Most students would jump at the chance to customize their own course content for the semester. Robert Howard, an associate professor of communication arts and associate chair of the Folklore Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gave his students such an opportunity. Howard has taught Folklore 560, Folklore in a Digital Age, before, but with the makeover he gave the course in the spring 2009 semester, it bore little similarity to its roots. While the old Folklore 560 analyzed e-mail forwards, amateur Web sites and the growing online exchange of rumors and legends, Howard says he wanted to emphasize ethnographic components this time around by having students document real culture around the state. Last spring's students of Folklore 560, which was cross-listed with Communication Arts 610, conducted video and audio interviews and gathered images to create digital portfolios to showcase an element of local culture. Each of Howard's 16 students chose his or her own topic. The digital portfolios generally consisted of collected footage edited into five- to 20-minute videos. "The students were supposed to look at their own world, the lives they lead, and ask, 'Where is everyday performance of identity? Where is everyday communication doing something important and meaningful?'" Howard says. Students made diverse selections when choosing their projects. Topics included knitting clubs, the Asian American experience and the local culture of railroaders. Several students, Howard says, focused on the culture of college life, a memorable example being the documentation of cheers at UW-Madison hockey games. Howard says having the students pursue their own topics guarantees a personal investment in the final product. "One of the reasons I really wanted them to go and pick their own local culture is because I wanted them to think about what culture happens around them and why they value it," he says. Communication arts student Emma Vasseur, who graduated this spring, read about the revamped Folklore in a Digital Age Course in a department e-mail. "This class stuck out because it was something kind of new and different," she says. "I assumed it was essentially creating a mini documentary, which is kind of what's happening." Vasseur's project addressed the culture of the uniforms in the Wisconsin roller derby league. "One of the most fascinating things about [roller derby] is it is a team sport and it is a very serious sport, but the players have the option to express themselves in a way they probably wouldn't elsewhere," she says. "In derby you have the option to create an alternate persona and really get into character." She says that different teams have different costuming requirements. Some teams allow their girls to wear anything, from corsets to tank tops, as long as they're all sporting the same colors. Other teams require their players to wear the same shirt, which they can rip, decorate and tie in any fashion they so choose. "Some of the girls get really into it and create this total opposite person from who they are in real life," she says. "They think it's really important and really a big part of the sport." On a very different note, curriculum and instruction doctoral student Anne Fraioli, who is also pursuing a minor in folklore, interviewed and taped her friend Lindy Wilson, who creates functional and aesthetic art out of nature. With branches, twigs and other natural objects she finds in the woods, Wilson makes free-form sculptures, furniture, baskets and dwellings, among other art forms. Wilson, who sells some of her art at a gallery in Mineral Point, Wis., is part of a larger community of rustic artists and attends the Woodlanders Gathering workshop in Mineral Point every year. "I feel like I'm contributing to the art world, especially that I get to document the arts and somehow try to make the process of documenting it artistic so it does justice to the art form itself," Fraioli says. With a generous grant from George and Pamela Hamel, the Hamel Family Digital Lab was completed with state-of-the-art computers and digital equipment. Students use Final Cut Pro, which is top-end editing software, to create and polish their digital archives. At first, Howard says, some of his students were intimidated by the equipment, adding that the lab boasts the same video cameras that are used to shoot major motion pictures. "But we've really given them a lot of access to the lab and we've brought in a lot of experts to help them," he says. When the semester came to a close, Howard says his students thoroughly enjoyed the process. "I'm surprised by how much time they seemed to be pouring into these projects," he says. "The vast majority of them went way over and beyond the normal amount of time I would expect them to put into a course like this." Unlike a lot of final class projects, the folklore class's digital archives have a shelf life, of, well, possibly eternity. Currently, Howard is working with colleagues around the country to create ethnographic archives to house cross-searchable folklore content, including student folklore papers dating back to the 1980s, as well as the new digitized archives created by his pilot class. "Local culture changes so fast," he says. "If you don't preserve it, it's very difficult to see how changes have happened." Howard is working with graduate student and project assistant Laura Wynholds from the School of Library and Information Studies. Wynholds assists during class time and shares her expertise on <a href="http://uwdcc.library.wisc.edu/minds/">MINDS@UW</a>, an online collection center that stores UW-Madison faculty and staff research, papers, reports and other scholarly output. Howard and his colleagues created an interface on MINDS that allowed his students to submit their digital archives directly into the database. While the digital portfolios are currently uploaded into the database, they are not yet publicly accessible. Howard says he is waiting to increase the volume of the archives after he teaches the class again to release them to the public. Howard, who will be on sabbatical during the fall semester, hopes to gather funds to teach the course again as a larger lecture of 80 or 120 students in spring of 2011, and divide the lecture into smaller sections to be led by teaching assistants in the Hamel Family Digital Lab. Most students would jump at the chance to customize their own course content for the semester. Robert Howard, an associate professor of communication arts and associate chair of the Folklore Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gave his students such an opportunity. Restructured folklore class brings local culture to life 16888 2009-07-09T09:26:00-05:00

