Job Opening: Senior Developer in the Media Library & Archives

Image

Reply

If interested, please apply at http://www.wgbh.org/about/employmentOpportunities.cfm and reference Job Requisition # P-0783.

WGBH is looking for a creative and energetic Senior Developer to lead the development of a digital asset management (DAM) preservation system for the WGBH Media Library and Archives.

The Senior Developer will play a leading role in designing and implementing the architecture, workflows, and applications for WGBH MLA digital library services. The system will be based on the Hydra Project technology stack, which includes Ruby on Rails, Blacklight, Apache Solr, and the Fedora Commons repository. In addition, the Senior Developer will work on web based projects for the Media Library and Archives, including the implementation of a website to give scholars and researchers access to material in the WGBH Archive.

Working closely with the Media Library and Archive’s Director, Project Manager, and a WGBH Interactive Designer, the Senior Developer will specify, document and develop the technical architecture of a prototype digital asset management system for digital preservation. They will develop user interfaces to the system. They will also continue to develop the Open Vault website: http://openvault.wgbh.org.

Specific duties include:

  • Gather requirements and develop specifications for the digital library architecture; work closely with digital object creators and managers to understand their needs.
  • Working with open-source applications and toolkits, design and implement a multi-purpose repository infrastructure that supports the ingestion, preservation, and delivery of digital objects.
  • Test, evaluate, and recommend potential toolkits and applications for inclusion in the repository architecture.
  • Design and implement workflows to extract, transform and repurpose metadata and digital objects as needed.
  • Customize open source applications to provide front-end interfaces to the repository for end-user delivery.
  • Maintain digital library architecture, troubleshooting issues whenever they arise.
  • Keep abreast of community-wide developments in the realm of digital library software and infrastructure.
  • Contribute to the development of Open Source applications.
  • Write and maintain documentation.
  • May supervise junior programmers.

Please note that this position has the possibility of being extended based upon funding levels.

Responsible for maintaining a working environment that leverages the potential and diversity of the department’s entire staff. Provide direction and leadership in such a way as to nurture, create and maintain an environment that is (1) free from discrimination, intolerance and harassment and (2) provides employees with equal access to opportunities for growth and advancement including professional development whenever possible.

Skills Required:

The ideal candidate:

  • Has experience implementing digital archives, using repository software such as DSpace or Fedora Commons.
  • Is Unix proficient.
  • Has some experience with Blacklight, Hydra, Ruby on Rails and/or Solr.
  • Can demonstrate understanding of Internet technologies including HTML, CSS, JavaScript and XML (particularly XSLT, XPath and RDF).
  • Has worked with web services such as REST, SOAP and/or XML-RPC.
  • Is familiar with one or more RDMS, such as MySQL. Experience integrating with, or extracting data from, FileMaker Pro will also be helpful.
  • Is familiar with online media workflows (from post-production to compression to distribution).

WGBH is a Mac shop, with LAMP servers. Candidates should be prepared to share and discuss code samples.

Educational Requirements:

To perform the required duties, the Senior Developer must possess the skills and qualities required to complete a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, and more than 3 years of work experience developing web applications. Demonstrated interest in library or moving images archive issues preferred.

Department Overview:

WGBH produces the best and most well known television, radio and online programs for public media. The WGBH Media Library and Archives preserves and helps re-purpose WGBH creations into the future. The MLA establishes the policies and procedures for the access, acquisition, intellectual control, and preservation of WGBH’s physical media and digital production and administrative assets. The MLA also offers production organization of archival materials from projects start up to shut down, research services, rights clearances, and licenses WGBH stock footage. This is a full-time, on-site position with benefits, starting as soon as possible. It is funded for 12 months, with the possibility of renewal after that. Moderate travel may be required. We work hard, but believe in work/life balance.

Lawyer and lobbyist Harry McPherson, 1929-2012

Posted on by
Reply

As Special Counsel to Lyndon B. Johnson through the turbulent years of 1965-1969, Harry McPherson was speechwriter and adviser on many major decisions, including the 1968 Tet Offensive.

As one who came to believe Vietnam was an unwinnable war McPherson, together with Clark Clifford, persuaded Johnson to reduce bombing activities.

This 1981 interview sees McPherson reflecting on his relationship with Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as some of the pivotal political decisions throughout his tenure.

