A Different View of Scholarship

Today's Medianote was a discussion of the University of Southern California's new Visual Studies Certificate. Open to doctoral students from a variety of disciplines, the program will train scholars to examine the historical, cultural and social aspects of images. It is an attempt to expand scholarship from its historic roots in the written word. Or as one MC101 student put it, "Why should we be restricted to using only the communications tools that were available long ago?"

USC's emphasis on visual studies dovetails quite powerfully with the university's Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. The foundation has digitized 120,000 hours of on-camera interviews of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. The video is searchable by nearly 50,000 keywords and phrases. There is hope that such initiatives will attract greater collaboration with organizations such as the Armenian Film Foundation, which has an archive of more than 400 testimonies related to the Armenian genocide of 1915.

For an example of what this new generation of image-driven scholarship looks like, see the Urban Icons Project.