Winter 2011 | Volume 91, Number 2

UpFront
Excerpts, Exhibits, Explorations, Ephemera
Shadows and Light | Over There but Still Here | Diet for a Small Planet | Bookshelf

UpFront
News, Notables, Innovations
Manifesting Innovation | Written in the Stars | Scholarship in the Digital Age | In Brief
Taking Flight | The Best . . . | PROFile: Howard Davis | Around The Block | On the Air

Shadows and Light
In a vigorous cultural flowering, early twentieth-century immigrant Japanese photographers on the West Coast were remarkably successful in applying to their images an aesthetic brought from their homeland—decorative, suggestive, and poetic. Unfortunately, their success was all too brief, cut short by the events following the attack on Pearl Harbor, including internment and the confiscation of their cameras. The little-known history and art of the Seattle Camera Club is explored by coauthor Nicolette Bromberg, MA ’74, MFA ’76, in Shadows of a Fleeting World (University of Washington Press, 2011), excerpted below.

 

My life as a historian has brought me vivid reminders of how partial is the remaining evidence of the whole human past, how casual and how accidental is the survival of its relics.

— Daniel J. Boorstin, Hidden History: Exploring Our Secret Past (1987)

* * *

During the 1920s, many Japanese immigrants on the West Coast found a successful way to both express themselves and to share in the culture of the West by making and exhibiting Pictorial art photography. So many of them were making photographs that they came together to form amateur camera clubs to share their love of the medium. They were amazingly successful. The photographs these immigrant photographers produced were exhibited in both national and international competitions and were included in nearly every book and magazine of popular photography. The artists were so talented and prolific that The American Annual of Photography noted in 1928 that, in various exhibitions, there had been “762 prints hung that were by Japanese photographers in the three [Pacific coast] states in contrast to 237 by non-Japanese photographers from the same region.” These were photographers who, in the words of the editor of the 1928 American Annual of Photography, “put a lasting mark on photography in this country, the repercussions of which are echoing throughout the world.”

Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, in particular, had large and active camera clubs regularly producing and exhibiting work—yet a few decades later, most of this photography was lost, hidden away, or destroyed. Regrettably, most of the achievements of these enthusiastic and talented Japanese camera club members faded into obscurity, in part hastened by World War II and the internment of West Coast Japanese American citizens. After the war and for many decades later, their work was relatively unknown, as were their achievements. . . .

But in the 1920s, Pictorial photography was a perfect fit for the Seattle Camera Club’s Japanese Americans, with its emphasis on nature and emotion and presenting the photograph as art. It has been suggested that, for these immigrants, photography was a convenient way of maintaining their cultural heritage of Japanese arts and aesthetics. They came from a culture that prized art and design in daily life. As Boye De Mente noted in Elements of Japanese Design, “There is no other culture in which design and quality have played such a significant role in the day-to-day life of the people.”

. . . Pictorialism has been defined as “the conscious attempt to turn beautiful objects and experiences into beautiful images.” This was the avant-garde style of its time that developed as photographers tried to gain acceptance of photography as an art form in the early part of the twentieth century. It often involved darkroom manipulation to make the work look more like “art.” However, by the time the Japanese photographers came to it, the emphasis had changed to less manipulation and more expression; and many of them did not print their own work or do darkroom manipulation. Their ideas were visualized in the camera rather than in the darkroom. They took the Pictorial ideas of expression of beauty and emotion and blended it with characteristic elements of Japanese art—use of patterns, flat surfaces, and lack of perspective. These Japanese American photographers were not seeking to be on the cutting edge of photography but found that the emotional and personal nature of Pictorial photography suited what they wanted to express about the world in their art. Indeed, by the 1920s, the Modernist “straight” photography movement, with its emphasis on sharp, clear forms and direct documentation of the subject, was already on its way to overshadowing Pictorialism.

[Key camera club figure Dr. Kyo] Koike discussed his ideas on why he saw Pictorial photography as an art in “Why I Am a Pictorial Photographer,” published in the September 1928 issue of Photo-Era:

“Some think pictorial photography is not a species of art; but I hold another view. Some compare photography with painting pictures; but I think pictorial photography has its own standing, somewhat different from that of painting . . . I read a few photographic books and magazines to learn something about compositions; but it is certain my idea is based on Oriental tendency, much influenced by the Japanese literature and pictures to which I am accustomed. I understand Japanese poems; and I think pictorial photography should not be an imitation of paintings, but it should contain a feeling similar to that of poems.”

