12 Faculty Members and Their Students to Conduct Research under McGregor-Oresman Grants By Sue Kropp
			JUNE 26, 2000--With support from the McGregor-Oresman Fund, 12 members of the Oberlin College faculty will team up with 12 students to conduct research this summer and fall. The McGregor-Oresman Fund promotes close intellectual collaboration between faculty and students with $75,000 received in a grant from the McGregor Fund, matched by Donald Oresman '46. Brian Alegant, associate professor of music theory, and Marcus Lofthouse, a senior from Billings, Montana, will continue working with a computer program Lofthouse has designed. Last summer, the pair discovered a series of rare configurations that can be replicated in two dimensions and are unknown to music theorists. This summer, Lofthouse will refine the computer program and re-execute the procedure to make sure that all of the configurations have been specified. He also will classify and generalize the configurations by investigating their characteristics. Alegant and Lofthouse plan to submit an article about their research to a music-theory journal at the end of the summer. Albert Borroni, visiting professor of neuroscience, and Kunal Dalal, a junior from Knoxville, Tennessee, are studying the role of calcium in the formation of long- and short-term memories. They will test their hypothesis in animals by activating synapses in the subjects' hippocampus, a region of the brain that aids in memory formation. Fletcher will be responsible for caring for the animal subjects, and will surgically implant stimulating and recording devices into the animals. She also will collect, store, and analyze data from the experiment for use in a future publication. Yolanda Cruz and David Miller, professors of biology, will supervise revisions to Biology 119: Laboratory in Organismal Biology. Miriam Hellweg '00 will implement the changes, revise current lab texts and study questions for independent exercises, improve existing illustrations, and run pilot experiments for students to use as examples in the fall. Sebastiaan Faber, instructor in Spanish, and two student assistants--Mariana Padias, a junior from Tucson, Arizona, and Maria Victoria Albina, a senior from Providence, Rhode Island--will produce a student-run newspaper for Spanish speakers at Oberlin College. Padias and Albina will research the organization, costs, facilities, and other resources required to start a newspaper on campus. They will interview students and faculty members involved in the production of student periodicals on campuses across the country; polling Spanish speakers to define a target audience, search for sources of funding, and recruit a team of editors to publish the first issues. Update of September 27, 2000: Christina Castellana, a senior from Birmingham, Michigan, and Viviana Westbrook, a sophomore from Mexico City--rather than Padias and Albina--will do the groundwork for producing the newspaper. Their work will result in a proposal for a Winter Term 2001 project, and the Winter Term project will result in a prototype newspaper that may become a campus periodical. Gregory Hess, Danforth-Lewis Professor of Economics, and Andrew Harrison, a junior from Tucson, Arizona, will investigate the relationship between the Native American Wars and the American economy during the late 1800s. Harrison will use secondary sources to construct an annual data set for the initiation and escalation of conflicts against native Americans in the Great Plains area and the Western states and territories. He will examine economic data from the same period to determine if the economy might have influenced the conflicts. Harrison will organize the data into a format that others can use to complete the study. Yumi Ijiri, assistant professor of physics, and Genevieve Baudoin, a junior from Albuquerque, New Mexico, will develop several hands-on exercises for Chemistry 65 and Physics 65: The Nature of Electronic Materials--Deconstructing the Computer. Baudoin will develop several exercises that demonstrate the function of equipment and computers specific to the chemistry and physics departments. She also will test the exercises and help write instructions for student worksheets. Roderic Knight, professor of ethnomusicology, and Stephen Clink, a sophomore from Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania, will prepare an instructional booklet on the kora, a 21-string harp played by the Mandinka people of Gambia, West Africa. Using Knight's field notes from 1970, the pair will extract and assemble lesson materials for eventual publication. Knight also will prepare hand-transcribed musical examples of an Indian-village fiddle tradition that he recorded in 1982. To enhance the ethnomusicology courses taught at Oberlin, Knight and Clink will digitize slides of musical instruments and musicians from around the world, and upgrade Knight's personal web page for use as a classroom tool. Robert Longsworth, professor of English, and Anna Raddatz '00 will conduct a study of student slang at Oberlin over the past 15 years. The study will involve assembling and editing for publication the six dictionaries of slang words compiled by students in Longsworth's course English 339: The History and Structure of the English Language. Longsworth and Raddatz also plan to write an introductory essay on how such transient linguistic behavior reflects both stable and changing patterns of campus culture. Bruce Simonson, professor of geology, and Michael Cardiff, a senior from Towson, Maryland, are putting together a web site that will be posted on OhioLINK's Digital Media Center. The site will contain images from five different continents that Simonson has photographed over the past 25 years during his field research. Cardiff will scan the slides and annotate the images. The database will be the first OhioLINK site devoted to the natural sciences. Anne Trubek, assistant professor of expository writing and English, and Peter Soppelsa '00 are continuing work on a textbook, "Technologies of Writing: From Plato to the Digital Age." The book will examine connections between the development of new technologies and the history of writing. The textbook is intended for use in composition and interdisciplinary first-year courses. Grover Zinn, Danforth Professor of Religion, and Samuel Upton '00 will complete an edition of a 12th-century Latin text, Concerning Sacred Scriptures and Sacred Writers, by Hugh of Saint Victor. Upton will complete the final phase of the project by comparing two manuscripts and making the final entry into Collate, a computer program designed to determine the relationship between multiple manuscripts. In a separate project, Zinn and Upton will locate, describe, and analyze medieval diagrams, schemata, and maps that will facilitate the interpretation and reconstruction of a complex instructional diagram described by Hugh of St. Victor in two works, Concerning the Ark of Noah Morally Interpreted and Booklet on the Drawing of the Ark. Zinn has completed a preliminary drawing of Hugh's diagram using Adobe Illustrator, and Upton will refine the drawing after further research.
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