At the New Media Lab, Graduate Center doctoral students and faculty members from a range of academic disciplines are given the opportunity to work in an interdisciplinary environment. They collaborative with NML staff, with each other, and with their advisors to use technology to develop innovative websites and tools in the digital humanities, sciences, and social sciences. See below for the list of current and earlier projects that have been developed at the New Media Lab.
[rollover project name for description]
Current Projects
AHRESOURCES is a streamlined, peer-populated teaching resources site sharing Art History Survey teaching materials between teachers. Currently, there is no standard set of resources for art survey teachers at CUNY. Most new teachers "reinvent the wheel" by creating their own lectures, PPTs and other teaching materials. AHRESOURCES streamlines this process, connects with other similar endeavors, and forms a community of peers.Michelle Jubin, Art History
Auditory Simulations is a project to create simulations of speech sound using different digital signal processing techniques. It is primarily focused on generating simulations of degraded speech signals, and in simulating the effects of digital signal processing in a hearing aid, with emphasis on compression characteristics.Reethee Madona Antony, Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences
This project is a display and visualization of a budding comparative collection of Black Sea fish osteology and mollusks. As one component of a larger website about archaeological research in Sinop, Turkey, it will serve as a bilingual (English and Turkish) multimedia home for this collection from the Black Sea coastal regions of Bulgaria, Turkey, Romania, Ukraine, Russia and Georgia and be available to other zooarchaeologists for their reference.Antonia M. Santangelo, Anthropology
Blogging For Your Health analyzes how participants write in the blog setting as compared to a more private MS Word setting. For this project Kreniske is building a blog that will serve as the hub for his participants’ posts. He will then compare these posts to writings created by an equivalent sample of participants writing created in MS Word.Philip Kreniske, Developmental Psychology
This website aims to create greater transparency around the politics of health and safety regulations within the American adult film industry. The ultimate goal is to serve as an informational resource, database, and platform for discussion amongst and between various publics – including industry performers, social scientists, and medical and legal scholars. Christopher Baum, Anthropology
Children Framing Childhoods is a longitudinal visual research project that documents how children from diverse cultural backgrounds growing up in an urban context use photography and video to represent themselves, and their complex identities from childhood to teenagehood. The on-line audio-visual archive has special relevance for urban educators and aims to cultivate a new set of lenses through which to visualize urban youth.Wendy Luttrell, Urban Education and Social Personality Psychology
This project aims to alter ways students approach academic, specifically geographic, thought. The course website will merge traditional low- and high-stakes assignments with emergent forms of digital communication to blur classroom boundaries, generate collaborative learning and encourage metacognitive attention to the production and mediation of disciplinary knowledge.Stephen Boatright, Earth and Environmental Sciences
The region of Cappadocia in central Turkey has dozens of Byzantine structures carved into the landscape. Many of these are cave churches that are decorated with medieval wall paintings inside. This project is a multimedia site designed to provide a scholarly introduction to the area with essays and bibliography as well as an archive of maps, plans, and photographs.Alice Lynn McMichael, Art History
The sound you hear travels through the outer and middle ear toward the inner ear and is affected by characteristics of the middle ear. Modeling techniques will be utilized to investigate the impact of the middle ear on sound transmission. Modeling will be done by developing programs in MATLAB and outcomes are potentially useful in clinics. Maryam Naghibolhosseini, Speech-Lnaguage-Hearing Sciences
By digitizing Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889-1951) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, I aim to make manifest its complex internal structure. I am creating a dynamic, interactive, digital incarnation of the work, and a valuable tool for its study. Employing digital technology in the humanities, eTLP shall be a twenty-first-century expression of one of the previous century’s most important philosophical texts.Kyle Ferguson, Philosophy
Using ArcGIS, Steve is creating a map of union members residences in Local 174, an influential Detroit local within the United Auto Workers. The map will enable visualization and analysis of residence patterns in this union in the era just prior to postwar suburbanization and the dispersal of industrial plants and union membership.Stephen McFarland, Earth and Environmental Sciences / Geography
This 20-30 minute documentary short presents a political economy of Everglades restoration. Florida's "Python Challenge," is a new "market-based solution" for Everglades restoration that offers cash rewards to hunters for eliminating invasive Burmese pythons. Through interviews with policy makers, anthropologists and 'gladesmen,' the film utilizes the python challenge to revealing the forces that continue to radically transform the Everglade ecosystem. David Borenstein, Anthropology
Gendering Islands brings together a variety of documents concerning the seventeenth-century francophone Caribbean from archives and libraries in France, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and the United States. This project is designed to create a multimedia research and teaching tool for exploring the colonial Antilles.Ashley Williard, French
The Jail of Mountjoy is a linguistic-historical-aural interpretation of the rhythms hidden in Finnegans Wake accomplished by reading Roland McHugh's Annotations as music. The goal is to open up the more non-linguistic elements of the work to the common reader, as well as to pragmatically show the varying phases of the Wakean dreamer's dream through sound.
