The Digital Media Center supports the use and creation of multimedia in education, scholarship, and creative expression. Towards this end, we provide hands-on training, consult with patrons on digital projects, and offer access to the essential tools for creating digital resources such as web pages, digital images, digital video, digital audio, PowerPoint presentations, and animations.

Services

The DMC aims to make it easy for the Rice community to create their own multimedia projects.  The DMC’s many services include:

  •  Providing for the short-term check out of camcorders, audio recording devices, and digital cameras to Rice students, faculty and staff—for free!

•   •  Making available hardware, software and personalized assistance to support a wide range of digital media projects, including editing video and audio, creating graphics and web sites, and scanning documents and images
•   •  Providing assistance to faculty in digitizing materials for classes
•   •  Teaching short courses on editing video, creating DVDs, producing podcasts, and using the web for research
•   •  Assisting researchers who wish to deposit their work into the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive (RDSA)
•   •  Maintaining a collection of scholarly resources on DVD and compact disc, including linguistic corpora
•   •  Exploring the educational potential of gaming by providing access to a collection of electronic and board games, particularly those focused on history

Facilities

The DMC is located in Herring 129, an open, sun-drenched space designed by renowned architect César Pelli. On the first level, you will find:

  • 6 video editing workstations, 

  • 2 audio editing workstations,

  • 8 scanning/web design workstations, which include an oversized scanner, a high-speed document scanner, slide/film scanners, and professional flatbed scanners.

  • state-of-the-art equipment for digitizing rare, fragile and/or oversized materials, including a copystand and digital scanning back (not for public use)

In addition, the first level features an audio recording and editing booth and a meeting space/ open classroom with room for 12-15 people.  The second level contains two meeting spaces (one with a large plasma display and DVD player), and comfortable study areas.  Wireless is available throughout, and you may check out a laptop for use in the DMC.   At the DMC web site, you can reserve equipment, workstations or meeting spaces or check to see if equipment is available .

Projects

Not only does the DMC assist members of the Rice community with their own projects, but it also develops digital scholarly archives in collaboration with faculty members and library staff.  For instance, the Travelers in the Middle East Archive , a collaboration with Dr. Paula Sanders funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and CITI, features texts, images, teaching modules and both historical and interactive maps focused on Western interactions with the Middle East, primarily Egypt.  The Via Gabina web site, a partnership with Dr. Walter Widrig, documents an archaeological excavation of two suburban villas and a Late Antique granary/barn near Rome.  In collaboration with Dr. Al Van Helden, the DMC redesigned and maintains the Galileo web site, which examines the history of the Renaissance scientist.  In addition, the DMC is building a digital archive of back issues of the Rice Thresher and contributing to the Americas Archive, which examines political and cultural relationships from a hemispheric perspective.  

Research

Staff members at the DMC strive to remain up-to-date with emerging technologies, as well as to understand transformations in how scholars conduct and disseminate research.  In collaboration with humanities librarian Jane Segal, the DMC is studying the impact of digital resources on humanities research.  Lisa Spiro of the DMC oversees the Learning Science and Technology Repository (LESTER), which collects information about new educational technologies, as well as the researchers developing them (http://lester.riceedu).

Events

The DMC hosts workshops and special events, including:

• Short courses on video editing, Podcasting, DVD creation, and using the web for research
• The teaching with technology brownbag lunch series, co-sponsored with Information Technology
• A National Games Day event

Staff

Currently the DMC is run by two full-time staff members: Lisa Spiro (Hanszen ’92), who has a PhD in English and a background in digital humanities, and Jane Zhao, who has a masters’ degree in computer science and is an Apple-certified trainer.  Nadalia Liu, who has a masters’ degree in library science, oversees the DMC evenings and weekends, and a team of talented students staffs the service desk and works on various projects.

For more information, please visit call 713-348-3635 or email dmc-info@rice.edu.