In “The Characteristics of Japanese Art,” written by Hoshin Kuroda and translated by Koike, the author writes that while Western art focuses on “human life,” nature is more often the subject of Japanese art. The Japanese artist uses nature in an “idealistic” rather than realistic way: “Accordingly, the Japanese picture is not a real sketch, but is an ideal image of nature.”
. . . Koike explained [in his “Pictorial Photography from a Japanese Standpoint” that to] “understand Japanese art, therefore you must shut your eyes and go far away to the slumber land where imagination governs the whole.” Koike saw himself as bringing the poetic “reverberation” from his Japanese culture together with the Western ideas of photography as an art to create his artistic sensibility.

Koike’s work was intimate and subtle poetry, whether it was a photograph of a muddy track through the woods or a tree in the snow that hinted of the soft sound of snow falling. His images are quiet and thoughtful, with the slightly soft focus and matt-surface photographic paper helping to make them experiences rather than documents. It was said of Koike’s work, “Our eyes are soothed by the gentle textural softness of snow; a shimmering surface of water becomes a moment of experience rather than a vision . . . for him photography was not self expression of ego, but it was an expression of a desire to gain quietude in himself, a way to convey the echo of his inner calling.” . . .

The legacy of Japanese culture meant that a sense of harmony was important in these Japanese Americans’ work and that the decorative styles of bold shapes and flat, two-dimensional patterns and shadows were also common characteristics. The name of the Seattle Camera Club’s journal, Notan, and the Japanese idea of this term was a key part of their work. Arthur Wesley Dow defined this as “darks and lights in harmonic relations,” which for the Pictorial photographer was the use of the negative space as a design element where the picture space maintains a balance between the dark and light elements. Koike explained in an article about the club in the November 13, 1925, Photo-Era, “We Japanese must, of course, work within the limit of Japanese ideas, and our art is decorative, suggestive and poetic. . . . Most of us have still to learn how to fill the picture space with a pleasing combination of light and shade, and telling but little. Suggest a story that fills our picture space with meaning, and with pleasure to the beholder. If one may add to this a ‘telling’ placement of light and dark, perhaps that is as near as I can get to what I have in mind as Notan.”

The Seattle Camera Club members not only loved photography, they also loved their adopted city. Seattle was a good place for creative Japanese immigrants who were interested in Pictorial photography. There was a large Japanese community for support and there were physical similarities to Japan in the landscape. Mount Rainier towers over the city and Mount Saint Helens farther south, then with its perfect ice-cream cone shape, was commonly called the Mount Fuji of the West.

Over There but Still Here
Almost fifty years after serving as a Marine Corps helicopter pilot in the early years of America’s involvement in Vietnam, Ken Babbs published a story set in that time and place titled Who Shot the Water Buffalo: A Novel. In this excerpt, the protagonist does what soldiers have done for as long as soldiers have been fighting wars—reflect on being away from home and do what they can to come to terms with their dangerous, boring, chaotic, and sometimes horrific predicament. Having come to campus in grand style earlier this year aboard the latest incarnation of the Merry Prankster’s famed psychedelic bus Further, Babbs read from his book to an audience of students and community members.

 

The southwest monsoon simmers to a close. Three or four days of steady rain recede to afternoon showers of hard and fast duration. The nights are clear and a breeze rustles the tent flaps, but not enough to ward off the mosquitos. The morning sun bakes the runway and the water from yesterday’s rain steams and dries. By noon a layer of wispy clouds boils in off the ocean and the muggy heat is at its worst.

Another month and the showers will end. The rice paddies will dry, the ground will be cracked and peeling, with dust rising and swirling on the fingertips of the wind. The hot season will be at its zenith and, along with the temperature, the war in the Delta will heat up.

Action and situation are muddled and confused, like a bowl of noodles. Politics and war. Impossible to move in one direction without a corresponding move in the other. What we get out of this depends on what we go in looking for. For some it is a medal, a badge of glory signifying so many combat missions. For others an opportunity to shoot up the countryside, let off pent-up frustrations.

In Washington it is a study of new tactics and weapons. In Saigon, an accumulation of American money and supplies. At an outpost in the boonies, it’s beer, C-rations and rice, dropped from the skies by a green whirley-bladed bird, huge and splendid with its tricks and capers, delightful to watch and touch, particularly the amazing giants who make it perform.

