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Speaker: Shigeru Miyagawa

"Visualizing Cultures"

Date: 21 February 2008

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Shigeru Miyagawa is Professor of Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and holds the Kochi-Manjiro Chair, Professor of Japanese Language and Culture. His linguistics publications include several books/monographs and nearly fifty articles. For his work in interactive media, such as “Star Festival,” “JP NET,” and “Visualizing Cultures,” he has been awarded the MIT Class of 1960 Innovation in Education Award, the Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education, Best of Show at the MacWorld Exposition, Distinguished Award from Multimedia Grandprix 2000, and was named by the magazine Converge as one of twenty national “Shapers of the Future.” He was on the original MIT faculty team that recommended "Open Course Ware".

Roundtable Topic

Thanks to the internet and other "new media," young people today get more and more of their information from visuals instead of the written text.  Yet, we do not teach how to "read images" in the same way that we teach how to read the written word. In Visualizing Cultures (http://visualizingcultures.mit.edu), we use the power of the Web to open windows on modern history by integrating graphic images, expert commentary, elegant design, curriculum, and databases in ways that have only recently become technologically possible. At the same time, we have created an extensive curriculum for dealing with visuals in the context of history. Launched at MIT in 2002, the site has focused topically to date on Japan and Asia in the modern world. The principal investigators are MIT professors John W. Dower, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian whose scholarship includes close attention to visual materials, and Shigeru Miyagawa, who is a pioneer in the production and use of digital media for education. The Visualizing Cultures project has collaborative relations with such distinguished organizations as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and Shiseido.

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