Partners
BBC Information & Archives, UK
MATRIX, Michigan State University, USA
Academic Technologies, Northwestern University, USA
Technology Manager, Projects: Richard Wright
Richard Wright was educated at the University of Michigan, USA and University of Southampton, UK. Degrees: BSc Engineering Science 1967, MA Computer Science 1972, and Ph D in Digital Signal Processing (Speech Synthesis) 1988. He worked in acoustics, speech and signal processing for US and UK Government research laboratories (1968-76), University College London (1976-80; Research Fellow) and Royal National Institute for the Deaf (1980-90; Senior Scientist). He was Chief Designer, Cirrus Research 1990-94 (acoustical and audiometric instrumentation). He has been with BBC Information & Archives since 1994.
BBC Information & Archives work closely with the JISC audiovisual digitisation projects (BUFVC-ITN and British Library Sound Archive), and have participated in DELOS. The BBC is running its own major in-house audiovisual digitisation project (covering several hundred thousand hours of material).
MATRIX, Michigan State University
Principal Investigator: Mark Kornbluh
Mark Lawrence Kornbluh is Director of MATRIX and Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. Mark Kornbluh is also the principal investigator on a wide range of grant-funded research and educational projects, and the Executive Director of H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine. He has spoken at conferences around the world on a wide range of digital humanities issues, and has served as an advisor and/or evaluator for several funding agencies on digital projects.
Project Manager: Dean Rehberger
Dean Rehberger is an Associate Director of MATRIX and also Associate Professor in the department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures at MSU. Dean specializes in using online technologies and developing educational resources for the World Wide Web. He has run numerous faculty technology and workshops and given presentations for educators and cultural heritage workers from local, national and international audiences.
Dean oversees MATRIX project planning, research and development, coordinating many of the grant-funded projects for the Center. His primary areas of research include: information design and architecture; digital libraries, museums and archives; Internet technologies in the classroom; and hybrid learning environments.
Michael Fegan: Systems Architect
Michael Fegan was the Chief Information Officer at MATRIX. Michael developed some of Matrix’s most successful online projects (e.g. Historical Voices) and was also one of the key architects of the MATRIXREPOS) and MediaMatrix – an online application for segmenting and annotating streaming media – more information on MediaMatrix is available in the Audio Annotation section of this site. Michael was involved in training and development across the United States, Africa, and Scotland on the digitization and delivery of online multimedia objects. We respected Mike’s professional contribution and valued the friendship he showed us. We were deeply shocked by his premature death in 2007.
Dennis Boone: Systems Architect
Dennis joined MATRIX/H-Net in June of 1998. His duties include system administration for many of the systems which make up the MATRIX computing environment, trying to encourage system security, resource planning, technical support for grant proposal writing, and doing web and database development.
Previously, Dennis was employed by the Network for Excellence in Manufacturing Online doing system administration and bibliographic database development, and at the MSU Computer Laboratory running the campus web server, and managing the MSU LISTSERV. Dennis’ outside interests include amateur radio, photography, and genealogy, and he can sometimes be found lighting community theatre productions at Riverwalk Theatre in Lansing.
Torger Bjornrud; Brandon Furtwangler and Steven Furtwangler: Programming
Academic Technologies, Northwestern University
Principal Investigator: Jerry Goldman
Jerry Goldman heads the OYEZ Project, a multimedia relational database devoted to the United States Supreme Court . With a major grant from the National Science Foundation, Goldman is working with collaborators in linguistics, psychology, computer science and political science to create a complete archive of 50 years of Supreme Court audio.
Jerry Goldman has been a several-time recipient of software awards from the American Political Science Association, including the 2005 APSA Best Instructional Website Award for IDEAlog, an application to analyze political values (created with Professor Kenneth Janda) . He is also a recipient of the 1997 EDUCOM Medal and the 1998 Silver Gavel Award of the American Bar Association for improving public understanding of law. In 2005, the Department awarded him the Farrell Teaching Prize for his long commitment to undergraduate teaching and advising.
Bob Taylor: Director – Academic Technologies
Bob Taylor, of Northwestern University, is Director of Academic Technologies. Bob’s role is to support Northwestern faculty in the implementation and adaptation of technology towards instructional and research goals, providing training and one-on-one consulting to faculty members and managing the University’s electronic classrooms and computer lab/classroom facilities.
Bill Parod: Systems Architect
Bill Parod is Architect for Scholarly Technologies within Academic Technologies at Northwestern University. He has been involved in the design and implementation of digital library projects for many years. Recent projects include Vesalius’ Fabrica, the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive, and the Chicago Homer.
Bill also worked on a Northwestern University collaboration with The Chicago Historical Society and The Newberry Library for Encyclopedia of Chicago and a suite of text analysis tools called WordHoard. Bill’s interests include repository interoperability and reuse through behavior definition, discovery, and access.
Jonathan Smith: Learning Architect
Jonathan Smith is Distance Learning Architect in the Academic Technologies department and the main developer of the audio annotation tool Project Pad. Jonathan has more than twenty years experience designing and developing telecommunications and educational software. Prior to starting at Northwestern, he was principal engineer at Cognitive Arts Inc where he worked on web-based courses for IBM, HP, State Farm, and Harvard Business School. At Avid technology, Jonathan was technical lead for the development of the 3.0 Macintosh version of Elastic Reality, a program for warping, morphing, and compositing video used in a number of feature films.
With a background in computer science, educational computing, and socio-cultural geography, Jonathan is interested in building systems that will enable instructors to provide high quality teaching on-line. He hopes his own enthusiasm and love of learning is reflected in the systems he designs and builds.
Steve Cohen, Senior Learning Technologist
Steve Cohen works as our Project Evaluator. Until recently, Steve was Senior Learning Technologist at Tufts University, Massachusetts, USA, where he developed a broad range of technologies to improve learning across fields as diverse as veterinary anaesthesiology, statistics, and criminal justice. Steve helped develop a pedagogical method for sharing courses and curriculum, between the US and African nations.