Much of it gives us a feeling of satisfaction. Hauling food and supplies to isolated outposts. Evacuating wounded to the comfort and safety of a hospital. And we feel better knowing we’re not the complete barbarians Hanoi Hannah makes us out to be. Still, we’re reluctant to trust the villagers, the families who are trying to keep their homes together, plant and harvest their crops, live a peaceful life.

You, who write to us, can you understand, does this make sense? Your letters are like messages from another planet. Does someone sitting in an office crank them out to perpetuate an American myth? A central morale building where families and towns and friends are invented and their activities chronicled? A vacation is planned—was it ever completed? Baby has a fever. Does the fever continue? Time stops and remains stationary until the next letter arrives, and, like a freight train on a siding, the pace picks up and the train jogs ahead to the next switch where it sits until prodded forward again.

Hello there. I send my answer into the void. Hello there. I, too, am an American. I am over here but still one of you. When you read this do you know that I am in the jungle, mingling with small brown people, passing out C-ration candy to their kids? Do I have depth, voice, body, a kiss? Or am I a picture hung on the wall, a projection on a piece of paper?

I write Rosey that I will comb the hills and the markets, peer into musty corners with my trusty jeweler’s eyepiece screwed into my left farsighted eye, and search for the perfect piece of jade, the solitary gem, the translucent marvel, the only stone remaining in Vietnam that will fit into the final fine bracelet to emerge from the Orient. I hope it makes her happy.

The evening shower curtains down another Vietnamese sunset with its full Roy G Biv spectrum beaming through moisturized prisms. The wind whips the rain water under the tent flaps and skims a muddy sheen over the floor.

I feel better having talked to you. We will chat again. You are so many and we are so few. Who are the fortunate ones? I desire answers. Adiós, hasta luego.

Diet for a Small Planet
Dinner salad or double-bacon cheeseburger? When dieting, some choices are obvious. But when it comes to cutting back on the amount of vital and scarce resources we, as a society, consume, the options are as numerous as the tradeoffs are complicated. Oregonians voiced their opinions about such issues in a survey, “How Much Is Enough? Examining the Public’s Beliefs about Consumption,” conducted by Ezra Markowitz, MS ’08, and Tom Bowerman ’69. An overview of the results is presented below in an article by Ronald Bailey titled “Deconsumption Versus Dematerialization: How to Protect the Environment by Doing More with Less,” published in Reason magazine and on Reason.com.

 

“How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement: We’d all be better off if we consumed less.” That’s a survey item reported in a new study by University of Oregon researcher Ezra Markowitz and Tom Bowerman of the Eugene, Oregon-based environmental polling and policy shop, PolicyInteractive. Their study, “How Much Is Enough? Examining the Public’s Beliefs about Consumption,” is in the [February 5, 2011] issue of the journal Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy.

In five polls of Oregonians and one national survey, they find 74 to 80 percent of respondents “support reducing consumption and believe doing so would improve societal and individual well-being.” Markowitz and Bowerman interpret their poll results as challenging “conventional wisdom about our collective and never-ending need for consumption of material goods.” Armed with these poll results, they hope to persuade policymakers that Americans are ready to “deconsume” for the sake of the environment, cutting back purchases of material goods, and especially reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases.

Digging deeper in one poll, Markowitz and Bowerman found that 84 percent agreed that cutting consumption would “be better for the Earth,” 67 percent agreed that we would then have more time to spend with family and friends, and 84 percent believed lowering consumption would lead to greater self-reliance. But talk is cheap, especially when answering pollsters’ questions. So the researchers sensibly probed further with a poll that asked respondents to choose among several different public policy proposals aimed at cutting consumption. It’s worth going through their results.

The Oregonians polled, it turns out, are not all that eager to tax their own consumption. Majorities were against a luxury tax on houses bigger than 2,500 square feet or costing more than $300,000 (62 percent opposed); a tax on houses bigger than 5,000 square feet and costing $500,000 (50 percent opposed); a 10 cent per gallon gasoline tax (63 percent opposed); a program to tax energy when its price is low and invest the funds in conservation (64 percent opposed); charging a one cent fee for each kilowatt hour consumed once a household consumes $100 of energy in a month (71 percent opposed); a luxury fee on second homes (56 percent opposed); a $1,000 new vehicle tax on cars that get fewer than 25 miles per gallon (62 percent opposed); and a one cent per mile carbon tax on airplane travel (58 percent opposed).

