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Theatrum Mediterraneum Online resources
for a course on Mediterranean
Boundaries
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The main purpose of the Theatrum Mediterraneum web site project was to provide support for the Mediterranean Boundaries course. This course, team taught by Thomas Arnold, Maria Georgopoulou and Ahmet Dallal in the Spring of 1999, will be offered again in Spring 2000 byProfessors Arnold and Georgopoulou. In this article, Professor Arnold discusses some of the motivations behind the site and shares some of the lessons learned from the use of online resources. Why create a website? According to Professor Arnold, a key motivation for creating this site was to facilitate student access to primary source materials: "In my first semester at Yale I put together a course with a lot of primary source reserve readings; materials such as travelers accounts of cities like Rome and Venice in early modern times. There were two problems with this. One, students avoided reserve reading. Two, this method only works for smaller classes. A course packet is one way around this, but packets cannot be easily edited by the instructor putting them together; and they have become increasingly expensive for students to purchase. With a web site I-together with my colleagues-could assign students primary source materials otherwise impossible; such as the story of a fifteenth century pilgrim only available, in English, in a thick volume published in the 1890s. Not exactly accessible. " Some of the primary source materials placed on the site include eyewitness descriptions of such things as: an earthquake in Crete; Christian pilgrims spending a night of prayer in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem; an autobiographical account of a galley slave uprising in Egypt; the slave markets of Kaffa, in the Crimea on the Black Sea. Professor Arnold feels that "...it is highly unlikely that these sources are used in teaching large undergraduate courses anywhere else in the world." Exploring with images and maps Unlike course packets and photocopied reserve materials, it is as easy to publish full color on the web as text. Color photographs of major churches and mosques in Cairo, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Granada, as well as Cairo craftwork and Ottoman plates illustrate the site. Professor Maria Georgopolou, a colleague in the History of Art Department and co-instructor on the course, travelled the Mediterranean area with a digital camera this summer and captured numerous images that will be incorporated into the site for the Spring semester. Among these are 360 degree (QuickTime) panoramas of St Mark's square in Venice and the interior of the Greek Church in Venice. A site with this much original material would normally have a search facility to enable direct access through a query. However, Professor Arnold wanted to encourage students to browse the site as if they were contemporary, early-modern travelers moving along the trade routes of the era: i.e, from Venice to Jerusalem by way of Corfu, Crete, Cyprus. Hypertext links and the continuous addition of new images and content will make the site an increasingly immersive environment. Future developments As the site grows, Professor Arnold feels it might develop into a multi-disciplinary encyclopedia of information about the early-modern Mediterranean. His ultimate goal is to expand the site beyond the History Department to service multiple courses in areas such as English and Art History, all of which are in some way connected to the time and place. Student feedback from the first web exposure is guiding future development. Several issues that the instructor encountered are of general interest to all instructors who use on-line materials. For example, online materials can overcome some of the shortcomings of photocopied handouts and course packets - they offer more flexibility in their creation, can be easily updated, and involve less expense for the student if hard copies are not necessary. However, many students still felt compelled to print out the readings so that they could annotate them or bring them to sections for discussion. The spring 2000 site for the course will include "printer friendly" versions of the readings to minimize overhead and cost associated with making hard copies. Professor Arnold also discovered that a small but significant fraction of students were new to the process of using a browser to access online course materials, and he plans on devoting class time at the beginning of the course to familiarize the class with his web site. |
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Theatrum Mediterraneum: Footnotes
The 98-99 version of Theatrum Mediterraneum can be viewed at http://classes.yale.edu/98-99/hist325b. The Spring 2000 version will appear later this semester and can be accessed through the student interface at classes.yale.edu, or directly at http://classes.yale.edu/hist325b.
Student responses, taken from the online questionnaire:
"I'm very impressed with the technical design of the site and the information on it. It looks really good and is easy to use. I loved the clickable maps especially!"
"Prof Arnold, this was a gorgeous website and I found it very easy to use and very impressive. It kind-of created incentive to do the web readings...appearance does affect my mental state when reading."
"I found the website readings to be both interesting and valuable. They really put the historical and cultural texts into focus, making the whole experience of studying this faraway time and place more real. I was certainly more inclined to read the website selections than the textbooks (with the exception of Lane, which is excellently written). I would encourage a greater emphasis on the original source readings on the web in the future. I found that, while they were the most engaging part of the course, they took a distant third to the lectures and textbook readings in importance during discussion section and in the midterm."
"The website had useful sources like maps and the readings definitely were much more interesting than textbook material; the primary sources make a difference."
"This is the first class that I have had readings on the web for and I look forward to other classes of mine having this as a source."
Professor Arnold comments on site creation: "I did the basic layout and design of the site using Macromedia Dreamweaver on my office Macintosh. Graphics were created with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Fireworks and Macromedia Flash. The material for the readings was scanned and converted to text using OmniPage OCR (optical character recognition) software, a time-consuming but satisfying process. Recently, we have started collecting digital images during trips to the Mediterranean using a Sony Mavica FD-91 digital camera, and in some cases with a Kaidan panoramic tripod head. Some of the photographs on the site are management with ImageAxs software" He recommends the book by Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton, Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites, Yale University Press, 1999.
Professor Arnold thanks ITS and the Library for supporting these web projects.
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