Center for eResearch

John Foley, Director
Kathy Andresen, Administrative Assistant
LuAnne Roth, Associate Editor
Mark Jarvis, IT Manager

Title: Ongoing Projects @ CeR

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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:

Oral Tradition (http://journal.oraltradition.org), an online, open-access, free-of-charge international academic journal.

eEdition, a digital, web-based edition of The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey (http://oraltradition.org/zbm).

The Pathways Project (http://pathwaysproject.org), a multimedia venture that explores the similarities and correspondences between humankind’s oldest and newest thought-technologies.

SyndicateMizzou (http://syndicatemizzou.org), an online resource for research news, presents the research and creative activities of University of Missouri faculty in their very own words.

UMRB Video Web site, (http://umresearchboard.org), will provide a setting for faculty from all four campuses to talk about projects that have been funded by the University of Missouri Research Board.

MizzouTube, currently under development, will serve as a video-sharing site for the University of Missouri community.

Department of English

Peter Monacell
Timothy Materer

Title: Digitizing James Merrill Manuscripts for the JM-L Website

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Our project will digitize selected manuscripts by the American poet James Merrill (1926-1995), beginning with his sequence of seven sonnets “The Broken Home,” first published in 1965. We have received permission to make these manuscripts available online from the trustees of Merrill’s literary estate, as well as from the curator of the James Merrill archive at Washington University in St. Louis. The Online Merrill Archive will be linked to The James Merrill Discussion Forum, maintained by Timothy Materer and located at http://web.missouri.edu/~materert/jm.html.

James Merrill revised his poems at great length. For example, the manuscript of “The Broken Home” contains 50 pages. We will edit manuscripts using a number of approaches, including transcription of selected pages, critical commentary, and interpretive chunking, which divides the manuscripts into what we perceive to be compositional stages. Ours will be the first publication of James Merrill’s manuscripts in any format, and by presenting them online we hope to enrich readers’ experiences of Merrill’s finished poems, and also to shed light on his writing process. Furthermore, we believe that making these manuscript pages available to students and scholars everywhere will initiate new discussions of his life and works.

Department of Anthropology

Carolyn Orbann
Lisa Sattenspiel

Title: An Agent-Based Computer Simulation of Infectious Disease Epidemics in Newfoundland, Canada

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  RePast model
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The goal of this project is to develop expertise in computer modeling using a Java-based package, RePast, which has been designed to facilitate simulations of social activities. This software is used to develop a simulation model that applies to a study of the spread of infectious diseases in Newfoundland, Canada. The details of community structure and parameter estimates for the simulation are derived from data collected during the summer of 2006. The resulting model illustrates possible patterns of infectious disease spread on Newfoundland in an engaging way. The model is designed in a flexible manner, so that it can be adapted for future projects involving data from other locations and time periods.

RePast is a relatively new simulation package and allows for complex simulations, as well as displaying the data in user-friendly formats. These include both data charts and graphs that are Microsoft Windows and Macintosh compatible and the creation of animations to better visualize epidemic processes. Being able to see how diseases spread across space adds a dimension to explorations of factors influencing those processes. Ultimately, it will be possible to present the model developed in this project on a webpage and to allow site visitors to explore interactively disease transmission patterns across space.

Department of German and Russian Studies

Chris Paladin
Olaf Schmidt
Monika Fischer

Title: Language in Flux: Oral Language Shifts in German Speaking Countries

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Considering the massive influx of English idioms, the increasing acceptance of digital communication derivatives, the substantial impact on youth language by ethnic minorities and multilingual communities, and the powerful revival of local dialects in contemporary media, the German vernacular must be regarded as the fastest changing of all Western languages. Traditional German “classroom syntax” in the United States appears increasingly discrepant from authentic speech patterns in German speaking countries. Despite scattered academic research and publications on particular phenomena, an inclusive digital collection of video, audio, and textual materials covering the entirety of oral language shifts has not yet been attempted. The general purpose of this project is, on the one hand, to raise awareness of the enduring rhetorical changes, especially with inflexible textbook publishers, and, on the other hand, to provide a digital information platform for students, particularly study-abroad applicants, language teachers, and everyone else interested in the German vernacular. Until the end of the Fall term 2008, we will have launched a well-structured, comprehensive website which will give visitors access to a collection of materials covering all major German dialects, important accents, subculture slang, and recent rhetorical changes inflicted by digital communication and cultural globalization.

