Thanks for joining us for our premiere of “A Clear Channel”!

above: Joe Tave, Dallas, Texas, local activist featured in this documentary about 1968, offers his response to the remix and its themes of “noise” and communication across difference

Yesterday’s premiere of “A Clear Channel” and technology demonstration of the Remixing Rural Texas prototype was very exciting for all of us. The event itself filled the room to capacity with project partners,  administrators, faculty,  and students from across the campus and at least a dozen more community members from all over the region. We expected no more than twenty. We received more than double that, with a room filled almost beyond capacity.

Technology Demonstration (Remixing Rural Texas), 8/7/12. Just getting started and the room continued to fill with honored guests from across the campus and community.

We began with a general introduction of the project, including our reasons for branching into the digital humanities. Then each member of the team said a few words about their many contributions to the project.

For many months, Shannon Carter  has worked almost daily with a fabulous team of graduate students from across the disciplines to produce the prototype appearing in Figure 1, create a remix to be demo-ed in that prototype (“A Clear Channel: Part I” and, this spring, “Still Searching”), and develop the extensive data source annotations to be included in each of these fields (footnote, timeline, map, content, audio, video, image, permissions).

The Production Team most directly involved includes Adam Sparks (student, MA in History), Kelly Dent (student, MA in Political Science), Jennifer Jones (student, PhD in English), and Sunchai Hamcumpai (student, PhD in English). This team has been working tirelessly through the Development, Asset Collection, and Production phases of this complex project with its many moving parts.

Prasna (student, MS in Computer Science) worked with us throughout the previous semester to built a working prototype and begin loading content, which other grad students in Computer Science helped along by bringing our content into the data source annotations for the RRT prototype.

None of this would have been possible without the amazing help of the Remixing Rural Texas Project Team, which  includes Andrea Weddle (Director, Special Collections), Adam Northam (Director, Digital Collections), and the fabulous resources at the Faculty Center.

Invitation: Screening and Technology Demonstration (8/7, 10:30-11:30)

Please join us for a screening of our documentary “A Clear Channel” and a demonstration of our new digital humanities prototype Remixing Rural Texas, both of which were funded, in part, by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities.

Tuesday, August 7, from 10:30-11:30,
Innovations A
Sam Rayburn Student Center

Synopsis: A short documentary (A Clear Channel) about the complexity of communicating about race relations in America, drawing attention to this this issue as it played out in one local context (a rural university town) at a particularly complex time (after 1964, as the first African American students set foot on this campus that had been segregated since 1889). Narrative remixes collective memories of 1968 drawn from existing source
materials to explore attempts by local African American student activists in a newly desegregated university to communicate about race in ways that promote social justice during one of the most turbulant years in our nation’s history.

The project consists of two components: a short documentary, remixed almost entirely from existing archival materials, and a prototype (using a variation on the data-source annotation tool powered by Mozilla Popcorn) designed to foreground the original context of all audio, video, and image-based materials included in the remix, as well as permissions for all artifacts, relevant geographical and temporal context contexts, and additional contextual elements.

We hope you can join us!
The CLiC Team (Converging Literacies Center)