Casey Michael Henry, English
LocateFlow: Discovering the Nature of Creativity is dedicated to investigating the nature of creativity. Utilizing innovative design and technology, the project includes articles and interviews about creativity, large-scale social media analysis to gather perspective on web users' definitions of creativity, and a toolkit to inspire creativity.Eathan Janney, Neuroscience
In Kate Chopin’s 1892 short story, “Miss McEnders,” a naive young woman travels from her affluent home in North St. Louis to visit a dressmaker on working-class Arsenal Street. The journey highlights existing class and ethnic divides in 19th century St. Louis and prefigures civic and structural changes in St. Louis throughout the 20th century that reinforced these divisions.Kate O'Donoghue, English
Mapping Mythology is a digital archive of artwork that intersects with Classical mythology. Due to the well-recognized reception of the Classical world in modernity, this project seeks to map classically-themed artwork onto the contemporary urban environment. This project will not only reveal hidden gems in city architecture and sculpture, but also seeks to connect the monuments to their given context in the larger history of Classical reception. Jared Simard, Classics
Medea’s Map of Colchis is a digital archive of speech recordings of Lazuri, the endangered language spoken in the highlands of the Caucasian mountains of Turkey. This interactive teaching tool will map linguistic variation found in the Lazi villages of Rize and Artvin, two provinces formerly belonging to the ancient Kingdom of Colchis. Lazuri is in danger of becoming extinct within the next two generations if children and adolescents no longer learn this language as their mother tongue. Ozlem P. Yuksel-Sokmen, Development Psychology
Memoscopio is a participatory action research project that documents, studies, and promotes nonviolence.me-mos-co-pio me mos ko'pjosust. [from memory + kaleidoscope] 1. Collective act of memory and creation. 2. Digital archive of materials about nonviolence, peace, and social justice.
3. Kaleidoscope of images, text, video, and audio.
Carolina Muñoz Proto, Social Personality Psychology
The Street Med Apps project will aggregate and streamline the disparate online resources for activist first aid. This interactive multimedia knowledge base will also provide strategic tools for street and affinity group medics such as on demand decision support, private communication, and geolocation capabilities. It will identify new types of mobile technologies that support the medical needs of individuals working in low-resource environments that can be used to improve the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of providers. Suzanne Tamang, Computer Science
The Simplicity Archive was created as a space to connect with people who engage in simple living and to spread awareness of Laurie’s research project on simple living. The site is also home to a blog written by Laurie about simple living.Laurie Hurson, Environmental Psychology
This project is part of a larger effort to curate a retrospective exhibition of works by Theresa Bernstein (1890-2002). This remarkable and prolific artist has, in general, been overlooked by scholars, thus the accompanying website — a compendium of images, videos, archival material, and other sources — will provide a starting point for future scholarship.Elsie Heung, Art History
The aim of this project is to create an environment to teach social skills to individuals with high functioning autism. The use of a virtual environment is hypothesized to enhance the intervention's generalization to new settings and each participant's understanding of when and how to apply social skills. This project will culminate in the construction of a virtual environment in Second Life™ as part of the doctoral dissertation project.Kevin Ambrose, Educational Psychology
Welike2draw is a suite of open-source hardware and software built to facilitate creativity and collaboration on digital devices. The software allows participants to share drawings over the internet, working simultaneously in real time and integrating rich media into their works. These devices hope to honor our bodies' capability of dexterous and rhythmic movements, freeing us from the need to sit at a computer and inviting us to dance shake and wiggle with our machinesSamwell Freeman, Computer Science
Using digital depictions that track the development of the concept of "hate crimes" and related legislation since the civil rights era, this project analyzes historical textual and visual data related to bias crimes to express changes in the public discourse and the larger cultural framework that contribute to society’s intolerance for violent bias-crime.
