The University of Arizona
Southwest Project
A Study of Shifting Learning Roles
Significant Southwestern Data Added
July 2001 - June 2002
The Southwest Thesaurus is an online resource consisting of terms and concepts related to the Southwestern region of the United States. These terms may be used to classify information by applying metadata, for the purposes of indexing or for further searching in online databases and the internet.
Music of the Southwest http://www.elearn.arizona.edu/msw
This initiative began with the concept being shared at a SW Project meeting in November 2002 and a call for input was put on the listserv. It is an effort to build more instructional objects and instructional modules on the Web for UA core curriculum courses interested in Gender, Race, Class, Ethnicity, or Non-western resources. The focus is largely on music created by the peoples of the Southwest (e.g., Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Anglos, various instruments).
Mike Martelle, a media specialist in the FCII, did an outstanding job designing the layout and images for the site last year. The site is using audio from the Tucson Meet Yourself Festival archives. Lee Furr from the College of Fine Arts' Treistman Center has been conserving the archived tapes, making analog copies and digitizing them.
This project is important because it is conserving and preserving unique artifacts that are currently at great risk. Dr. James S. Griffith, retired Folklore professor in the College of English and former Director of the Southwest Folklore Center, has been of great assistance in identifying which tapes to select for the project. There are approximately 356 seven inch and twelve inch audio reels and the process to conserve and digitize just one is considerably involved. The Vice-Provost for Educational Technology allocated $10,000 in June 2001 to support work this fiscal year. That work has been carried out at the Treistman Center under the direction of Lee Furr and Mike Holcomb.
Beginning in the summer of 2001, a graduate student was hired to draft translation of approximately fifteen corridos previously digitized. Because corridos do not translate easily to English, Dr. Celestino Fernandez agreed to review our drafts and made corrections. Dr. Fernandez introduced the corrido competitions at TMY for many years and his corrections bring the product to higher level.
Tom Hapgood of the Treistman Center designed an attractive template for use with streaming QuickTime audio and streaming the lyrics, in both Spanish and English. During the winter 2001/2002, additional analog reels were selected from Special Collections, conserved, copied as analog back-ups and digitized. The digitized version has been set up for streaming from the College of Fine Arts' QuickTime server. In addition, a video tape of the New Hope Baptist Church Choir from Casa Grande performing several songs was digitized and set up to stream as Real video by Jeff Imig of the FCII and a QuickTime movie version was created from the tape by Lee Furr. Lee took advantage of some excellent new features in QuickTime.
Also during the winter, the site was revised to incorporate style sheets and we are adding new audio clips to the sections for: Gospel music, Waila, Mariachi, Chinese Lion Dance, and accordion.
Defining the Southwest http://www.library.arizona.edu/definingsw/
Defining the Southwest was developed out of discussions with Dr. Larry Evers, Chair, Department of English. This site has broad applicability within the curriculum for both undergraduate and graduate courses. It is currently organized around nine themes: perspectives, literary genre, historical maps, geographical features, linguistics and anthropology, tourism, images, student projects, and exploration and questions.
Student projects from Dr. Roxanne Mountford's Fall Semester English Composition course will be added during the spring. (See http://www.library.arizona.edu/definingsw/students.htm)
Architecture and Urbanism of the Southwest http://www.elearn.arizona.edu/adobe
John Messina, AIA, Research Architect, The Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture, and The Southwest Center, developed a new instructional module for the Architecture section of Defining the Southwest. John's narrative and the images he selected from his personal archive, explain the role of adobe in the social fabric of Sonoran culture as well as its place as a prominent feature in the physical structures throughout the region. The narrative spans pre-colonial times to the present.
Following postings to various campus listservs in January 2002 announcing that Architecture and Urbanism of the Southwest was available, John Gilkey from the College of Pharmacy sent an excellent QuickTime VR panorama of Casas Grandes, Paquimé, Chihuahua, a site featured in the Pre-Hispanic section of the site.
Finally, Architecture and Urbanism in the Southwest was added to MERLOT in January 2002.
