, and in that way have a "living project" for years to come.

Each student contributed one (or more) pieces to the site in a wide variety of forms: sound, image, text, video, and considered the questions from any number of angles – the end of place, the end of time, the end of culture, the end of living.So take a look here at the END OF AUSTIN – explore and engage with how this class imagined our swelling city’s possible, eventual, inevitable decline. And, of course, keep checking back for more.Lest we end on a bummer of a postapocalyptic note, though, it’s worth noting that projects like this might point to a new future for creative and scholarly work. The lasting and public frontier of the digital world has the potential to breathe new life into traditional scholarship in academia and into documentary production.Ultimately, as Randy notes, American Studies is a perfect place for experiments like this to begin: “Creating a site like this seems like the next step for fields like American Studies: it invites scholarship, art, and the wider public all to the same party.”

Grad Research: The Archive of Childhood

This just in from AMS graduate student Rebecca Onion:

At last! The site I’ve been working on with my American Studies seminar (Popular Culture and American Childhood) is now live. The Archive of Childhood was born from the idea, dear to childhood studies scholars and historians of childhood, that the history of childhood should strive to feature more voices of children. Often in the archives these voices are an absent presence, and there’s nothing that can be done to recover them (damn you, estate of AC Gilbert, for failing to save the sheaf of letters from young Erector Set fans to the company!); this project was intended as a way for students to contribute their own experiences with popular culture to a web “archive” while these experiences are still relatively fresh in their minds, while simultaneously practicing the skills of analyzing a primary source and writing for a public beyond their instructor.

For all the details on Rebecca's exciting new archival endeavor, click here! You can also get all of the updates on her project by following her on Twitter!

Watch This: Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt on Fox's Good Day Austin

Our faculty members are certainly making the rounds on TV this month! Today, Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt was interviewed on Fox's Good Day Austin about her new book, A Mess of Greens, and food traditions around Thanksgiving.In case you missed it, never fear - you can check out the video here. Enjoy!

Read this: "Main Currents," American Studies Fall 2011 Newsletter

We're pleased to announce that the American Studies Fall 2011 newsletter, "Main Currents," is now online and ready for your perusal! Check it out here to see some fascinating stories and discussions with faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and alumni of the department, in addition to research and project updates.We won't spoil the content for you, but we will say this: the folks in the American Studies department have been busy doing a lot of fascinating things all over the board.