Roz Myers, Criminal Justice
What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past is the story of how a daughter reconstructed her family’s missing past from a handful of mysterious objects passed down from her father. The strange collection—locks of hair, a postcard from Argentina, a cemetery receipt, letters written in Yiddish—moved her to search for the people who had left these traces of their lives and, ultimately, to come to terms with the bittersweet legacy of the third generation.Nancy K. Miller, English
This project examines whether or not young Latinas and Black women ages 18-25 who use a smartphone app for sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information can achieve increased knowledge and utilization of SRH services such as pregnancy prevention (Plan B), HIV, STI, and pregnancy testing, and to other social services, such as substance abuse treatment.Sonia K. González, Public Health
Previous Projects
A Study of Hipster Culture and Identity in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is an ethnographic web-based exploration that will be a centralized, interactive place for the collection of multimedia research results, news, links, references, and participant-generated content.Antonia Levy, Sociology
A huge number of free 3-D models can be found on various web sites. Text-based search engines provide helpful information only if the models are annotated with descriptive keywords but it can be difficult to describe some objects (i.e machine parts). This project aims to create a site that provides internet users with a free resource for conducting example-based queries that would direct them to the site of actual 3-D models.Ilknur Icke, Computer Science
A Geography of Impertinence is a web-based tool for studying the Spanish experience of piracy and contraband in the Early Modern period. The website will allow users to interactively discover key points in the geography of piracy, using a set of Portuguese maps from the 1630s. The tool is also designed to serve as a gateway into — and as an annotation platform for — a variety of literary, historical and historiographic documents. Clayton McCarl, Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages
A Grammar of Where? will provide a geographically referenced database, maps, and links to the works of three poets writing about, and working in, the Americas. It will draw upon a broader dissertation research project that explores how nation, home, and community are imagined and named in the works of Anglophone poets writing (and publishing) between 1945 and 2005.Tonya Foster, English
Architecture and Wayfinding is a 3D simulation of one of the Graduate Center's floors. The project aims to reveal particular characteristics of built environments that influence the process of wayfinding, or how people find their way in certain challenging environments.Aga Skorupka, Environmental Psychology
This project thinks through the practices through which people might come to "know," understand, have, and create the experiences that characterize living in a city. It draws upon people's everyday practices as examples of "archival practices," especially those involving digital technologies, which may provide guidance for researchers who study affective urban experiences. Through close engagement with these practices, this project will provide alternative methodologies for urban research.Adeola Enigbokan, Environmental Psychology
Using a combination of real-time audio processing and 3D modeling software, music student Zachary Seldess will create virtual 3D sound environments that, via a local area network (LAN), can be experienced and altered in real-time simultaneously by several users. Zachary Seldess, Music Composition
Artistic Exchange: A Timeline of 16th Century Flanders, Spain, and Latin America will be a dynamic timeline exploring 16th century art historical connections between Flanders, Spain, and Colonial Latin America. This project will utilize MIT's open source tool, SIMILE Timeline, to provide a broad visual picture of the historical period.Kimberly Alvarado, Art History
Using the Max/MSP/Jitter programming environment, Music Composition student Nathan Bowen hopes to change the concert audience experience by allowing audience members to help determine the outcome of the performance. Dividing the audience into two teams, each team will be assigned the task to get their video game character to cross the finish line first and prevent the other team from gaining ground.