These results mirror similar findings in a June 2010 national poll by the Institute for Energy Research, which found that 70 percent of respondents opposed any new energy taxes aimed at reducing dependence on foreign oil or reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The same poll found that 61 percent opposed any increase in gasoline taxes. In another politically liberal state, Massachusetts, a January 2010 poll asked about residents’ support for the Cape Wind energy project. The pollsters found that “while 42 percent of respondents are less likely to support the Cape Wind project if their bill increased by $50 per year, this percentage increases to 67 percent at the $100 increase per year threshold and to 78 percent at the $150 increase per year threshold.”

Markowitz and Bowerman found that Oregonians were, however, happy to cut the consumption of the rich, favoring a 5 percent luxury tax on private yachts, airplanes, and motor homes (61 percent for). In addition, 76 percent are for utility rates structured so that the per unit charge goes up with increased energy consumption; 75 percent approve of making energy efficiency standards on new buildings stricter, and 57 percent favor boosting automobile fuel efficiency standards.

Taking into account the fact that their poll respondents don’t seem much interested in policies aimed at encouraging deconsumption, Markowitz and Bowerman mildly observe that other policy avenues besides taxing consumption might be more fruitfully pursued. They suggest publicity campaigns. “If consuming less of nonessential goods and services is beneficial or necessary for long-term survival of our species, then it seems it would be prudent to publicize the widely held ‘consume less’ disposition,” they write. They hope that if people knew that their neighbors favored deconsumption, a cultural shift in attitudes would lead to lower consumption.

UpFront
News, Notables, Innovations

PRODUCT DESIGN
Manifesting Innovation
Product design students build a better bike.

 

It’s five o’clock, and the team looks worried. Six product design students and two professors stand in a pothole-pocked parking lot in industrial northwest Portland, anxiously straining to make out the features of each cyclist who appears in the distance. Is that him? Is that? Nope.

Nine hours ago, Scott Warneke, the seventh member of their team, left Portland to complete the fifty-one-mile Oregon Manifest Field Test, riding the hand-built bicycle University students have labored for six months to conceptualize, refine, and fabricate. One by one, two dozen other contestants have pedaled their entries across the finish line, “utility bicycles” of all colors and shapes created by professional industrial designers, craft bike builders, and student teams from design schools across the country. But the minutes pass, and there’s still no sign of Scott. The University team looks at each other. A few fat drops of rain splatter the pavement. Someone says it out loud: “Where is he?”

Oregon Manifest, a Portland nonprofit organization, dedicated its 2011 Constructor’s Design Challenge to advancing the art and craft of the utility bicycle, and called on the country’s top builders and designers to create approachable, adaptable, human-propelled car alternatives. Each Design Challenge utility bike would be designed to safely and comfortably carry both rider and cargo, and would feature an antitheft system, fenders, lights, and a sturdy kickstand to facilitate loading or unloading. Finally, to ensure all that design flash was backed up by plenty of substance, the bikes would be subjected to a rigorous field test, replete with gravel, dirt roads, puddles, traffic, and hills.

Creating the University’s answer to this challenge was a project that consumed the passions of a total of nineteen product design students over two terms. Their efforts were guided by a pair of professors who also happen to be professional industrial designers at well-respected crucibles of innovation: Christian Freissler of Ziba Design and James Molyneux of Nike’s Innovation Kitchen. After a spring term spent researching and designing four prototype bikes, the summer team refined that “sea of ideas” into one ideal vehicle, engineered to meet the needs of any university student. The Campus Bike would be flexible, user-friendly, customizable, and almost completely maintenance-free, thanks to enclosed gears, a belt drive system that eliminates the grease and potential snags of a traditional bike chain, and airless tires filled with a high-density foam. No more greasy jean cuffs, no more squeaking gears, no more flat tires. With bike guru Dave Levy of Portland’s Ti Cycles acting as mentor (and generously providing use of his workshop), the summer team built their bike from the ground up, doing every aspect of the construction themselves except the welding. As none of the students had ever built a bike before, countless new skills had to be acquired, and quickly. But their fresh, user-oriented approach also resulted in a finished product that’s a bit unlike any bike you’ve ever seen.

