El Barrio Project

I just recently returned from Harlem, NY, working on a project with a group of fantastic artists in East Harlem. The project is called Augmenting El Barrio and is a project where artists accomplished in murals, painting or other forms of artistic expression will be aumenting their work with an augmented reality tool.

Augmented reality is where the real world, when viewed through the viewfinder of a smart device, is augmented with additional information to supplement or add information to that which the user is viewing. So, for instance, if someone is looking at a mural in East Harlem through their smart device, he or she would be provided additional information regarding that work of art...this could be in the form of a video from the artist hoovering in the corner of the screen, perhaps some information on the work of art itself or anything else the artist wanted to add.

I'll keep you posted on the progress of this very exciting project and in a later post describe how this project will ultimately be incorporated into the Virtual Harlem Project.

cheers...

bc

Welcome to my Augmented Wanderings

I've considered blogging for quite some time now but never took the opportunity to really sit down and begin...I thought now would be a great time as I am at the end of the first year of a fantastic transition in my academic career. After having spent over 15 years teaching at the University of Central Missouri, I finally was offered the opportunity to make the jump to a Research I institution, The University of Arizona. The support and resources at my new institution are fantastic...support for my interests in Digital Africana Studies, Digital Humanities, virtual environments, augmented reality all in support of my literary studies focusing on the Harlem Renaissance and African American literature....I know, that's a curious set of connections there...but one that I see as not only important but also a fantastic way to merge the real with the virtual, interest students in a variety of ways to express their understanding of a text and even to experience it on various levels.

Through these posts, I plan to express these ideas more completely, offer rants, raves and glympses of the research on which I am working, short video clips, interview snippits and links to some of the latest tech and blogs that I encounter on the Web. I expect this to be a fluid, dynamic and multimodal space where sometimes I may get a bit experimental...enjoy and visit often...

bc