Nathan Bowen, Music Composition
Employing methods from Statistical Physics and using computer simulation, Physics student Huafeng Xie studies complex networks drawn from a wide range of systems such as the World Wide Web, protein interactions, and citations of scientific articles, trying to understand the structure, dynamics, and revolutionary history of these systems. Huafeng Xie, Physics
Counter-Mapping Return is a participatory mapping project that studies the ways in which maps, plans and planning tools can be used to articulate the aggregate of social and physical considerations that are built-in to negotiations of space. An expropriated Palestinian village named Miska, served as a case study for the mapping exercises.Einat Manoff, Environmental Psychology
The Healthy CUNY Initiative, an effort by students, faculty and staff to make CUNY the healthiest urban campus in the US, is holding the CUNY Fights the Fizz Counter-Advertising Contest, which is inviting students to design campaigns to educate the CUNY community about the harmful health effects of soda and help end Big Soda’s targeting of young soda drinkers.Amy Kwan, Public Health
To what extent can a website nourish a field of study? In 2010 The Mellon Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies took shape at the Graduate Center with the purpose of fostering dialogue "among humanists and scientists" regarding the philosophical, sociological and ethical debates that surround current scientific research. This NML project aims to turn the Committee's current website into an interactive, resource-rich hub for all interested scholars. Erin Glass, English
The Digital Anthologist is a tool in development that facilitates storage, editing, and classification of materials on the web. In the spirit of "folksonomy," this digital anthologizing tool will function as another way for web users to curate online, in ways that tag back to print conventions like the Table of Contents but also utilize web conventions such as linking and tagging.Chris Leary, English
Project Goals: Fine tune web architecture and underlying pedagogy for undergraduate wiki-based, inquiry-driven digital humanities course that blends online collaborative commenting on texts with live weekly seminar discussions. Engage students in multicultural history of classical world(s) by turning every document into a conversation. Create enriched learning experience where the syllabus becomes just the starting point on an open-ended collaborative journey. Andrew Lynch, Liberal Studies
This project will result in a series of interconnected digital maps detailing the spread of ideas, techniques, and shared passions amongst the most influential New York-based "downtown" theatre-, dance-, and performance art-makers, to show how New York’s built environment affects artistic ideas, and how the artists’ social milieu is meaningful and instructive to their work.Jake Hooker, Theater
Establishing Position is a web-based platform that explores the experiences of sexual-minority athletes within the context of mainstream and gay-identified sport. Stephanie M. Anderson, Critical Social Personality
Extreme Makeover: Producing Extreme Homes Reproducing Ideal Citizens examines the reality television program Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (EMHE). Using audio recordings from interviews while on the set of the show, I will produce an audio documentary that discusses how EMHE, along with their corporate sponsors, attempts to reinvent a particular kind of person — a middle class, do-it-yourself, patriotic citizen. Bree Kessler, Environmental Psychology
This project focuses on the influence of the 1970s fiscal crisis on the places of performance, the perception of neighborhoods as theatre districts, and the phenomenon of government intervention in both of these elements. Digital mapping visualizes the changes in the geo-cultural landscape, especially the movement of "downtown theatre" from the West to the East Village, and the accompanying alterations to the built environment and neighborhood demographics.Hillary Miller, Theatre
This project combines ongoing fieldwork on hacker spaces in the US and Germany, web-based materials posted by individual hacker collectives, and links to academic papers on related phenomena. By collecting these resources on a single website, it will present a global picture and make it accessible to both academics and people in the movement, while situating the hacker space movement in a larger social movement perspective.Rose White, Sociology
This project seeks to convey the history of "chicha," a fermented corn beverage of pre-Columbian origins, in Bogotá. It includes the creation of a comic book narrative that takes the reader through one thousand years of "the culture of chicha" and an accessible website that will reach large sectors of the public in many parts of the world. Igor Rodriguez, Anthropology
This project examines an ongoing land conflict in the small town of Caledonia, Ontario, Canada. The conflict centers on land that was granted to the Six Nations Confederacy in 1784. Today, the Canadian government and the Six Nations Confederacy both make vastly different claims regarding the ownership of this land. Using GIS mapping techniques, Flash software, and database methodology, this project provides an online, interactive exploration of this conflict. Shana Siegel, Sociology