On the first morning of the competition, thirty-four gleaming bicycles are wheeled into the atrium of Pacific Northwest College of Art for formal judging. A hubbub of builders, designers, and students wander up and down the row of bikes, exclaiming over the impeccable craftsmanship on display. Perched near the end of the long row, the completed Campus Bike looks both sturdy and nimble, with its bright green accents, angular frame, and small tires setting it instantly apart from the other bikes. The students proudly answer questions and demonstrate their creation’s modular cargo rack, built-in storage compartment, and retractable bungee system. They explain how the badges that cover the modular system’s attachment points when not in use can be customized (theirs feature the Oregon mascot and a stylized version of the leaping White Stag), how the green pedals, seat, handlebars, and frame inserts can be produced in any school’s colors and easily interchanged to create a custom look. And they show off the bike’s retractable fenders, which roll up like a window shade when not in use. Everyone’s nuts for those fenders: by noon, photos of the bike are already making a splash on cycling and design blogs around the world.

At their presentation to the panel of four judges, the team demonstrates how their interpretation of “utility”—that is, whatever a university student needs right now—is answered by the Campus Bike. They show how quickly and easily the bike can go from hauling groceries to carrying a student’s morning coffee to being optimized for rainy weather. They hand the judges the waterproof map of Eugene that folds into the perfect shape for storage in the bike’s locking compartment. And as a grand finale, the presentation ends with a demonstration of how, with the push of a button, the spring-loaded kickstand slides up and into the hollow frame of the bike, out of sight and out of the way. The judges’ eyes widen. “Let’s see that kickstand again,” someone says.

Panel judge Tinker Hatfield ’77, Nike’s vice president of innovation design and special projects, was greatly impressed by his first look at the students’ bicycle. “I really felt like they had an inordinate amount of great ideas,” he says. “[Their] ideas, execution, and presentation . . . all together, it was extremely impressive. So I’m proud to be a Duck right now.” He grins. “As usual.”

But unlike most University product design classes, where the presentation of a prototype marks the finish line, one large and looming obstacle still lay ahead for the Campus Bike team. Would their bike (and its engine, Scott) stand up to the rigors of the field test? The next evening, waiting anxiously at the finish line, they still weren’t certain.

Finally, a little after 6:00 p.m., Scott rounds the last corner and is greeted by the cheers of his team, their fellow bike builders, and a crowd of local cycling enthusiasts. Scott glides into the final checkpoint, climbs off the bike, and gratefully hugs his teammates. He’s exhausted and dehydrated, but both he and the bike finished the course intact.

At the awards ceremony, while each of the winning bicycles in the professionals’ category generated appreciative oohs and applause for their astounding elegance and craftsmanship, the student category’s champion created a special stir in the audience. One voice in the crowd managed to sum it all up as the University’s award-winning bicycle was held up for all to admire: “Oh, that’s cool.”

—Mindy Moreland, MS ’08

PHYSICS
Written in the Stars
Range-riding shepherd turned astrophysicist

 

Perhaps in another universe, one of the infinitude predicted by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, Kathy Hadley, MS ’05, PhD ’11, never even glimpsed that fateful poster in a Yakima employment office announcing an opening for a part-time Halloween pumpkin face-painter, a poster that, in this universe, our universe, somehow led her—through a series of Rube Goldbergian actions and reactions, causes and effects—to a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from the University of Oregon.

In that parallel universe, Hadley might have never suffered the motorcycle accident that seriously injured her leg, rendering impossible her former peripatetic existence.

In that universe, she might still be working as a humble shepherd throughout the western United States, moving with her herd, adjusting to the seasons, communing with the land.

“It’s so amazing when you’re on a mountain, looking at the night sky,” says this Hadley, our Hadley, as she reminisces about her itinerant former life from the lookout of her office in the physics department on the fourth floor of Willamette Hall. “It’s like you’re discovering it for the first time. It’s breathtaking.”

Maybe her long-ago late-night stargazing was the inciting event that put her on a path toward theoretical physics. Imagine if, in that other universe, the glittering field of stars had instead been concealed by thick cloud cover . . .

But who can say? Perhaps physics would have tracked her down in that universe as well, through a completely different series of unlikely events.

“It was as if physics chose me,” says Hadley, and her serene conviction on this matter makes one wonder if her career path wasn’t, in fact, written in the stars.

“I loved physics before I knew to call it physics. I remember being fascinated watching galaxy-like shapes form in the foam as I stirred a cup of hot chocolate.”

Hadley’s work explores the complex mechanisms of star birth and solar system formation: magnetohydrodynamics, to be inscrutably precise.

This is the process by which the universe comes to know itself: A molecular cloud in deep space condenses to give birth to a star, around which accretes a disc of dusty gas, rocks, and chemicals, out of which planets begin to agglomerate.