Mayor Kevin H. White, 1929 – 2012

Posted on by
Reply

This weekend we lost a giant of Boston and Massachusetts history, Mayor Kevin White.

White served as mayor of Boston for 16 years and saw the city through immense growth and renewal. He also governed the city through a period of great racial turmoil during the 1960s and 70s, culminating in the controversial desegregation of the Boston City Schools through busing in 1974.

In the WGBH Archives, we have many video and audio recordings of White during his time as Mayor, but a few stand out as examples of his leadership style in times of tension.

Last year, on the anniversary of the event Elizabeth Deane posted a piece about White’s work with soul singer James Brown and with WGBH to broadcast the performer’s concert live the night after Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. In this video from that night, Mayor White, humorously dubbed “a swinging cat” by James Brown, pays tribute to Dr. King, “one of the greatest Americans” and asked the audience to help him “make Dr. King’s dream a reality in Boston.” This pivotal moment quite possibly saved the city from the riots and violence that plagued other cities in response to Dr. King’s death.

A second pivotal moment in White’s tenure as mayor came in 1974 when the U.S. District Court ruled that Boston’s schools were racially segregated and discriminatory and ordered the implementation of a controversial busing program to desegregate the system. The Boston School Committee, led by Louise Day Hicks, actively resisted the court ordered program and many white neighborhoods protested against their children being bussed across the city to integrate predominantly black schools, and against black children being bussed into their neighborhoods. Many parents, particularly in the neighborhood of South Boston, kept their children out of school in defiance.

In this clip, Mayor White answers questions from the press regarding violent flare-ups and the timetable for the busing program. A year later, having experienced the tumultuous and sometimes violent first year of desegregation through busing, he addressed the city and appealed to the community to act responsibly, and with restraint, to allow children to enter the schools safely as they opened in September of 1975.

Mayor White’s passion for redevelopment and his strong vision for the future of the city also left their mark on Boston, particularly in the growth of the downtown area and the eventual submergence of the central artery highway underground. Even thought the legacy of the desegregation crisis as a whole is still unsettled, White’s leadership as a peacekeeper and the voice of reason helped to maneuver the city through extremely tense times of anger and controversy.

Other remembrances:

From the Front Lines to the Classroom: Remembering Fred Shuttlesworth and Derrick Bell

Posted on by
Reply

Shuttlesworth Statue, Birmingham, AL. Courtesy Kinu Panda.

This past week saw the passing of Fred Shuttlesworth and Derrick Bell, two important actors in the Civil Rights Movement.

Shuttlesworth, a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a leader in the Birmingham Campaign to desegregate public facilities and end discrimination in hiring in Birmingham, Alabama, endured repeated attempts on his life, church and family by members of the white resistance. In addition to his activities in Birmingham, Shuttlesworth could be found on the front lines of the 1961 Freedom Rides, the 1964 efforts to desegregate the beaches in St. Augustine, Florida, and the 1965 marches in Selma, Alabama.

Open Vault contains a recording of Fred Shuttleworth’s speech at the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom. Click on the 5th of 15 hours of the Educational Radio Network’s live reporting from the march – Shuttlesworth starts at 19:00. You can hear a great example of Shuttlesworth’s fiery and inspirational preaching style in this recording:

Now, in many places, the court’s calendars of the land are clogged. The police forces are being marshaled and lines taught to keep people from trying to be free. The judges have their hands full and the politicians are worrying night and day. Now, if the politicians want to be free, and if they want peace, if the judges want to unclog their calendar, if the police want to be unfettered so that they can go ahead and hunt crooks because people who want to be free are not necessarily crooks.

At the same time that outspoken leaders like Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, and Martin Luther King were marching, sitting-in and conducting public campaigns of non-violent civil disobedience, the NAACP was waging its own war against the legal barriers to desegregation through the court system.

In 1959, 29 year old Derrick Bell joined the NAACP Legal Defense team along side Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley. Throughout the 1960s, Bell would shepherd 300 school and public facilities desegregation suits through the courts, including James Meredith’s successful bid to desegregate the University of Mississippi, or “Ole Miss,” in 1962.

Derrick Bell, 1990

Almost 30 years later, Derrick Bell, then serving as law professor at Harvard, found himself at the center of a new kind of civil rights struggle. When a Black female lecturer was denied an open tenure-track position, Bell used his highly visible position as the first African American professor at the law school to draw attention to what he and many of his students felt were ongoing discriminatory hiring practices. Bell took leave without pay to protest the lack of women of color on the law school faculty.

