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Highlighted Projects

Beam Classroom: Digital Dual-Image Projection

When Kodak announced that they would no longer manufacture slide projectors, a cross-campus team at Bowdoin worked to replace the dual-slide carousels, often used in comparative art history courses, with dual-image digital projection. The project exceeded expectations when it fostered significant pedagogical changes by faculty in Art History and the Classics departments. The project results include:

  • The design of a dual-screen digital display with a single projector
  • A custom developed podium device and touch screen for instructor to easily control the two-image display
  • High-resolution scanning of slide images
  • An image database that faculty can access from anywhere to plan their lectures

Use
The project originally intended to implement digital images for Art History 101. However, faculty members across departments saw the value of using digital images for their course lectures. Classes in the Classics/Archaeology, Environmental Studies, Biology, and Art History departments are using, or have used, this technology.

Contribution
Implementation of digital technology can fundamentally alter how faculty access and use visual images for their teaching. The variation in which an instructor can display images -- singly, wide-screen, side-by-side comparison, several images stitched together -- gives him/her much more autonomy in crafting a lecture. The instructor can select the most effective way to present the material to maximize the students understanding.

Digital collections eliminate many of the physical, economic, and social barriers that have traditionally confined access to information resources. Further, they provide multiple access points to images via metadata, so instructor's can search for images across many factors, e.g. artist, year of work, geography, style.

After an initial pilot project with a collection of 15,000 architecture images, over 80,000 images have been digitized and are managed through the digital asset management software.

Technologies
Customized software (Luna Imaging and ArtStor)
Custom-built 7" LCD monitors
Mercury 5000 HD digital projector
Crestron Controller with custom programming
Kramer splitters, transmitters and receivers
High-resolution scanner and scanning software

Contact
Ruth Bartlett, Education and Research Consulting