The Medieval North Atlantic
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The Medieval North Atlantic |
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| Project Overview: An Encyclopedia of Viking Britain | |
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Imagine visiting the imposing site of the priory at Lindisfarne, where the Viking Age began with the first Norse raid of England in 793 AD, and consider how actually being there now would help to bring the events of the past alive for you; think of the excitement of visiting the archaeological digs of pagan Viking ship burials, replete with buried treasure alongside human and animal sacrifices; consider the ability to wander at will through the spectacular Viking ruins of the settlement at Jarlshof in the Shetland Islands on a glorious, windswept day in the far north. Now consider the possibility of making such a journey at the speed of light through a virtual reality pilot, complete with a personal electronic guide which provides maps, static images, explanatory video clips and sound bites which bring to life these ancient peoples and places in your classroom, or even in the comfort of your own room at home. Your guide is an electronic and interactive documentary which allows you to choose the pace and focus of your explorations, while your pilot allows you to look at three-dimensional images and 360-degree panoramas of the sites you choose to visit. Such a tool is an obvious way to spark the curiosity and imagination of young students, drawing them in to the study of the literature, history, and mythology of a culture with a built-in appeal for many young people.
The Interactive Multimedia Encyclopedia of Viking Britain will bring the people, places, and stories of the Vikings in Britain alive for an almost unlimited number of High School and underclass College students, students in Central Pennsylvania, the Mid-Atlantic, and indeed beyond; but not only these students will benefit from this project. It is true that students—and especially secondary and lower-level college students—learn better when they can see and make connections between the text and the world, and the word and the image; thus interactive and multimedia internet tools are ideal vehicles through which we may help these students learn. It is equally true, however, that most students—and certainly the best of upper-level college students—learn best by teaching, by being asked to gather, assimilate, organize and present information. Again, multimedia and interactive tools are ideal for such active learning and teaching, and the Interactive Multimedia Encyclopedia of Viking Britain is designed to be compiled and authored by just such advanced undergraduates, many of whom wish to enter teaching as a profession.
In order to gather the materials necessary for this project, I plan
to capture digitized images of a number of significant cultural and archaeological
sites in Viking Britain. These digitized images will take three forms:
1) Linked Quick-Time Virtual Reality (QTVR) panoramas which will
allow the viewer to scan 360 degrees from a series of vantage points at
each site; 2) Static images which will allow the viewer to
examine more closely details of important aspects of each site; 3)
Video images which will capture sounds and activities at each site, and
will offer the opportunity to include some explanatory voice-over information
about the historical and cultural context of each site. By combining
digitized video footage, QTVR panoramas, static images, and simple maps
of sites, one can create compelling virtual tours. “Virtual” simply
means that such electronic representations are quite evocative of the actual
sites, and that they are to some degree interactive. These panoramas
are “interactive” in that (by clicking and dragging the cursor on the screen
with one’s mouse) one may “interact” with the images. Most simply
put, by clicking and dragging the cursor, one can look around 360 degrees
from the vantage point one chooses when one records the panorama.
The viewer chooses the pace and the direction of examination, drawing upon
the finite number of images filmed by the creator of the panorama.
By “multimedia” I mean that the project will be composed of a combination
of text, static images, streaming video, and sounds, rather than of text
alone. The inclusion of short documentary-style informative video
clips created at each site, for example, helps both to elucidate points
of interest and to draw the viewer more fully into the virtual experience;
further, creating “hotspots”—which allow a viewer to click on various objects
in the QTVR panoramas—allows for much richer and more informative tours.
By “interactive” I mean that the project will be composed on-line, utilizing
hypertext links to allow a reader to travel through a series of related
documents according to that reader’s interests and needs, rather than in
a traditional linear fashion. Thus an interested reader could search
through the entire document in, for example, a thematic way. An interest
in Viking ships might lead a reader through maps, pictures, QTVR panoramas,
video clips, and text dealing with such disparate sub-topics as “The Jarls
of Viking Orkney,” “The Impact of the Age of Viking Raids upon Britain,”
and “Viking Trade and Commerce in Britain.”
Through studying the digital materials I have captured on site, the
students in my course on Viking Britain will be allowed to examine quite
closely sites which most of them will never have an opportunity to visit;
more than that, however, they will be the virtual tour guides who will
collate the materials and compose the text that will lead visitors to our
Viking Encyclopedia through the places, objects, and cultures represented
by the electronic images. Thus this technology provides an opportunity
for extremely active learning to take place. For previous courses
I have designed and constructed templates for the student composition of
virtual tours and interactive research projects; these will serve
as the starting points for the Virtual Tour Pilots and Interactive Multimedia
Guides my students will complete for the Viking Encyclopedia. Each
student in my Viking Britain course will plug text and graphic information
into this prefabricated interactive format. Thus, although the text,
graphics and sounds will be unique to each project, all of the projects
will all be formatted identically, and therefore will “look” and “feel”
the same.