Peer into this later moment of civil rights struggle in a Ten O’Clock News
feature story on Bell’s protest here on Open Vault.

Fred Shuttlesworth and Derrick Bell fought against discrimination and racism throughout their careers – Shuttlesworth from the pulpit and on the streets, and Bell in the courtroom and the classroom. Taken together, their two paths paint a rich picture of the struggles of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s, and continuing up through today.

Do you remember the Birmingham Campaign?
Would you have the courage of James Meredith to desegregate Ole Miss?
How have evolving hiring practices affected the diversity of your workplace?
Would you be willing to sacrifice your life or your livelihood for the sake of others?

References:

Steve Jobs on “The Machine that Changed the World,” 1990

Posted on by
Reply

In this 1990 interview with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs for a documentary on “The Machine that Changed the World,” Jobs muses on milestones in computing and the future of the machine as he sees it.

In addition to recalling his first exposure to computers, 35 year old Jobs imagines a world where networked computers change the way humans work and communicate with each other. Here are few snippets of the interview which you can watch in full on Open Vault.

…we’re starting to be able to create clusters of people working on a common task in literally 15 minutes worth of set-up…we’re finding we can re-organize our companies electronically very rapidly… in the 1980s we did personal computing and now we’re going to extend that as we network these things into inter-personal computing

Check out the full, unedited interview here on Open Vault.

How did Steve Job’s and Apple’s innovations change your work life and how you communicate?

Do you remember your first desktop computer?

LSD: Lettvin vs. Leary

Posted on by
1

Get ready for a mind-expanding trip with LSD guru Timothy Leary on Open Vault. We’ve just posted LSD: Lettvin vs. Leary, an extraordinary hour-long debate from 1967, shot before a packed house at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium.

The posting comes in connection with a radio feature story heard recently on WGBH 89.7 by local Morning Edition host Bob Seay. (Click on the icon under the date to hear the story.) It’s about some young researchers at Harvard Medical School who have cracked open the door to the LSD vault, which has pretty much been locked for more than forty years.

Here’s a brief description of the film available on Open Vault:

Leary speaks first. Dressed in Indian-style tunic and trousers, he makes his case mainly in darkness, with psychedelic images flickering on a screen behind him. He describes LSD as a sacrament, a psychedelic technique that enables us to reach a deeper level of thinking and inspiration. “It’s a gamble,” Leary acknowledges:

It’s Russian Roulette…I don’t know the effects of LSD on the nervous system…[But] of all the Russian Roulette games I see around me, including Vietnam and polluted air, I would say the Russian Roulette of LSD is about the best gamble in the house.

Lettvin then takes the stage. In his short-sleeved shirt and pocket protector, he seems like a character in a different play. He offers an impassioned critique of Leary’s case, based in part on his experience as a senior psychiatrist in an addict ward. “I look upon you as a fundamentally vicious tool of the devil,” he says to Leary, “and I will explain to you why.”

Lettvin compares the effects of another drug, alcohol, with those of LSD, focusing on what he calls LSD’s “return trips,” the repeated episodes that sometimes follow a single dose of the drug. “You pay for whatever visions you get by this loss in judgment,” he says, “the loss of judgment that stays and stays.”

He sums up his criticism of Leary’s case with one word. “[It’s] not a scientific word, wrote a critic in the Boston Globe, [but] sometimes the right word has to come from the street.”

The film was produced by Austin Hoyt, and shot and edited by Boyd Estus.

Here’s a link to the film: LSD: Lettvin vs. Leary

The Infill Housing Program, 1968-1973

Posted on by
Reply

by Kenny Whitebloom

[re-posted from our Boston Local TV News Project blog: http://bostonlocaltv.org]

If you’ve been following this blog with any sort of regularity, which we hope’s the case, you are by now well aware that the WHDH-TV cards often reveal only one small glimpse into the larger news story they reference. One measly, unsatisfying glimpse: that’s usually all we get.

That was the case with a recent series of cards I encountered about the Infill Housing Program of 1968, a development project which broke ground in November of that year. Thanks to the folks at the Internet Archive and the Boston Public Library–who together have digitized and made (easily) accessible a great many of Boston’s public records–I was able to get a clear understanding of the history of the Infill Housing Program in Boston, and Roxbury in particular.

