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In the course Frengen 204, Songs in Love and War, taught by Marisa Galvez, I taught a auxiliary
lab in which students used multimedia to imagine ways in which to...to reinterpret and to put
a modern spin on medieval and early modern lyric poetry. So over the course of the
term, I met with students once a week to help bring their capstone projects to fruition.
And in the beginning, we didn't have any sense of what form they were going to take so it
was this ongoing dialogue for several weeks and then several weeks of intensive design
and post-production. Each student was allowed to envision their own way to use multimedia
to re-interpret the troubadour lyric. And one of the aspects that made this so engaging
was that each of them interpreted this in a different way. One wrote an original sestina.
One composed original music that took a modern slant to early modern source material. Two
of them did web-based projects and one of them actually did a textured, multi-layered
video. And all of these were informed by their research that they did in the class with Marisa.
And the other aspect in which I was able to assist them was in the creation of the…the
web-based platform that they were using over the course of the term. And that was the work
of Experimedia. So Experimedia is the DLCL's in-house design team and Performing Trobar,
I think, is one of our great successes. And that in the course of just one term, my students,
Giulio Gratta, Class of 2010, and Ashling Loh-Doyle, also Class of 2010, were able to
mostly on their own and but in consultation with Marisa so that the project was adaptive
to what she needed, they were able to create a customized website, attuned to the needs
of both the course and the research outcomes that Marisa was interested in. It's all custom,
done in the Drupal content management system. And including an original theme done by Ashling
and information architecture and workflow done by Giulio and I think it looks pretty
great and we have plans for improving it. We're able to leverage everything that we
built and, of course, upgrade it and improve it. That's the idea and I think a better student
console and a better instructor console for the website. So Drupal sites can have a kind
of overwhelming user interface that's not super friendly and there's an art in making
it easier to use. And I would like to do that for next time. We're really fortunate to have
funding from lots of separate quarters within the university that makes collaborations like
this possible. Here at Stanford we have a Center for Computer Research in Music and
Acoustics. They were amenable to working with us and that is how we had such an amazing
workshop experience because the Troubadours and the students were able to work together
in the CCRMA studios and we're very grateful for the work and the support of CCRMA, the
DLCL, SiCA, the Provost's Office, Academic Computing Services through the Libraries,
all of these units of the university brought to bear resources to make this whole thing
possible. It was really fabulous working with Marisa. We got started very early so we got
started on this project the term before she was going to teach and we spent the whole
term building and talking about what it was going to look like and that also gave us some
time to…to have those…those other collaborations that I mentioned with CCRMA and so forth,
they kind of came into being because we had this sort of, you know, collaborative, creative
ferment happening, sort of bubbling non-stop. For me, it's all about the students and making
things happen for them. The fact that Anne was able to get this really fabulous assignment
afterward. So she was able to extend her research. She went to France and was performing and
touring with the Troubadours in the summer and was able to cut an album with them. I
mean that's…that's huge. Anne's a music major so she was able to come into a Lit class
and get a kind of career-making, potentially experience from a Literature class because
Marisa was so sort-of open-minded and innovative in the way that she thought about offering
this class. And that's the kind of faculty that I really love working with.