A New Digital Environment for Building Cultural Connections
Staff from the Center for Media and Instructional 
Innovation (CMI2), David Hirsch and Gabe Rossi, and Lecturer in Comparative Literature, George Syrimis presented a new digital environment born of a partnership between the CMI2, the MacMillan Center, and the Hellenic Studies Program. The CMI2 project page refers to the New Digital Environment as “a multimedia gateway into modern Greek literature and culture.” CMI2 describes the environment’s back-story as follows: “Yale’s MacMillan Center partnered with the CMI2 to create a web-based resource about modern Greek literature and culture for use in its Hellenic Studies Program. This online resource offers Yale students and academics the opportunity to contextualize selected readings with multimedia content collected for and connected to the primary texts. The multimedia study environment not only offers distinct units of study corresponding to course curricula, but also enables thematic and self-guided exploration. The process of gathering and organizing content for the project is facilitated by browser-based technology developed at the CMI2 for empowering faculty to collect and tag digital objects easily. Content encompassed in the collections include: images of art, culturally relevant music files, maps, historical entries, and biographical information on key personalities.”
David Hirsch, Associate Director of CMI2, started off the talk by underscoring the impetus for the project: to
create a new environment in which one can tag and do dynamic searches in order to find meaning in the connections among various materials and sources. The goal was both to create a context, mechanism, and repository for collecting a critical mass of information for subsequent research and to encourage researchers and scholars to explore, discover, and create connections and meaning out of the materials and sources collected there.
Gabriel Rossi, an Instructional Technologist at CMI2, stated that the New Digital Environment can be used by faculty and scholars to upload a variety of materials including text, images, video, and audio files for students and researchers to search. In this particular project, the main focus has been on course texts, which have been tagged and hyperlinked with other relevant materials, be they image, audio, video, or other text files, that have been uploaded to the site. Hence, all text materials are queryable. Various tagging methodologies may be employed - thematic, chronological, by the course calendar, etc. - to maximize the hyper- and inter- textuality of resources on the site.
Gabriel used The Mermaid Madonna, the only text in English on the site, to demonstrate that one can 
traverse the primary texts featured in the environment traditionally - chapter by chapter, page by page, and line by line. One could also use a less traditional method of text perusal: given that every word in the text is hyperlinked, one could travel the text in a less linear, more circuitous, fashion by clicking on hyperlinks and taking a series of detours. As a user of the site, one can access materials in a variety of ways - by reading the texts and following hyperlinks, by burrowing into the cloud tag, by sequentially perusing the various file/filter types. Users may also tag any and all components loaded to this environment, thereby adding to the network of connections among materials. Above and beyond tagging, users can add their own annotations to any material found on the site. These annotations are then saved for later sessions. If users are students, they can have access to not only their own annotations, but those of the instructor, as well. This feature allows the instructor to model good research skills for the students. Each session in the environment is tracked, logged, and saved. The application chronicles the trail users have traced through the database in correct order so that they may later access their “choose your own adventure” paths through the materials and thus, track their own methods of constructing connections and meaning.
This is an experimental application, CMI2 really appreciate George’s willingness to be part of an experimental project. This will hopefully be a rich research environment. George didn’t want to craft the relevant research connections among materials on his site for people, but rather he wanted them, both students and scholars, to craft the connections themselves so that they could find meaning. This particular use scenario would allow the site to be a fertile research tool. Users of the site are permitted to draw their own connections. CMI2 is hoping to track what users are doing on the site to see how this environment is useful. Tracking use scenarios will allow them potentially to re-purpose the environment for new applications. In the future, CMI2 and George Syrimis hope to extend the environment to incorporate community contribution of content. At this point in time, George is the only one who contributes source materials to the site.
The environment uses Ajax, which allows you to tag and comment while listening to an audio or video file, meaning while the file is active. One can even embed YouTube files directly into environment and play them from within the environment.
An audience member asked how can one use languages in other alphabets in an environment like this? Would the hyperlinking capability work? George does use some titles in Greek on the site, but all tagging words are in English. As long as the term is listed both in Greek and English, you can maximize the hyperlinkability of the database’s holdings.
George Syrimis, Lecturer in the Hellenic Studies Program, then demonstrated how a lesson could be built out
of the site. He selected a sketch of a seemingly Christ-like crucifixion figure, but then thwarted the viewer’s assumptions by introducing the actual cultural context of the image - the sketch actually depicts a naked Greek man dancing the Zembekiko dance. The dance is featured prominently in Zorba the Greek. George then found an audio track on the site to which the Zembekiko is danced. George essentially demonstrated through his path from the initial drawing, to the Zembekiko dance, to the song used for the dance, how you can use the research environment to culturally contextualize knowledge, enhance understanding, and learn. George really likes the ability to link to outside sources. There are so many different threads the students could follow. The difficulty has been to contain the info possible rather than to expand or find it. George suggests that you find a very specific topic around which to build a body of work. Let the students use this very specific topic to exercise their ability to build connections and locate meaning.