These planets orbit their central star in perfect lockstep—a docile flock.

Like most shepherds in the American West, Hadley and her husband, Jay, found themselves laid off during the late-autumn and winter months, when heavy snowfall transforms mountain passes into impasses. One October, in search of temporary work, she walked into a Yakima employment office, pored over the job openings, and felt dispirited.

“I knew how to track animals and find water—skills that don’t really transfer to the real world,” she says.

Then, a particular flier caught her eye: an artist was needed to paint faces on pumpkins for Halloween.

The equations of motion governing Hadley’s life quickly took shape after that:

“She could only nod or shake her head,” she says of the student. “She communicated letter by letter.”

Add a whole lot of compassion to the equation. Raise it to the power of patience.

Only in this universe.

“Physics is like boot camp,” says Hadley. “The decision to pursue it has to come from within. You have to love the journey.”

Despite the complexity of her work, it was the fundamental nature of physics that initially drew her into its fold—in particular, its reputation as being the most foundational of all the physical sciences. In studying star formation, she has tackled one of the most basic and esoteric of all physical processes, for stars are the hydrogen-powered furnaces wherein all the heavier elements of the periodic table are forged and distributed in supernova explosions. All is stardust, from the carbon atoms in a shepherd’s sun-scorched skin to the potassium atoms in a sheep’s fleece.

What could be more complex? What could be more fundamental?

“Physics is the ultimate story problem,” she says.

Hadley has searched for answers her whole life, scouring land and sky for her soul’s purpose. She left college in her twenties, and she and Jay herded sheep in the mountains and deserts of Idaho, Wyoming, and much of the rest of the American West for twenty-five years. Her daily routine, in those hardscrabble days: She and Jay would rise at dawn and spend their time corralling sheep, climbing mountains, and hiking for miles over rugged terrain and patches of deadfall.

“What could be better?” she says.

But the shepherding life wasn’t always romantic and beautiful, she says; sometimes it was romantic and harsh. The couple endured blizzards, thunderstorms, heat waves—Mother Nature at her most furious. Hadley frequently found herself face-to-face with fundamental forces of nature: rain, wind, bears. As far as life-paths go, it was a terrific fit.

“It was clean and pure and gave me a huge amount of time to think and find myself.”

And she grew to love and respect the sheep under her care. She would gaze at the clouds and landscape and ponder whatever it is one ponders when deep in nature and deep in thought; at the same time, her sheep stared at the ground and chewed their cud, each species ruminant in its own way.

She learned that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to herding sheep. In time, she developed different shepherding styles to suit the distinct personality of each herd.

“I recognized that they are conscious beings with different personalities,” she says. “Some wanted to be held, some wanted to be free, some wanted me to hold them as loosely as possible, giving as much free rein as possible without chasing.”

Now she teaches students at the UO and Lane Community College—and finds herself using shepherding principles when she leads her undergraduate physics classes.

“Each class has its own identity,” she says. “Students develop a feeling of community.”

Hadley trusts in her own pedagogical instincts, honed by twenty-five years in the wilderness. In one recent class, for instance, during a lecture on the complex behavior of molecules within a gas, she made the topic come alive by passing around a bag of 600 balloons of many colors to her students filling a large lecture hall. They proceeded to blow up the balloons, bind them in pairs, and bat them around in what looked like a crazy game of volleyball. In essence, they built a gas.

“It was beautiful,” says Hadley, smiling at the memory. “A big gas of spinning, colorful balloons. Students were standing, laughing, jumping. It was great.”

In another universe, perhaps this balloon demonstration never happened. But it is difficult to imagine Hadley, in any universe, not surrounded by scores of sentient beings—whether Homo sapiens, Ovis aries, or some other species—who look to her for guidance.

In this universe, though, the demo did occur. And there stood Hadley, the shepherd turned astrophysicist, at the head of the classroom, while all around her a multitude of shimmering orbs were breathed into existence, expanding, rising, and spinning, filling the room’s airspace with movement and color and sound, where just moments before there had been nothing at all.

— Eric R. Tucker, MS ’11

ARTS AND SCIENCES
Scholarship in the Digital Age
The world goes techno for academics too.

 

If digital scholars in the humanities had a rallying cry, it might be something like “Free access for all” or “Information liberation.”

But academics are more inclined to act than to protest, and in what is likely the quietest revolution you’ve never heard of, humanities scholars across the country, including at the UO, are employing digital tools and collaborating with library specialists and IT geeks to create new modes of conducting research and new ways of disseminating it to wider audiences.

