Now that we’re up and running on our new system, we’ve posted a few new programs for you:

The Medium

The Old Maid and the Thief

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

2008 Annual Math Awards Lecture

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  I am currently wrapping up my first experience with the New Media Consortium (NMC) sumer conference, hosted this year by Princeton University.  I’ve seen whole host of media presentations over the past few days, including a very interesting session put on by our friends at Bradley University about their award-winning digital theatrical performance, The Adding Machine.  Last evening I presented NUAMPS Archival Imaging to a very lively audience, and generated a lot of interest in our process with conference-goers.  I have some interesting ideas and other conference tidbits to share with the NUAMPS crew upon my return, and I look forward to returning to NMC in the future to continue NUAMPS’ relationship with this very innovative community.  

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While our blog continues happily on Wordpress, the NUAMPS site has gone through a major metamorphosis. Cosmetically, you won’t notice any significant redesign, but underneath we’ve gone from hand-coded html to the Plone content management system. So you can expect more updates, more often.

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NUAMPS has recently delivered two more programs for air on the Big Ten Network. Produced in association with University Relations, these pieces highlight the superb talent that exists among both faculty and students at the Northwestern School of Music.

NUSO Student Showcase

Scheduled Air Dates:

Thursday, June 12th - 1pm EST (Premiere)

Musique de Chambre: A Faculty Recital

Scheduled Air Dates:

Tuesday, June 24th - 8pm EST (Premiere)

Wednesday, June 25th - 4am EST (Repeat)

Friday, June 27th - 1:30pm EST (Repeat)

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We’ve expanded the types of articles available at Science in Society by including Medill Reports and Research Digests.

Read them.

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READ THE ARTICLE

Project Digitizes Works From the Golden Age of Timbuktu

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: May 20, 2008

From Timbuktu to here, to reverse the expression, the written words of the legendary African oasis are being delivered by electronic caravan. A lode of books and manuscripts, some only recently rescued from decay, is being digitized for the Internet and distributed to scholars worldwide.

These are works of law and history, science and medicine, poetry and theology, relics of Timbuktu’s golden age as a crossroads in Mali for trade in gold, salt and slaves along the southern edge of the Sahara. If the name is now a synonym for mysterious remoteness, the literature attests to Timbuktu’s earlier role as a vibrant intellectual center.

In recent years, thousands of these leather-bound books and fragile manuscripts have been recovered from family archives, private libraries and storerooms. The South African government is financing construction of a library in Timbuktu to house more than 30,000 of the books. Other gifts support renovations of family libraries and projects for preserving, translating and interpreting the documents.

Now, the first five of the rare manuscripts from private libraries have been digitized and made available online (www.aluka.org) to scholars and students. At least 300 are expected to be available online by the end of the year.

The project to collect the digital manuscripts is being organized by Aluka, an international nonprofit company devoted to bringing knowledge from and about Africa to the scholarly world.

In partnership with a consortium of private libraries in Timbuktu and with financing from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Aluka enlisted media technicians from Northwestern University to design and set up a high-resolution digital photo studio in Timbuktu. A local staff was trained to operate the studio.

Many documents in the graceful Arabic calligraphy are a visual delight. Although the writing is mostly in Arabic, quite a few manuscripts are in vernaculars adapted to the Arabic script, which is sure to pose a challenge for scholars.

“The manuscripts of Timbuktu add great depth to our understanding of Africa’s diverse history and civilizations,” said Rahim S. Rajan, the collection development manager at Aluka.

Researchers have been struck by the range of subjects that attracted Timbuktu’s scholars over several centuries and into the 19th century. Most of the first digitized ones are from the 17th through 19th centuries. The topics include the sciences of astronomy, mathematics and botany; literary arts; Islamic religious practices and thought; proverbs; legal opinions; and historical accounts.

“It is a rich corpus of historical and intellectual literature that is just beginning to become more widely understood and accessible to a broader group of scholars and researchers,” said Mr. Rajan, a specialist in Middle East studies.

In a recent seminar conducted online, members of the Aluka-Northwestern team described some of the problems in starting the digitizing facility in Timbuktu: frequent interruptions of electric power and dust storms fouling delicate electronic components.

“It wasn’t as bad as other places that I’ve seen,” said Harlan Wallach, director of the Advanced Media Production Studio at Northwestern, who has set up similar installations in Asia. “We blew out a lot more transformers and equipment working on a project in China than in Timbuktu.”

While there may be no substitute for seeing the actual manuscripts, Mr. Wallach said, it is better to read them in the digitized form. Many of the pages are so fragile they should not be handled.

Even if Timbuktu today is a dusty, mud-brick shadow of its past renown, living mainly on the few tourists attracted by its name and legend, the pages of its history are emerging from obscurity and, in some cases, are being disseminated by the speed of light.

NUIT AT NUAMPS Manuscripts featured project

NUIT AT NUAMPS Timbuktu Multimedia Web Gallery

Manuscripts webinar available here

Aluka Web site

Harlan’s Timbuktu Project Blog 

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On May 12th, NUAMPS shot and broadcast the National Forum on Interdisciplinary Team Development, which was held in Northwestern University’s Hardin Hall. It was essentially a national meeting of health research consortia and the National Institute of Health, discussing the various facets of doing this kind of research in an interdisciplinary environment. We shot the entire event using 3 cameras, and broadcast both the presentations of the speakers and the audio commentary of those assembled. In total, we live-mixed 41 microphones, providing the ability to always hear any attendee with minimal background noise.

For more on this event, please visit http://ircforum.northwestern.edu

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Latest Additions, African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes
Timbuktu Manuscripts Collection

Aluka is pleased to announce that the first five of 300 manuscripts from Timbuktu, Mali are now available. The digitised manuscripts can be found in the Aluka Digital Library as part of its African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes content area.

The manuscripts demonstrate sophisticated visual and technical artistry and embrace a diverse range of topics and genres, including the natural and physical sciences, the literary arts, the Islamic religious sciences, and historical accounts. Many of them are written in local African vernaculars and Arabic using calligraphic scripts.

Digitisation of the manuscripts was a joint effort between Aluka and one of its partners, the Mali-based SAVAMA-DCI (L’organisation Non Gouvernmentale pour la Sauvegarde et la Valorisation des Manuscrits pour la Defense de la Culture Islamique ), a non-profit consortium of private manuscript libraries in Timbuktu. Aluka and Northwestern University’s Advanced Media Production Studio (NUAMPS) provided training, expertise, and equipment to SAVAMA-DCI, enabling the organisation to create a digital imaging studio in Timbuktu so that it could photograph each manuscript page and thus enhance preservation efforts.

Additional Timbuktu manuscripts will become available online before the end of 2008.

Press release here

Manuscripts webinar available here

Aluka Web site 

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The NUAMPS digitization studio is in the midst of digitizing some Evanston-specific works by the 19th century photographer, Alexander Hesler. The project, for the NU Library, involves the imaging of the Picturesque Evanston album, produced by Hesler in 1887, featuring photographs of Evanston at that time, including thoroughfares, homes, churches and University buildings. Hesler was also famous for his many portraits of Abraham Lincoln, an example of which is shown here.

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We have been shooting a number of events around Northwestern to be broadcast for the Big Ten Network, including a showcase of students who performed with NUSO, the Northwestern University Symphony Orchestra. For many students, especially undergraduates, this annual event is a rare opportunity to perform in front of an orchestra.

Keep an eye out for this program on June 12th!

Pictured from left to right are: Brandon Eubank, Jennise Hwang (top row), Paul Whitley, and Eric Stassen (bottom row).

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