In The Lost Museum, intrepid visitors can explore a virtual reconstruction of legendary showman P. T. Barnum's American Museum and investigate the mystery of who burned down this NYC landmark in 1865. Educators, students, and history enthusiasts can explore a rich archive of historical documents and present-day scholarship that reveals the marvels and scandals surrounding Barnum and his museum, as well as the social, political, and cultural history of the mid-nineteenth century city.American Social History Project, Center for Media and Learning
The Media2Politic Project is a sociocultural experiment which will attempt to make correlations between images and values in contemporary society. This project asks the question, given a cachet of images and a cachet of value-laden words, will demographic patterns emerge if respondents are asked to connect the images with the words that most describe them?Stephanie Jeanjean, Art History
Combining oral history and new media, this website is part of Beth Counihan's English dissertation (completed 2005) that investigates literacy development among participants in a lower Manhattan senior center. Via online exhibits, two participants in a memoir writing workshop at Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town learned to use the Internet and shared their experiences of life in New York from 1939 to the presentBeth Counihan, English
Hope Hartman, City College and Graduate Center professor of Instructional Psychology, is creating a MultiUser Virtual Environment (MUVE) on theories of educational psychology. This "metaenvironment" will consist of 3-D rooms with interactivity and animations to illustrate theories and help learners experience them as a way of learning about them.Hope Hartman, Educational Psychology
The Musical World Map is an interactive web-based application in development that enables users to navigate the world map while listening to the music of the country or city associated with a particular location. This teaching tool will also explore audio boundaries as opposed to actual national borders and provide contextual documents and images to supplement the music application.Ozan Aksoy, Ethnomusicology
Many social service programs for dispossessed populations are underutilized because potential clients are unaware of numerous available resources. This project aims to provide a comprehensive listing of city organizations, including adult and youth homeless organizations, free health clinics, detoxification and substance abuse treatment programs, soup kitchens, and mental health services. Marcos Tejada, Sociology
Using digital recording technology to generate a group of poems as an audio-book, this project will attend to, insist upon and preserve the profundity of the everyday utterance. It aims to fabricate a world that parallels the ordinary space of everyday activity and its language events, reassembling that space as a new architectural sound-object.Miriam Atkin, English
Four high school students from Benjamin Banneker Academy for Community Development in Brooklyn are partnering with graduate students on this research project to utilize digital video production as a research methodology. It examines attitudes regarding recent renovations to the Brooklyn Children's Museum and will engage young people in understanding how their peers understand and interact in a museum environment.Askia Egashira, Environmental Psychology
Web 2.0 applications and patient participation in creating medical knowledge are facilitating significant changes in the political culture of health care. While industry and media laud this trend, some academics argue that patients take on too great a burden. The voice of the average patient is underrepresented in this debate. This project seeks to fill that gap through a study on blogs written by women with Multiple Sclerosis as sites of connection to others and engagement with the medical establishment.Collette Sosnowy, Environmental Psychology
This online resource broadens our understanding of religious theatre and performance by studying groups that are generally labeled as "religious cults." The study of "New Religious Movements" (NRM) reveals the diversity of religious performances, offering resources useful to scholars in a range of disciplines. Edmund B. Lingan, Art History
This project is an analysis of 300 images of war-affected youths in Iraq and Afghanistan from the websites of four international humanitarian organizations. Interviews will be conducted with key informants from these organizations about the production of the images on their websites.Aida Izadpanah, Environmental Psychology
Part of a larger Web-based project on nineteenth-century photography and history in Brazil, this project focuses on the work of the Brazilian photographer Marc Ferrez and, more specifically, on his photographs of Rio de Janeiro between 1860 and 1910. Fernando Azevedo, Art History
Phylo explores the origins of contemporary philosophy by looking at historical relationships between individuals, institutions, and ideas. These relationships are contained in a user-maintained database and rendered using data visualization tools. In fall 2009, Phylo launched a user-annotated catalog of job openings in academic philosophy that enables job seekers to share and gain information about the market.David Morrow and Chris Alan Sula, Philosophy