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Some 2,000 miles separate Madison and Hollywood's star-making machine, and it's a 1,000-mile journey to New York's Great White Way. <div id="story_image_1357" class="photo right" style="width: 250px;"> <img src="http://www.news.wisc.edu/story_images/0000/1357/beatles.jpg" alt=" " /> Although Ed Sullivan was uncomfortable with rock ‘n’ roll, in a savvy courtship of teenage viewers, he booked the Beatles, Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones early in their careers. The first time the Beatles appeared on the show, viewership nearly doubled, reaching some 74 million households. Photos courtesy: <a href="http://www.wcftr.commarts.wisc.edu/">Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research</a> </div> Yet Madison is home to more than 240 collections of film, theater, television and radio history and memorabilia — a treasure trove of cultural history held by the <a href="http://www.wcftr.commarts.wisc.edu/">Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research</a> (<abbr title="Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research">WCFTR</abbr>) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in cooperation with the Wisconsin Historical Society. And now, thanks to a special project, three new collections have been sifted, winnowed, digitized and posted to the <a href="http://www.wcftr.commarts.wisc.edu/">WCFTR Web site</a>, joining a collection from legendary Hollywood star and producer Kirk Douglas that the center digitized and launched as a pilot effort in fall 2007: <ul> <li>acclaimed costume designer Edith Head,</li> <li>early radio pioneers in Madison, and</li> <li>nine slideshows taken from the center's Stills and Flat Graphics Database, which will soon be searchable online. </li> </ul> All three offerings are supplemented with short essays and background information researched and written by UW-Madison film and media studies faculty and graduate students. Links to other key electronic resources and published information are also provided, adding extra context and understanding. While browsing the exhibits, it's impossible to not have an "Oh, wow" reaction. <div id="story_image_1359" class="inline-content photo left" style="width: 250px;"> <img src="http://www.news.wisc.edu/story_images/0000/1363/tcat.jpg" alt=" " /> <img src="http://www.news.wisc.edu/story_images/0000/1361/TCATKelly.jpg" alt=" " /> Edith Head designed a white gown for Grace Kelly to wear in Alfred Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief” (1955). The photo from the film shows that the final version of the dress is nearly identical to her signed watercolor sketch. </div> "At first, we started scanning some of our documents and putting them up so people could really see these cool memos and letters and photos," says <a href="http://commarts.wisc.edu/directory/?person=mhilmes">Michele Hilmes</a>, professor of media and cultural studies in UW-Madison's <a href="http://commarts.wisc.edu/">Department of Communication Arts</a> and director of the WCFTR. "We have wonderful letters from [John F. Kennedy] to William Evjue, publisher of the Capital Times and owner of WIBA, Madison's first commercial radio station." Although the center's full collection is impressive for its massive size — the United Artists materials alone fill a whopping 2,000 boxes — what sets the center apart is the work it does related to the collections. "Scholars from all over the world come to Madison to explore the archives. Hundreds of books have been written based on research done at the center," says Hilmes. But there's something for nonexperts, too. "If you've ever tried to go online and find out what's in an archive, it can be very confusing," Hilmes continues. "Archives just provide access to materials, but it takes a lot of research experience to navigate the finding aids and figure out what you're looking at. Here we have a department of communication arts with all these scholars who know a lot about the history of media. We decided we could create scholarly exhibits for the Web that would provide context and background, along with critical analysis that would situate the material and tell people more about it." Those who delve into the three new online collections can take a fascinating journey. <div id="story_image_1365" class="inline-content photo right" style="width: 250px;"> <img src="http://www.news.wisc.edu/story_images/0000/1365/hood.jpg" alt=" " /> Head was nominated for 35 Academy Awards for costume design; she took home the Oscar eight times. </div> Head worked on more than 1,000 films during her 44 years as head designer at Paramount and 14 years at Universal, receiving 35 Academy Award nominations along the way. The online collection features some of her personal papers, but is largely watercolor, pencil, and pen-and-ink sketches by Head and her teams of designers. It reveals the thought process and the business behind designing film costumes — along with some unexpected postings, such as actor Richard Burton's measurements (chest 42 inches, trouser inseam 31 inches). The university was a leader in creating educational broadcasting content for the developing new medium of radio. The new WCFTR exhibit "Radio Pioneers in Madison, WI" draws from the Wisconsin Historical Society archives and shows the growth of the medium and the philosophy of using radio to educate. The collection includes, in the chapter "WIBA: Madison's First Commercial Radio Station," photos and extensive documents, including letters and notes to Evjue from Kennedy, Robert La Follette and President Harry Truman. The title of the third new collection, "Photos and Flat Graphics Slide Shows," gives little hint of the bounty within. The nine slideshows — ranging from TV's iconic "The Ed Sullivan Show" to theater's "Design for Living" — are drawn from the center's extensive publicity and personal photographs, movie stills, posters, playbills, clippings and scrapbooks. Some take viewers behind the camera to see what goes into making a classic film; others reveal how studios shaped actors to become stars and bankable box office draws. The Douglas and three new digital collections were made possible through contributions from UW-Madison alumnus Stephen P. Jarchow. His support funded four graduate students as summer fellows to develop the featured collections for the Web. So what comes next? "Eventually we'll create an online catalog of photos and visual materials in all the collections," Hilmes says. "But besides paper, we have film collections and video collections ... thousands of audio recordings ... [and] a wonderful set of collections around the Hollywood blacklist. ... Don't get me started, I could go on and on." Three new collections in the holding of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research have been sifted, winnowed, digitized and posted to the Web. Film and theater center digitizes three new collections 16689 2009-05-06T09:29:00-05:00