David Wacks, the former chair of the UO Romance languages department, has described digital scholarship as “anything a humanities scholar does that is mediated digitally, especially when such mediation opens discussion beyond a small circle of academic specialists.”

At the UO these efforts are taking many forms. Doug Blandy, an associate dean at the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, is a team leader for a collaborative, online project among several American and Chinese universities called ChinaVine. The site www.chinavine.org educates users about Chinese folk art and was recently redesigned to incorporate links to social media sites as well as photo sharing, audio, and video platforms to make it easier for users to interact.

The earlier version of the website provided information but was “a one-sided conversation,” with few opportunities for visitors to get involved. “Now there are multiple modes of entry through which people will engage with the product,” Blandy says.

Fundamentally, digital scholarship heralds a new way of thinking about access to information, says Robert Long, poet and UO assistant director of faculty development. “It is about sharing information and breaking down institutional barriers,” he says. “It’s about making information freely available to anyone who has an Internet connection.”

Expanding access to scholarly work is a major push behind the creation of online, open-access academic journals. Traditionally, Long explains, print journals were the place for scholarly research in almost all humanities fields. They maintained respected peer-review standards and were the publishing brass ring for tenure-track scholars. Get your research accepted by these elite journals and you nailed your publishing requirement.

But the downside of the system is that it is expensive and exclusive. An annual subscription to just one of these journals could cost a library “tens of thousands of dollars,” he says, and even when the journals went online, subscription costs remained high.

But today, Long says, software developers committed to the idea of democratizing information have developed “open source” software that allows libraries and scholars to create their own online academic journals. “They can be as complicated and as robust as people want them to be, and peer-reviewed [to any degree] they would like,” he says. Most significantly, access to the journals is free.

These online journals are not just online or PDF versions of a print product, says Karen Estlund, head of digital services for UO Libraries, but are their own entity.

“They transform scholarship beyond just reproducing the print artifact and turn it into something richer by taking advantage of things we can do in an online environment,” she says. Increasingly, she adds, more universities are accepting work published in online journals as counting toward tenure.

One pioneering example of digital scholarship is the work of Massimo Lollini, a UO Italian language and literature professor. Lollini is a scholar of Francesco Petrarch, a fourteenth-century poet who invented the Italian sonnet form. In trying to make the study of Petrarch more engaging to students, Lollini created a website called the Oregon Petrarch Open Book, which allows users from around the globe to view different translations of Petrarch’s Canzoniere simultaneously, read scholars’ critiques, and discuss their findings.

In working with the site, Lollini saw possibilities for broadening its scope. This past spring he went online with Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, an online, peer-reviewed, open-access, international journal (journals.oregondigital.org/hsda) that explores the intersection of the humanities and the digital age. The second edition appeared in the fall.

Writing and reading are still at the core of the human enterprise, Lollini wrote in the introduction to the first issue, “but in the new technological and social context they acquire unprecedented forms even when they recover usages of orality and sensory experiences.” Hence the need for “transferring our cultural legacy from earlier forms into digital technology.”

Long helped establish the framework for an online, student-run, undergraduate research journal, OUR Journal, which was activated in the fall. Carol Stabile, a professor in the English department and at the School of Journalism and Communication whose scholarship has included analysis of the online game the World of Warcraft, plans to have her journal, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, online by the fall of 2012.

“It’s an exciting moment in academic publishing,” says Stabile, who is also the director of the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society. “Things are in crisis and things are changing. But it also means that people who have a different vision of how this might work also have the opportunity to try new things and to innovate. And that’s pretty cool.”

— Alice Tallmadge, MA ’87

Taking Flight

JACK LIU

Located in one of the most disadvantaged areas of Sacramento, California, S.A.C. Prep is a public charter middle school focused on preparing kids for academic success. Three years ago, one S.A.C. Prep class adopted the UO as “their” school—the “O” flag hanging proudly in the classroom, accompanied by lots of dreaming and encouragement about a future of studying in Eugene. In the summer of 2011, a flock of Sacramento ducklings migrated north to experience “their” university firsthand—staying in a UO residence hall, eating in a dining commons, meeting undergrads, and touring the campus. “We see this as an investment in students, some of whom might one day become Ducks,” says Jim Williams ’68, general manager of the Duck Store, which sponsored the visit.

