March 9, 1998 | Volume 87, Number 20 | Previous | Next | Index
Princeton University Office of Communications, Stanhope Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel 609/258-3601, Fax 609/258-1301

Princeton Atelier brings choreographer Martine van Hamel to campus

Like a fantasy class
By Sally Freedman

This is like a fantasy class for me," says Deborah Way '98. "American Ballet Theatre was one of the companies I dreamed of working with when I considered dancing as a career."
     Now an economics major, Way has a job waiting for her on Wall Street when she graduates, but this semester she is participating in the Princeton Atelier offered in collaboration with American Ballet Theatre (ABT). This innovative course involves not only lectures and seminars but also a strong studio component: a three-week ballet workshop with choreographer Martine van Hamel and members of the ABT Studio Company.
     The Princeton Atelier program was created by Toni Morrison, Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities.
     As she describes it, the program "brings professional artists to the University for intensive, in-residence collaborative projects with students and faculty. Artists who lead an Atelier seminar select a project that they want to watch unfold, examine or experiment with -- in the company of students -- before developing it for the professional art world." ...

 
Choreographer Martine van Hamel (c) auditions students for Princeton Atelier. (Photo: Rosalie O'Connor/courtesy American Ballet Theatre)

Library begins to create unified catalog
By Justin Harmon

The library has begun the process of creating a unified database of its holdings. Using $4 million in special funding identified by the provost, Princeton has contracted with OCLC, a nonprofit membership organization that provides online services to libraries, to create new records for 1.5 million titles not represented in the current Online Catalog. (Most of these are currently accessible as digital images in the Electronic Card Catalog.)
     OCLC will add to these records "shelf-list" information on actual holdings (numbers of volumes, locations) currently maintained on cards in drawers in Firestone. These new records will then be merged with the 1.3 million existing records in the Online Catalog. ...

Grafton documents "curious history"
By JoAnn Gutin

The Footnote: A Curious History, by Dodge Professor of History Anthony Grafton, has been getting press coverage that John Grisham might envy. In the past few weeks alone, the book been reviewed in both the daily and Sunday New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, New Republic and Times Literary Supplement, to name only a few.
     Why all this popular attention to a slim, scholarly book on an arcane subject?
     The Footnote is a serious work of historiography that traces the growth of scholarly documentation from its origins in ancient church history to the present. ...

Students to work with local teachers and their classes to create Web-based environmental science lessons

Creating science lessons

Students in the chemistry class From Ozone to Oil Spills met with 6th grade science teachers from Princeton, Trenton and West Windsor on February 19 as part of the Pathways project.
     During the course of the semester, groups of three or four Princeton students will be working with the teachers and their classes to create Web-based environmental science lessons, which will be available for viewing at a May 11 symposium in Kresge Auditorium. Ari Altman '97, a recent graduate of the Teacher Preparation Program, is coordinating the project and working with Pathways staff to integrate the lessons into the education program of the Trenton-based Invention Factory. ...

 
Pictured are Sheree Rockford of West Windsor-Plainsboro Upper Elementary School (l), Kim Dasher '01, Clare Levy '01, Sharon Zubricky of West Windsor-Plainsboro Upper Elementary, Laura Hahn '01 and Emma Bloomberg '01.

Wavelets help retrieve images
By JoAnn Gutin

Dancing babies may be all the rage among computer graphics buffs, but Adam Finkelstein goes for a different kind of visual on his screen: Georgia O'Keefe's cattle skulls, for instance, or the "Breaking Wave" of 19th-century Japanese artist Hokusai or the ubiquitous Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe.
     These iconic images are among those that Assistant Professor of Computer Science Finkelstein uses in the video demo of the new computer program he developed with colleagues at the University of Washington before coming to Princeton last spring. ...

Art Museum exhibits photographs ... Technology Fair to help users [direct link to Fair home page] ... Symposium discusses war, literatures, Pan-Americanism [direct link to more information about the symposium] ... University League open house

Editor: Sally Freedman
Associate editor:
     Caroline Moseley
Calendar and production editor:
     Carolyn Geller
Photographers:
     Denise Applewhite,
     Robert P. Matthews
Web edition: Mahlon Lovett