Looking for that perfect image for your class, but away from your computer? Now, search over 32,000 images from the Duke University Libraries’ digital collections on your iPhone, through DukeMobile, Duke’s integrated iPhone Application.
iPhone and iPod Touch users can browse and search twenty collections that range from advertisements and documentary photography to sheet music. You can save and download images to an album, and access all descriptive information. 
Making digital image collections viewable on mobile devices is part of the library’s ongoing efforts to make its resources available whenever and wherever researchers need them.
DukeMobile, introduced in March 2009, currently serves about 50,000 users, providing mobile access to the campus directory, sports scores, interactive maps, event listings, the course catalog, and Duke videos on YouTube.
How is our relationship to physical space changing as space becomes “virtual”? What do virtual spaces reveal about the people and circumstances that create them? Those are questions asked by Annabel Wharton, Professor in Art, Art History & Visual Studies, in her research on Medieval and Modern Architecture.
Over the past few months, Wharton has explored Second Life, an immersive world inhabited by several million avatars representing real life humans, as well as Assassin’s Creed, a popular video game set in thirteenth century Palestine and Syria. She is examining the effects of digital architectures on those who navigate those virtual realms. In Fall 2009, she plans to teach a course on Jerusalem in which students will join her in investigating the power of architecture in these new media.
For the past four years, Wharton has been studying “pathological architectures,” seeking to understand and describe the ways that “sick” buildings affect the people who occupy them. More broadly, she is interested in how architectures act as agents in modifying the way humans live. Her work in exploring architectures in Second Life and video games is preparation for the last chapter of her book.
“It’s impossible to understand space conventionally any longer; digital worlds and immersive spaces play too large part in our economy and culture to ignore,” Wharton said.
“I expected myself to be a kind of tourist in Second Life and in video games. But the space is invasive; it doesn’t allow you to be simply an objective observer. I have become subjectively engaged, in a way that surprised me. ”
Wharton also noted that, in Second Life, the spaces are created by the avatars themselves; both shaping and acting is an expression of their producers. As opposed to “real” life, objects retain reference to those who made them. A chair or a house in real life is anonymous; a chair or a house in Second Life, with a click of the mouse, reveals its creator. Search engines allow you to invite those makers to talk to you about their work.
For example, during the recent presidential campaign, Wharton explored the Second Life spaces created by Democrats and Republicans. Democratic spaces were functional, open, modern, information-centered. Republican sites were architecturally elaborate with classicizing buildings and the intimacy of Main Street. She drew from her observations conclusions about the working of the “public sphere” in immersive worlds.
For faculty thinking about integrating Google Earth, Second Life or video games into a course, Wharton suggests becoming familiar with the technology first. She compares it to learning a new language or visiting a new city with its own culture and conventions. Each technology may take several weeks of learning its mechanisms and exploring its the territory to feel “at home”.
With Second Life, Wharton recommends having students to visit a variety of spaces, some connected directly with the course contents and some not, in order to accustom themselves to navigating the space and interacting with other residents. But finally students can construct the historical sites they are studying in three dimensions so that they and other avatars may walk through them.
Most residents of Second Life are “in world” for social purposes or for entertainment—from soft-porn to “dancing for Jesus.” But groups engaged in politics, education, art and music are also active there. Avatars can walk around the Sistine Chapel and the Temple at Karnak or they can attend discussions of Obama’s Cairo speech with Egyptians, Turks, Iranians and other Muslims from around the real world. The first brief piece that Wharton wrote about Second Life described her first visit during the Gaza War to the newly opened Palestine Holocaust Museum (article at iReport).
“It is really worth investigating digital technologies,” Wharton says, “They give you a new means of rethinking your old assumptions—a central concern of education.”
New in Blackboard 8: When you post the announcement in Blackboard, you can choose to email your announcement to all of the users in the course site by clicking a check box.
Blackboard automatically adds the course ID to outgoing email messages, in the email subject field. Usually a course ID consists of Course Subject, Course Number and Suffix, and Course Term. (e.g. ECON101.01-F2009)
To learn more, see our help page for the Blackboard Email Tool and visit the Blackboard support website. If you would like more help with Blackboard, request an office visit and we will come to you.
Students in Victoria Szabo and Richard Lucic’s capstone course ISIS 200 have produced a “mapping toolkit” that includes a list of devices, directions for using the devices to collect mappable data, directions for creating maps with Google Earth, and a website to organize this material.
The initial purpose of this mapping toolkit is for Duke Engage students in partnership with WISER (Women’s Institute of Secondary Education and Research) to produce useful maps to facilitate the planning of community facilities and ways to impact gender disparities in health and education in Muhuru Bay, Kenya.
Students produced a helpful website:
The mission of ISISmapping.org is to help you map your world. We believe that maps are power, a power that should be shared by everyone.
During this course, students investigated mapping technology and devices, and decided which ones should go to Kenya as part of the toolkit, based on the needs of the project and the conditions in Kenya. They produced documentation and worked out best practices for mapping, in consultation with researchers in Kenya. The recommendations and documentation they produced can be used by anyone who’d like to map their world.
Watch Victoria Szabo, Sherryl Broverman and students in the course talk about the project.
At the final presentation of the project, students were asked about the challenges they faced when exploring the technology and creating the project. They described the challenges of coming together as a team, keeping up with rapidly changing technology to determine the best way to map, and creating a way for people in Kenya to make maps with their data despite intermittent electricity and rare access to the internet.
Guest post by Danette Pachtner, Lilly Library, Duke University
Easily and legally share documentary videos in Blackboard. Duke University Libraries has acquired over 80 video titles from Films Media Group that include permissions to stream clips or entire documentaries in Blackboard at Duke. The Films on Demand collection offers a great opportunity to provide easily accessible video content to students for course reserves and to create custom playlists for a broad range of classes and topics. 
Duke’s streaming video database can be accessed on the library homepage from the Search Resources/Databases tab (see image).
You can browse titles or search across all titles by keyword. Once you have found a relevant video, copy the URL from the video page and add it to your Blackboard course as an external link.
If you have suggestions for titles to add to Duke’s Films on Demand database, contact Danette Pachtner, Librarian for Film, Video, and Digital Media.