Fieldnotes From a Neighborhood: A Portrait of the San Pedro Chapel http://www.fcii.arizona.edu/dlearn/Jan/SanPedroChapel/coverchapel.html
In the Fall, Janet Knight in the Office of Distributed Learning created a digital version of Fieldnotes,a 1998-99 collection of oral histories that English Department professor and writer, Sandra Florence, prepared in a program sponsored by the Tucson Writers' Project. The project was supported by the Friends of the Tucson-Pima Public Library under the direction of Ann Dernier. It is a valuable addition to the Old Fort Lowell Neighborhood Web site.
Stories From the Southwest: Sabino Canyon streaming video http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/sabino/streamingvideo.html
Dave Bushell of Gorilla Productions, a local video production company, gave us permission to digitize and stream a professional quality, 25 minute video tape about Sabino Canyon. Jeff Imig's group digitized the tape and it is available for both RealPlayer and as an MPG streamed from CCIT's SGI video server. The tape is suitable for U of A undergraduates as well as K-12 students.
The Southwest Project's Web site was revised and moved to a new virtual location to faciliate administration and maintenance of it. An automatic forward was set up from the old location. Doug Williams, FCII's network manager, configured the server and registered a new URL for us: http://www.swproject.arizona.edu
SWJA Oral Histories http://www.elearn.arizona.edu/oralhistories
The SWJA Oral Histories project brings forward new and unique oral histories from members of the Tucson community. In August 1998, members of the New American community were invited to participate in recording information about their lives and experiences in the former Soviet Union and in Tucson. The call was published in The Newsletter of New Americans Club, in both English and Russian. Led by Israel Rubin and Carol Zuckert, members of the the New Southwest Jewish Archives Committee, coordinated,conducted and recorded the interviews. The tapes, which have been added to the library's Special Collections archives, have been transcribed and marked up into HTML on the above Web site.
Through Our Parents' Eyes and Images of the Southwest Web site revisions
Extensive revisions to the appearance and organization of most of the Web sites in these two collections was accomplished by the end of summer 2002. New navigation buttons were created by Gary Mackender, a graduate student and graphic artist, that gave the sites a more consistent look a feel. There are approximately 25 discrete Web sites comprising these two collections and their development has occurred in various stages since 1994. Many of the images in the oldest sites required extensive editing; the quality of scanners and software is far better today than seven years ago. Mike Martelle created a beautiful graphical template for the Southwest Jewish Archives Web site. A site index was created for Through Our Parents' Eyes. Other site indexes will be developed as time permits over the coming months for Images of the Southwest and individual Web sites. These site indexes help new visitors identify resources within the site.
On April first I prepared information for Julieta Gonzalez of the UA's News Services for a news release to the Tucson community.
The Little Cowpuncher:
Rural School Newspaper of Southern Arizona
Little Cowpuncher was the name of a mimeographed school newspaper, written and illustrated by Anglo and Mexican-American ranch children. It appeared from 1932 to 1943 at five different rural schools in Southern Arizona, where Eulalia Bourne was the teacher. Most of the students who attended these one- or two-room schoolhouses, close to the Mexican border, were bilingual and bicultural. Some were the sons and daughters of pioneer Mexican and American ranch families; others were children of ranch hands working for large landowners; and a few were temporary students from families living on mining claims or road camps. Their original and unedited stories and drawings vividly describe their lives on isolated ranches, and the everyday and special events throughout the school year at Redington, Baboquivari, Sasco, San Fernando, and Sopori schools. On this site you will find Little Cowpuncher online, looking as much like the originals as possible.
"In 2000, the Library received grant funds for the "Ten Books Project" to explore new ways of making full-length books available on the Web. The books in this project were quite lengthy, sometimes comprising several hundred pages or even several volumes. Many had complex layouts including footnotes, charts and tables, maps, etc."
This Agdata Project website is designed to bring the works of the many data groups in and out of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences together. With the collective knowledge of the members of the Agdata team, it is possible to develop bigger and better projects that will benefit the college. Specific Subject Fields:Weather, Watershed, Plants, Weeds, Insects, Rangelands, Maps, and Imagery Including Disease Diagnostics. Searchable databases retrieve resources in a variety of formats, including simulated 3D object modeling and panoramas.
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