This research and CD-ROM project examines the production and performance of "embodied knowledges"—delineating how dance educators provoke critical consciousness through African-derived dance. The data collected for Political Movements, including digital video footage and photographs of dance performances, were an integral part of this dissertation.Rosemarie A. Roberts, Social-Personality Psychology
Myths of Nature Portrayed in Post WWII National Geographic Car Ads is a study that utilizes a timeline and archive to visually analyze, thematically group, and present the changing portrayals and narratives of of nature found in National Geographic car advertisements. Shawndel N. Fraser, Environmental Psychology
Renegade Poetic America will provide a comprehensive database, resource center, and digital exhibition for the letters of two American poets, Edward Dorn and Amiri Baraka. With integrated annotations, links to sound, image, and word, and dynamic timelines, this website will offer an in-depth look at complicated American lives, cultures, and histories. Claudia Pisano, English
Sociology student Laura Fantone (completed 2005) produced this documentary on women and resistance in Tuscany, from World War Two to the present. Four self-described "regular women" connect their everyday lives to recent Italian history, from the resistance to fascism, to the feminist movement, to freedom of speech and contemporary global wars. Laura Fantone, Sociology
Roots was produced by Art History student Leeann Pomplas-Bruening at the New Media Lab for a major NYC financial institution. The 3D visualization of the stock market was used as part of a multimedia installation at the institution's training headquarters.Leeann Pomplas-Breuning, Art History
Scientists in all disciplines have created thousands of still images and animations on computers. There also are thousands of uncompiled scientific photographs, films, audio files, and software applications. John Jay College Mathematics instructor Gary Welz aims to create an online digital library for the storage and distribution of rich media for scientific professionals. Gary Welz, Mathematics
Working across disciplines with a "Neo-Baroque" conception of inter-arts unity, Music Composition student Peter Kirn develops techniques for integrating physical computing, digital multimedia, and interactive performance. Building on music as the formal ordering of events in time, he creates a toolkit of approaches to media and performance.Peter Kirn, Music Composition
This web exhibit lets visitors view the work of architect Julio Vilamajó's landmark buildings in 1930s and 1940s Montevideo, Uruguay.Elizabeth A. Watson, Art History
Physics student Lei Zhou uses cellular automata techniques and 3D animations and simulations to depict and comprehend gridlock and to find possible strategies to ameliorate this urban traffic problem. Lei Zhou, Physics
Urban Assignment revolves around the ways in which urban analytic tools and available technologies are capable of integrating and communicating abrupt changes in urban condition. This project explores the ways in which these technologies can be used in a 'bottom-up' manner (information to be fed by community networks and individuals) rather than strictly through 'top down' mechanisms of various authorities.Einat Manoff, Environmental Psychology
This project begins with community supported agriculture (CSA) and goes on to focus on the many alternative food networks (AFNs) urban residents create and seek out to meet their dietary needs and culinary interests. It provides a resource for people interested in the many facets of urban food from aesthetic experiences to social and environmental justice issues. It includes material on the scholarly and policy implications of urban food systems. Christine Caruso, Environmental Psychology
The history of New York City from Dutch settlement to the present is the focus of this website that combines informative exhibits, incisive primary documents, interactive graphics, and educational curricula to uncover the many and varied layers of the city's past. Working with the collection of the Seymour B. Durst Old York Library and Reading Room, two GC History students produce this website, which has become a favorite on-line source for NYC history.American Social History Project, Center for Media and Learning
The Virtual Poetry Project is an online journal that showcases the ways contemporary poetry overcomes the limitations of the written text. Connecting artists and scholars around the world through web 2.0 technologies, this project will build a web of resources and a network of people interested in these new forms of experimental poetry.Marcos Wasem, Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages
High-temperature superconducting materials allow for resistanceless flow of electricity below a certain temperature and have many practical applications in power generation and transmission, medical devices, communications, and computers. Incorporated into Yuri Artemov's Physics dissertation (completed 2005), 3D animations and visualizations of the tornado-like swirl of electrons illuminate the nature of superconductors and ways to improve their construction.Yuri Artemov, Physics
At certain frequencies, rhythm and pitch become one. It is possible to associate light and sound in similar ways. This project explores dialogues across the boundary between light and sound, art and music, in the spaces between performers. Rob Collins, Music Composition
