During two years of a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Fund for Improvement of Post Secondary Education, we created a computer workstation teaching tool that combines three-dimensional viewing of works of art with a relational database of images and words. We have dubbed this tool ECIT (rhymes with Becket; "an electronic compendium of ideas and facts in an interrational data bank of images and text." We used ECIT to teach a one-semester university course of lectures serviced entirely by electronic equipment, that is, we used no slides. In the classroom each student sat at his/her own workstation on which he/she learned to manipulate ECIT. Students were asked to find images under discussion and to search for supporting information and facts as the lecture proceeded. The electronic searches were often guided by one of the instructors whose computer monitor was projected on a screen at the front of the room. While the new technique was somewhat intimidating to a few of the students, in less than two weeks it had become transparent and was acting as a stimulant to further visual and intellectual exploration.
Perhaps the most prominent among our innovations is the three-dimensional imaging portion which provides representations of art in architectural settings through which the spectator's line of vision can move freely in "real time." Within these settings mural paintings are seen in full color, in perspective, in their true positions, and in their proper relative scale. This technique permits the study of works of art "in context" as no previous method has done.
The other innovation is the electronic data bank combining images and text that scroll together. On the first level, the data bank makes available from the beginning the full inventory of all the images that illustrate the course. These images and their captions can be studied on most of the 26 clusters of computer workstations on campus using a standard World Wide Web browser such as Netscape. The data bank further offers a searchable gathering of all facts and ideas involved in the course. Rather than a simple database arranged in flat files, the units of information are elaborately linked together to express associations in the physical, historical, social, religious, psychological, and interpretive sense. Because of the flexible and far-reaching search facility of ECIT, students can study the relationships between all the works of art, the people, the ideas, the concepts, and the historical circumstances discussed in the course. ECIT also contains a full bibliography which can be searched and printed out at any time.
These innovations led to a reinterpretation of student examinations. Working singly or in groups of two or more, the students were given subjects that tested their skills in art historical research along with the use of the electronic compendium as applied to computer analyses and reconstructions of works of art. The goal was to exhibit their skill in scanning and manipulating images on the terminal screen, recreating fresco cycles in three-dimensional models, and driving through the models in three dimensions to study the paintings. They were asked to identify and analyze facts and images, and taught to enter them into the compendium.
While the course as such was a great success, our instructional techniques were, to say the least, exploratory. We feel there is still much to do to develop them to their fullest extent. Toward this end, we plan to give the course (Art 430, "Piero della Francesca Online") again in the spring of 1995, at which time we will seek to hone and polish "in class" techniques (e.g., coordination between lecturer and graphics specialist; invoking student discussion based on findings in the compendium; introducing suitable subjects for quizzes, examinations and term papers, and so on).
1. One of our main objectives in this project is to ensure the the transferability of ECIT's framework and teaching technique to other scholars. Although not yet tested, we have taken care to make the form of ECIT both valid and workable for any historical or humanistic field that uses visual images. During our seminar, we had at least one visiting professor at each session, to bring an expanded point of view. Not only were the visitors unanimously enthusiastic, but also they immediately saw the applicability of ECIT to their own fields. As a result, although we consider our project to be still in development, we plan to start working with other scholars as soon as possible.
2. We will start with a series of cooperative, hands-on ventures with colleagues who study and teach about a variety of art historical media (architecture, sculpture, and painting, book illumination, print-making, and so on). These scholars will include faculty members on the Princeton campus, those from other American universities and institutions, and one or two colleagues from foreign universities. Each person will be offered assistance in preparing a single class from a course already in progress. In this way, the research and collection of appropriate images will have been completed. We will expect the Visual Resource department of each colleague to supply digitized versions of the slides usually shown in that lecture. We will then give guidance in preparing the information and images for entry into the compendium and instruction in the process of inputting the textual and visual material. We plan to share with our colleagues what we have learned about teaching with ECIT and learn from them new ramifications of the method in accordance with the needs of their particular subjects. Finally, we will participate in the teaching of the class as a method of control and evaluation, and afterwards seek opinions and suggestions.
3. Evaluation In fact, this project offers a good opportunity to evaluate the impact of a totally new methodology in the art history classroom. It should be possible to design a set of exercises for the students to show "before and after" responses to the new tools. We might try to make a comparison between different sets of students, some of whom will use the new tools and some of whom will not. In this way, we might be able to see if the new approach makes observable changes in students' ability to comprehend art historical material.
4. Another goal of these experiences is to serve as stimuli to the participating instructors to proceed with the use of ECIT for an entire course, and to win support from their home departments to do so. With luck, they would become advocates in encouraging their institutions to up-grade faculty teaching facilities to make such an approach possible.
5. Availability We emphasize here that ECIT is not a database of information, nor is it in any way a "canned course." Rather, it is a structure of or framework for a collection of data to be filled with material (images and information) by each user for his/her own purposes. When we are satisfied that the framework if fully developed we plan to make it available to any academic who wishes to use it.
If we get further outside funding, we plan to prepare the necessary documentation for ECIT. The framework, construction, and operation of ECIT would be thoroughly described for the records and for the purposes of dissemination. The goal here would to provide guides written in language that is simple and non-technical for use by academics, but precise enough to be valuable to the graphics specialists who will, no doubt, continue to work with art historians. This material will be given to all the collaborators for their use and evaluation.
The 3D software is built upon Silicon Graphics Inventor toolkit. The database software interface was written in Motif and connects to an Oracle7 database system.
