Across Emory, instructors frequently incorporate Atlanta as a case study in their classes. From studying access to health care in the Rollins School of Public Health, to examining the landscape of spoken languages across Fulton county (Department of German Studies, Department of Spanish and Portuguese), or when writing building biographies of Atlanta’s most iconic landmarks, students and get to engage with the city they live in.
But how can we bring this engagement to a group of students in a different country? How would students – who have never been to or even heard of Atlanta – approach our city?
Emory Center for Digital Scholarship team members Dr. Alexander Cors and Dr. Bailey Betik recently visited with partners in Bonn, Germany, as part of the OpenWorld Atlanta project to find out. Along with Emory architecture professor Dr. Christina Crawford, the two ECDS employees have been awarded a Collaborative Research Grant from the Halle Institute for Global Research and Learning for their work on developing the Atlanta-based teaching and learning hub.
This funding enabled Bonn partners to travel to Atlanta in April, followed by the Atlanta team’s visit to Germany in July. The ECDS partnership with Universität Bonn faculty included consulting with the university’s Institute of Geography, namely Dr. Eva Nöthen, Julia Klumparendt, and Dr. Tobit Nauheim on the joint development of a Cabbagetown “virtual field trip.” For students in Germany, learning about the American city is a part of secondary school curriculum, though many will not get the opportunity to visit a real-life example. OpenWorld Atlanta’s web platform presented an innovative digital solution to facilitating access to an American city beyond a textbook. The Atlanta-Bonn team collaborated to build a “virtual field trip” using elements of 3D modeling, Google Streetview, video and audio interviews, embedded maps, and interactive photo galleries about Cabbagetown’s past, present, and future.
Under the leadership of web developer Dr. Betik, the team tested the prototype with students at a German high school, Europaschule Troisdorf, in their unit on American cities and received points of feedback and praise for developing further iterations. In addition to the school visit, Dr. Cors and Dr. Crawford gave guest lectures to Universität Bonn undergraduate and graduate geography students. The team also partook in incredible German hospitality, enjoying Dr. Nauheim’s personalized tours of Bonn’s historical city center and the government district and participating in the Geography Institute’s annual Kubb tournament, where the Atlanta-Bonn team took home second place!