THE BEST . . .
. . . Place to Kiss

 

Former University president Prince Lucien Campbell lent his name to campus’s most ill matched set of sites. The first is hard to miss. At eight stories, PLC Hall is both the tallest and the ugliest building on campus. Thankfully, bordering the other side of the lawn from this ode to utilitarian efficiency is a spot far more charming. Here, in the Prince Lucien Campbell Memorial Courtyard, any pair of lovebirds can hope to find a roost.

The courtyard is nestled at the center of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, an institution Prince Lucien Campbell, the man, championed during his years as University president (1902–25). Campbell did not live to see the opening of the museum in 1933, but the courtyard bearing his name would have won the love of this patron of the arts.

Despite its location off the museum lobby, the courtyard is easy to miss, hidden as it is behind two large and heavy doors. Once inside this oasis, it is even easier to forget you’re at the heart of a busy university. Although it has no roof and is open to the world, all outside noise somehow seems to evaporate along its column-lined corridors. Lush green plants caress the central reflecting pool at the head of which kneel two stone musicians. Perhaps the pair, reminiscent as they are of mischievous fairies and fawns, once flitted through A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Behind their kneeling figures rises a small cupola glowing with gold tile. It’s a breathtaking surprise hidden from view until one takes the time to wander all the way down the courtyard.

Beneath this golden dome many a couple can be imagined to have stolen a kiss. Far from the watchful gaze of resident assistants, professors, and parents, the only witness to young love is Prince Lucien Campbell. The president’s stone bust watches over this testament to romance, hidden as it is in the shadow of PLC.

—Elisabeth Kramer

This is the first in a series of student-written essays, each describing a superlative aspect of campus.

PROFile
Howard Davis
Professor of Architecture

Go no further than the door of Howard Davis’s office to see the impression the acclaimed architecture professor has left on students. An elaborate mantle, like the frame of some exquisite piece of art, borders the entrance of 321 Lawrence Hall on three sides, all a gift from a student.

“He designed his final project so that the half-scale fits around my door. Then he built it and gave it to me,” Davis recalls.

The student, Tom Kerr, MArch ’90, studied with Davis more than twenty years ago but the two remain in touch and, whenever possible, visit one another. One memorable trip was Davis’s journey to India while Kerr was studying on a Fulbright scholarship. Kerr showed his former professor some of the country’s most famous buildings, an experience Davis notes as his “introduction to Asia.” Davis’s relationship with Kerr is just one of many enduring student-teacher ties he has fostered in twenty-five years at the UO.

During those decades, Davis has traveled frequently, often to visit Ducks in the far-flung reaches of the world. Just this past summer, Davis could be found in Italy, then Japan, advising students studying abroad. After a brief pit stop in Eugene, he spent September leading Ducks around London.

“Architects are supposed to travel,” he says. “There’s so much significant architecture all over the world and it’s very important to experience it firsthand. It’s sort of like how professors of literature read everything. We try to see buildings.”

When Davis and his students visit a city, he encourages them to talk with locals. The goal, he says, is to understand the active role buildings play in people’s lives.

“The thing about this architecture school is that for some reason students who come to the UO are predisposed to thinking about architecture in cultural and environmental terms,” he says. “They’re very receptive to the idea that buildings are not abstract objects that just land from outer space. They understand that buildings are anchored in the world of people, of cities, of the environment.”

This rare disposition, Davis adds, makes his job all the better because students come in ready to learn. He verified as much a couple of years ago while teaching a seminar. Davis asked the students how many had come to the UO because they expect to make a difference in the world. Every student raised a hand.

Name: Howard Davis

Education: BS ’68, The Cooper Union; MS ’70, Northwestern University; MArch ’74, University of California at Berkeley

Teaching Experience: Twenty-five years at the UO.

Awards: In 2009, received both a Distinguished Professorship award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and a Faculty Excellence Award. Two years later, won the UO’s Thomas F. Herman Faculty Achievement Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Van Evera Bailey Faculty Award.

Off-Campus: Davis, who has visited every continent except Antarctica, hopes to next travel to Peru, Bolivia, and Finland.

Last Word: “I think I do have an impact on students, but I think that they’re ready to be taught. We’re all doing it together.”

—Elisabeth Kramer

 

On the Air

JACK LIU

ESPN’s popular College GameDay program broadcast from the memorial quadrangle early on the morning of this year’s Oregon–Arizona State football game. Counting the ensuing 41–27 victory, the Ducks are 5–1 with the ESPN crew in town.

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