eResearch Seminar and Fellowships
The CeR sponsors digital and internet-based research and creative activity through a weekly seminar series involving faculty-student teams from across the University of Missouri campus. Students apply for eResearch fellowships carrying a stipend of $1000, and research teams make a presentation to the interdisciplinary seminar each week. Participation is open to both undergraduate and graduate students from all MU colleges: Agriculture, Arts and Science, Business, Education, Engineering, Health Professions, Human Environmental Sciences, Journalism, Law, Medicine, Nursing, and Veterinary Medicine. The schedule below includes links to the abstracts and presentations.
eResearch Seminar Presentations
All presentations are scheduled from 2:00-3:00 pm on Fridays in 200B Reynolds Journalism Institute
September 19, 2008
2:00-3:00 pm - 200B Reynolds Journalism Institute
Alumni Presentation
Sarah Zurhellen
Department of English
Jeff Rice
Title: Writing Speech: What Can Instant Messaging Teach Us About Language and Literacy?
This encore presentation was originally presented on April 11, 2008.
Historically, all new developments in digital technology, from the Web onward, have evoked a crisis in popular rhetoric, and Instant Messaging (IM) is proving no different. From the public media to the discussion boards on InsideHigherEd.com, IM language is increasingly discussed using terminology that comes directly from the crisis rhetoric that so often surrounds language deviations threatening to disturb the status quo. However, if, as one Parent Teacher Council representative claims, IM language differs from Standard Written English in its ability to use students' natural tendencies to "think orally and write phonetically," then rather than decrying it as the end of the English language, perhaps we should welcome it as a new communication technology that blends oral and written literacies. In response to crisis rhetoric that undermines our ability to recognize new possibilities, I investigate how and why IM language developed and how and why it has evolved as new users and audiences have joined in, in order to assess its current function as a communication technology that exists somewhere between the oral and the written. Drawing on the research of Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Eric Havelock, I explore how IM language merges effective communicative practices from oral and written technologies in order to create a new form of communication most efficient for the digital medium.
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September 26, 2008
2:00-3:00 pm - 200B Reynolds Journalism Institute
Center for eResearch
John Foley, Director
Kathy Andresen, Administrative Assistant
LuAnne Roth, Associate Editor
Mark Jarvis, IT Manager
Title: Ongoing Projects @ CeR
The Center for eResearch fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange via digital and internet-based media. It seeks to democratize academic research by using electronic tools and strategies to remove barriers to learning and knowledge-sharing, and to promote a broader, more inclusive, and more diverse academic community. The CeR supports campus-level, national, and international research efforts through a series of projects:
Oral Tradition (http://journal.oraltradition.org), an online, open-access, free-of-charge international academic journal.
eEdition, a digital, web-based edition of The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey (http://oraltradition.org/zbm).
The Pathways Project (http://pathwaysproject.org), a multimedia venture that explores the similarities and correspondences between humankind’s oldest and newest thought-technologies.
SyndicateMizzou (http://syndicatemizzou.org), an online resource for research news, presents the research and creative activities of University of Missouri faculty in their very own words.
UMRB Video Web site, currently under development, will provide a setting for faculty from all four campuses to talk about projects that have been funded by the University of Missouri Research Board.
MizzouTube, currently under development, will serve as a video-sharing site for the University of Missouri community.
iTunes U (public), currently under development, will distribute audio, video, and textual content to the broader MU community—alumni, parents, faculty, staff, legislature, and the general public.
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October 10, 2008
2:00-3:00 pm - 200B Reynolds Journalism Institute
Department of English
Peter Monacell
Timothy MatererTitle: Digitizing James Merrill Manuscripts for the JM-L Website
Our project will digitize selected manuscripts by the American poet James Merrill (1926-1995), beginning with his sequence of seven sonnets “The Broken Home,” first published in 1965. We have received permission to make these manuscripts available online from the trustees of Merrill’s literary estate, as well as from the curator of the James Merrill archive at Washington University in St. Louis. The Online Merrill Archive will be linked to The James Merrill Discussion Forum, maintained by Timothy Materer and located at http://web.missouri.edu/~materert/jm.html.
James Merrill revised his poems at great length. For example, the manuscript of “The Broken Home” contains 50 pages. We will edit manuscripts using a number of approaches, including transcription of selected pages, critical commentary, and interpretive chunking, which divides the manuscripts into what we perceive to be compositional stages. Ours will be the first publication of James Merrill’s manuscripts in any format, and by presenting them online we hope to enrich readers’ experiences of Merrill’s finished poems, and also to shed light on his writing process. Furthermore, we believe that making these manuscript pages available to students and scholars everywhere will initiate new discussions of his life and works.
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October 17, 2008
2:00-3:00 pm - 200B Reynolds Journalism Institute
Human Environmental Sciences
Colleen Boron
Tyler Robertson
Russell RavertTitle: Development of an iLife-based Multimedia Scrapbooking Project Designed to Help Children Cope with Hospitalization
The objective of this project is to develop, implement, and evaluate a pilot multimedia scrapbook program for pediatric patients in University of Missouri Children’s Hospital. The goal will be to create a replicable intervention to help children cope with hospitalization and educate their peers and classmates about the hospital experience.
Using a digital camera and iMac computer (using iLife ’08), patients will work individually with the research team to create a DVD containing digital images of the hospital areas, equipment, and staff who the patients encountered that they can take home to share with family, friends, and classmates. One member of the research team will lead the therapeutic activity, while the second will serve primarily as observer as participant, taking field notes and providing technical support as needed. Participants will include one patient from the early childhood developmental stage (4-7 years), one school-age child (8-12 years), and one adolescent (13-17 years), and who will soon be returning home from a hospitalization lasting at least 3 days. Data that will be collected and analyzed include observations, participant quotes, the researchers’ field notes, and results from a follow-up web-based survey (using the Surveyshare online survey tool). The survey will collect data from participants and their caregivers regarding when and how the DVD was used and satisfaction with the process and outcome.
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November 14, 2008
2:00-3:00 pm - 200B Reynolds Journalism Institute
Department of German and Russian Studies
Chris Paladin
Olaf Schmidt
Monika FischerTitle: Language in Flux: Oral Language Shifts in German Speaking Countries
Considering the massive influx of English idioms, the increasing acceptance of digital communication derivatives, the substantial impact on youth language by ethnic minorities and multilingual communities, and the powerful revival of local dialects in contemporary media, the German vernacular must be regarded as the fastest changing of all Western languages. Traditional German “classroom syntax” in the United States appears increasingly discrepant from authentic speech patterns in German speaking countries. Despite scattered academic research and publications on particular phenomena, an inclusive digital collection of video, audio, and textual materials covering the entirety of oral language shifts has not yet been attempted. The general purpose of this project is, on the one hand, to raise awareness of the enduring rhetorical changes, especially with inflexible textbook publishers, and, on the other hand, to provide a digital information platform for students, particularly study-abroad applicants, language teachers, and everyone else interested in the German vernacular. Until the end of the Fall term 2008, we will have launched a well-structured, comprehensive website which will give visitors access to a collection of materials covering all major German dialects, important accents, subculture slang, and recent rhetorical changes inflicted by digital communication and cultural globalization.
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November 21, 2008
2:00-3:00 pm - 200B Reynolds Journalism Institute
Feedback Session