MediaBASE
This collaboration between IMSC and the Institute of Multimedia Literacy at USC will attempt to address ways in which students can explore and learn about varying forms of multimedia and content from various disciplines, and interpret and understand their relationships in terms of various modes of interrelated scholarly address.
A digital application is being developed to allow students, teachers, and researchers the freedom to explore a diverse collection of media objects (i.e., video, film, music, speech, 3d objects (sculpture/architecture), photography, and painting) and learn about relationships between various scholarly categories such as discipline, medium, rhetoric, and formal components. For instance, students could investigate how history has used various forms of media; while at the same time explore how the same selected media has been used for purposes of persuasion or interaction. The interface will allow the users to drop in media objects and pull up individual scholarly data as well as data on the relationships between objects. For example, a user can pull up a painting and a piece of music and see how aspects are related. The application will be designed to be user driven in that professors, students, and researchers can author their own content and create hypothetical relationships between media objects. This system will also demonstrate a bloging interface that will allow for professors to post official content and remarks and allow for students to add their own remarks regarding the object and its relationship to other media objects in the database. Because of the vast scope of the project, IML will solicit scholarly input from experts in the various schools and disciplines within USC, in order to guide, produce, and evaluate the content. IMSC will conduct formative human factors studies, which will initially evaluate the usability of the system and design research methodology for assessing the efficacy of the system as an educational tool.