Mission
The Center for eResearch fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange via digital and internet-based media. It seeks to democratize academic research by using electronic tools and strategies to remove barriers to learning and knowledge-sharing, and to promote a broader, more inclusive, and more diverse academic community. The CeR supports campus-level, national, and international research efforts through a series of projects:
An online, open-access, free-of-charge journal
On September 19, 2006 the international academic journal Oral Tradition, founded in 1986, became a free, online, open-access periodical. To date the current issue (volume 21, number 2) plus twelve years of back issues have been posted at the journal site as a series of downloadable pdf files, with full indexing and search capabilities. By September 2007 all 21 years of contents will be available to anyone worldwide with an internet connection and a browser, free of charge. We have undertaken this project to enlarge both the readership and the authorship of Oral Tradition, with special concern for those parts of the academic community outside the Western distribution network for paper journals.
A digital, web-based edition
As part of a program of electronic editions, Halil Bajgorić’s 1935 performance of a 1030-line South Slavic oral epic, The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey, has been made available online and free of charge at the project site. Although the epic was also published as a conventional book, this eEdition radically reintegrates the performance by synchronizing the audio record, an original-language transcription, an English translation, a commentary, and an idiomatic glossary – presenting all of these dimensions on the same electronic “page.”
An online resource for research news
SyndicateMizzou presents the research and creative activities of University of Missouri faculty in their very own words. All articles feature excerpted interviews with researchers and creative artists in four formats: streaming video, downloadable video (mpeg4), ipod-ready video, and audio (mp3). A brief article and pertinent links are also included, and users can subscribe to the site through an RSS feed. Among the constituencies addressed by SyndicateMizzou are the campus community, average citizens in Missouri and across the country, prospective MU students, and faculty colleagues and students at other institutions.
eResearch seminars and fellowships
The CeR sponsors digital and internet-based research through a weekly seminar series involving faculty-student teams from across the colleges of the University of Missouri (Agriculture, Arts and Science, Business, Education, Engineering, Health Professions, Human Environmental Sciences, Journalism, Law, Medicine, Nursing, and Veterinary Medicine). Students apply for four to six eResearch fellowships (carrying a stipend of $1000) available each semester, and research teams make a presentation to the seminar each week.
The Pathways Project
The Pathways Project is a multimedia venture that explores the similarities and correspondences between humankind’s oldest and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the Internet. The overall project consists of a book, Pathways of the Mind (due 2008), and a suite of online vehicles: a wiki, an eEdition, several eCompanions, a data-base, and an RSS feed.
MizzouTube: A video-sharing community
Presently under construction, MizzouTube will serve as a video-sharing site for University of Missouri community. We expect to begin beta-testing in January 2008.