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For years, the historical significance of the Stonewall Rebellion, the Mattachine Society and the GLF has been "in the closet" and largely unknown to mainstream America. An upcoming University of Wisconsin-Madison summer intersession course will explore those topics, along with other people, places and issues of the Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights Movement, by taking 17 students on a two week, five-city bus trip around the Northeast. The class, the <a href="http://www.wisc.edu/lgbt/gayhistory/">Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights Movement, 1950-1970</a>, is the innovation of <a href="http://www.housing.wisc.edu/ilc/faculty.php">Scott Seyforth</a>, a graduate student in educational leadership and policy analysis, who also serves as a residence life coordinator for University Housing. "This is a history that has been hidden and we are attempting to bring it more into view," he says. "We will be helping to contribute to an emerging field of study and meeting with people who changed the course of U.S. history, even if no one knows who they are." Seyforth adds that the bus trip is a unique way for students to learn through first-hand experience and investigation. "One of the things that makes this trip powerful is students become immersed in the project. Students are learning the issues from the time they wake up until they go to bed. That is very powerful." The learning journey will begin in Madison, with lectures from UW-Madison alums and local <acronym title="Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered">LGBT</acronym> rights advocates. On May 29, students will board a bus headed to Washington D.C., where they will spend four days meeting with activists who organized and picketed at the first gay and lesbian civil rights demonstrations, along with others who successfully advocated the American Psychiatric Association to de-list homosexuality as a mental illness. From Washington, the group will travel to New York City, where they will meet participants of the Stonewall Rebellion, who resisted police harassment against the gay and lesbian community at the Stonewall Inn in 1969. During their three days in New York, the group will also visit the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the largest and oldest lesbian archive in the world. Participants will learn about the activities of the histories of the Mattachine Society and <acronym title="Gay Liberation Front">GLF</acronym>, or Gay Liberation Front, organizations of men and women which sought to bring gay and lesbian rights out of the background and into a more prominent place in American society. Along the road, students will attend a church service at the traditionally African American <acronym title="Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered">LGBT</acronym> Unity Fellowship Church in Baltimore and meet with the publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News in Philadelphia, Pa. <a href="http://commarts.wisc.edu/People/Bios/zaeske.htm">Susan Zaeske</a>, associate professor of communication arts and faculty adviser for the trip, says the group will explore the political, religious and the cultural levels of LGBT life. Zaeske also says she is thrilled with the diversity of students on the trip and hopes it will increase the learning experience. "It's quite an even mix [between <acronym title="Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered">LGBT</acronym> and heterosexual students] and I think it is wonderful," she says. "LGBT history is so central to American society that people who are gay or straight know that gay rights are important. I am really heartened by that." Student participant Kia Block hopes the trip will give her this understanding of <abbr title="Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered">LGBT</abbr> issues and make her a better ally. "I think I'll come back with a better understanding of the history behind the <acronym title="Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered">LGBT</acronym> movement and probably a newfound respect for what <acronym title="Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered">LGBT</acronym> people have gone through in the past and are still going through," she says. "Hopefully I'll come back a better ally with some new friends." The bus trip is part of the curriculum for the <acronym title="Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered">LGBT</acronym> certificate, new to UW-Madison in 2003. Sociology professor Joe Elder, another faculty leader of the trip, says this course is a way of the university showing its dedication to <acronym title="Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered">LGBT</acronym> issues. "At the moment, <acronym title="Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered">LGBT</acronym> people are probably the most discriminated against," Elder says. "All discriminated groups face barriers. This trip is one way of bringing those barriers down." The trip is sponsored by the <acronym title="Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered">LGBT</acronym> Certificate Program, Pathways to Excellence, the <acronym title="Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered">LGBT</acronym> Campus Center, University Housing, the Offices of the Dean of Students, the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, the Vice Provost for Diversity and Climate, the Women's Studies Program, the Wisconsin Alumni Association and the Office of the Chancellor. For years, the historical significance of the Stonewall Rebellion, the Mattachine Society and the <acronym title="Gay Liberation Front">GLF</acronym> has been "in the closet" and largely unknown to mainstream America. 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