Each section of this project will be revised by each succeeding generation
of upper-level students in my courses, who will refine the work of their
predecessors, continually updating outmoded technology and editing or re-writing
as the current scholarship indicates. It has been proven time and
again that advanced peers are ideal tutors for younger students;
thus the concept is to guide and edit the writers of this encyclopedia
while empowering their contemporary voices. The role of the professor/professional
editor during the compositional process of each student project will be
to provide clear direction concerning topics, procedures, and scholarly
processes, and to engage in continuing assessment throughout, offering
active criticism of topics, titles, outlines, bibliographies, multiple
drafts, etc. Final editing on the part of the professor will be limited
to eradicating substantial errors in fact or egregious problems with syntax,
grammar, etc. The idea is to enable the students to be full partners
in this project; therefore undergraduate work will be left intact
insofar as scholarly rigor will allow.
Current State of the Project and Tentative Time Table:
Pilot Chapter: The Lords of the Isles
This is an on-going long-term project; the first Chapter will concern Viking life on Shetland, Orkney, and the Isle of Man. The Preliminary Module presently under construction is “The Vikings on the Isle of Man.” Funded by an institutional grant dispersed by the Grants Advisory commission of Gettysburg College, in the summer of 2000 I compiled digital materials from seven Viking sites from the Isle of Man. These included: Braaid, a Viking homestead; Maughold and Andreas, sites of Norse cross-slabs and other artifacts; Cronk ny Merriu, a Viking homestead and promontory fortification; Knonk e Doonee, Peel and Balladoole, sites of significant Norse graves; and Tynwald, the site of the 1000-year-old Manx parliamentary assembly founded by the Norse.
The project for summer 2001 included the researching of possible venues and the compiling of digital materials for a number of Viking sites on Shetland, including Jarlshof, arguably the most extensive and best-preserved Viking settlement in Britain. I spent several weeks prior to the project researching and targeting selected sites. During the tenure of the project I spent a number of weeks in Britain, during which time I compiled digital materials; it took some additional months to format these materials for assembly. These materials will be assembled into the first Chapter of the Interactive Multimedia Encyclopedia of Viking Britain (The Lords of the Isles) by the Instructor and students of English 401-A (Viking Studies: The Vikings in Britain) in the Fall Semester of 2001. In each subsequent year I hope to add another Chapter to the encyclopedia; examples could include Vikings in the Western Isles, The Danelaw, The Vikings in Ireland and the Irish Sea, etc. My methodology will no doubt evolve as the project grows, but it will be based on the premises I have outlined.
Significance of this Project to the Humanities
This is an interactive multimedia project designed to be constructed for students and by students, a collaborative effort edited by a professional medievalist and drawing upon materials targeted and gathered by a scholar, but true to the spirit of the junior colleagues who do the initial compilation of materials. I see the Interactive Multimedia Encyclopedia of Viking Britain as a model for any number of similar endeavors covering a wide range of the Humanities, endeavors of inestimable value to High School and College curricula. Further, each Chapter of this project will be a self-sufficient and valuable teaching and learning resource to any audience with Internet access. Moreover, each Chapter will be linked with the succeeding ones, creating an ever more detailed resource. Finally, a major theory of this project addresses the needs and concerns of secondary school educators: perhaps most notably, many teachers today are worried that the technology which is making distance-learning a reality will be used in budget cuts to remove teachers from classrooms rather than adding resources to them. Projects such as this one manifest a different understanding of the term “distance-learning:” this Viking Encyclopedia will project students and teachers together into virtual representations of distant sites and cultures, rather than projecting a virtual teacher into a distant classroom.
This project was conceived of and implemented by Christopher R. Fee; Fee, Joseph Zoller and Sarah Doherty compiled the on-site digital materials, with additional assistance from Kathryn A. Lowe, Director of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow. All student projects are the work of each individual student, each of whom retains the right to use and to display copies of that work as she or he sees fit, provided that such use is not for profit.
The project as a whole, including all digital video, QTVR panoramas, and digital static images compiled by the instructor, all student work, the design, structure and format of the individual pages, and all of the instructor's work, is copyright 2001-2002 Christopher R. Fee and Gettysburg College. The College and the instructor each reserve the right to display and to modify all work herein, including student research projects, in any way for non-profit and educational purposes. By participating in this seminar each student thus implicitly agrees to allow her or his work to be used, displayed, and modified for educational and non-profit purposes.
All images, video clips, sound recordings, animations, and textual materials borrowed from copyright sources are used herein for educational and non-profit purposes only, and will be removed from these pages upon receipt of an express written request to that effect from the copyright holder. All images, etc. which appear in this project are either expressly owned and copyrighted by the instructor or are from copyright sources, and each is individually credited to the source from which it was taken.
This project has been made possible through funds from the Grants Advisory Commission of Gettysburg College. The Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow provided additional assistance.
For further information, to request to use material on these pages for educational and non-profit purposes, or to request that copyrighted material be removed from these pages, please contact:
Christopher R. Fee, Department of English, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA 17325
Phone: (717) 337-6762
E-mail: cfee@gettysburg.edu
Copyright 1998-2007 Gettysburg College and Christopher R. Fee