Women and Gender Studies

Jennifer Kimball
Mike Stadler

Title: Open Source Sounds:
KOPN Reel-To-Reel Radio Archives

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KOPN-FM community radio's reel-to-reel sound recordings collection reflects the history of mid-Missouri and the nation. However, reel-to-reel recordings have a limited life-span.

Though the reel-to-reel project has reformatted several hundred tapes, many of these programs are not cataloged, making use of them difficult. Moreover, the programs are inaccessible to many potential listeners and researchers.

For this study, 65 reformatted tapes will be catalogued from the Local Issues Collection, focusing on the Of the People series and The Inside Story: Missouri Prisons series. The programs will be put on the project website for free listening.

Both series were produced in the 1970s and 1980s for KOPN. Of the People was a panel and interview show focusing on international issues’ relevance to mid-Missourians. KOPN's prison issues series is a primary source about an extremely marginalized group of people.

Programs will be abstracted, and will then be put on the project website with abstracts and an index. Data on program topics and content will be gathered. The process of constructing a catalog and webpage devoted to the programs will illuminate a variety of challenges, pitfalls, and rewards of working with information and archival records produced by diverse people in a non-academic setting.

Department of English

Sarah Zurhellen
Jeff Rice

Title: Writing Speech: What Can Instant Messaging Teach Us About Language and Literacy?

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Historically, all new developments in digital technology, from the Web onward, have evoked a crisis in popular rhetoric, and Instant Messaging (IM) is proving no different. From the public media to the discussion boards on InsideHigherEd.com, IM language is increasingly discussed using terminology that comes directly from the crisis rhetoric that so often surrounds language deviations threatening to disturb the status quo. However, if, as one Parent Teacher Council representative claims, IM language differs from Standard Written English in its ability to use students' natural tendencies to "think orally and write phonetically," then rather than decrying it as the end of the English language, perhaps we should welcome it as a new communication technology that blends oral and written literacies. In response to crisis rhetoric that undermines our ability to recognize new possibilities, I investigate how and why IM language developed and how and why it has evolved as new users and audiences have joined in, in order to assess its current function as a communication technology that exists somewhere between the oral and the written. Drawing on the research of Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Eric Havelock, I explore how IM language merges effective communicative practices from oral and written technologies in order to create a new form of communication most efficient for the digital medium.

Department of Music

Darin Olson
Julia Gaines

Title: An Analysis of Information Provided by Music Publisher’s Online Catalogs

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With the evolution of internet sales and marketing over the past ten years, most sheet music publishers have developed web-based catalogs to replace the hard copies of previous generations. These online catalogs provide musicians with immediate access to an abundance of literature with the click of a mouse. However, a quick review shows the information provided by publishers is subjective and sparse. A quick comparison of an online clothing catalog illustrates this point. The Dillard’s website contains information on price, brand, shirt style, color, size, fabric, sleeve length, and design regarding men’s “sport shirts.” A typical music entry by a publisher includes price, title, composer, and instrument. In a composition there are many musical elements to address, such as duration, key signature, type of notation (manuscript/engraved), and many different types of technical aspects. The online music catalogs do not provide adequate information for the consumer to make an educated purchase.

The purpose of this study will be to review the information provided about solo marimba literature by ten major music publishers. Through the comparison of various catalogs, similarities and differences will be discovered. With the assistance of a faculty advisor, fifty pieces will be acquired an analyzed from the online catalogs to reveal the objective contents of the pieces. The discoveries will be related back to the publisher¹s website to unveil any discrepancies. The information collected about each piece will then be entered into an unbiased, searchable internet database already in existence. The site is www.percussionmusiconline.com and the creator of the site, Tim Palmer of the UK, has already agreed to include the information from this research into the site.