A map displaying the 11 completed Infill buildings in Roxbury, from Mayor Flynn's 1986 "Roxbury Neighborhood Housing Initiative"*

The Infill Housing Program of 1968, organized by the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) under the supervision of director Hale Champion, was designed to re-purpose vacant lots in city neighborhoods into some 2,000 single-family and multi-story housing units for low-income families around Boston. Known also as “vest pocket” housing, for the way in which construction ‘slips’ in to already portioned off land, the Infill Housing concept of the late 1960s called for the construction of industrially-produced, precast concrete modular housing on vacant, tax-foreclosed lots in Boston, namely in the South End, North Dorchester, and Roxbury. The majority of the Infill structures were four story buildings designed to house two ‘large’ families in a duplex arrangement. Despite their concrete gut, the apartments were brick-faced and considered architecturally attractive for the time (see: exterior of an Infill prototype). The other structural type was wood-framed.

 

Mayor Kevin White sold the $47 million Infill idea to the Boston City Council in October 1968 by promising the project wouldn’t cost the city a thing: the Federal government would cover the costs of plans and loans, and private developers would see to the actual building. The first year of construction was to cost $16 million. The White administration claimed that the use of private development firms using mass production techniques would help reduce waste, save money, and speed up construction. The Development Corporation of America (DCA), who had claimed that the construction of the frames for each four-story house would take no longer than one day, won the largest contract. (Another firm, Housing Innovations, took a small amount of units). While the DCA covered the construction of the Roxbury and South End iterations, the Boston Housing Authority took charge of renting the units upon completion to a select group of low-incomes tenants under a subsidized rental program. Once occupied, the houses were to be run and managed by a tenant cooperative.

Opposition to the project was swift and vociferous. It ranged from issues related to structural design and density to social prejudice, especially in the predominately white areas. Mrs. Louise Day Hicks, then councilor-elect, called the program an “ill-conceived, selfish-interest-spawned, giveaway program.” Councilors Thomas I. Atkins and Frederick C. Langone objected to the plan’s speedy presentation to the City Council, despite their eventual approval. Langone said that even “the administrator of the Model Cities [a wide-ranging plan to revitalize many city services in Roxbury and North Dorchester] admitted to us he had not read the document which came before us.” Local residents complained that, unlike large private contractors, the city never afforded them the opportunity to purchase the vacant lots for housing or other purposes. Others worried that the large family units would take up dwindling open space that otherwise may have been used as a public park or play area for children.

All things considered, Roxbury was to see 400 units of family housing as result of the Infill program. The project broke ground on Intervale Street in Roxbury in late November 1968, and by 1973, after delays had pushed the start of real construction back to 1971, a little over 100 units in 18 structures were built to various stages of completion. Eleven buildings were constructed in Roxbury. However that was to be the extent of the progress. The DCA filed for bankruptcy in April 1973, leaving half-completed buildings to remain vacant on once vacant lots. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) inherited the properties. The structures that were completed soon proved to be structurally deficient: the slabs of pre-stress concrete pulled apart and the roofs leaked. Social problems arose as a result of the some 315 families living together in the various apartment buildings, and by 1976 the tenant cooperative had faded away. Robert Walsh, the deputy director of the BRA from 1971-1976, explained the project’s failure in two short sentences: “Simply speaking it was a damn good idea. It just broke down in execution.”

For sixteen years the abandoned shells of the half-completed or otherwise abandoned Infill houses languished in Roxbury, bringing down housing prices and attracting vandals and burglars until 1986 when another neighborhood housing initiative spearheaded by Mayor Raymond L. Flynn made use of the existing structures and land. Open Vault, our very own digital library of archived WGBH news and programming, has footage from The Ten O’Clock News in 1986 which shows Mayor Flynn announcing the construction of a housing and commercial complex in Douglass Square in Roxbury.

Save for a few residents who admitted that they were better off in the new units despite the issues, the Infill Housing Plan of the late 1960s and early 70s was a failure. One piece of a larger political and civic effort in the 1960s and 70s to revitalize declining U.S. neighborhoods following the creation of President Lyndon Johnson’s HUD in 1965, the Infill Housing program, like many other HUD-run projects, failed for a number of reasons: overzealous private contractors who promised too much too quickly; building materials whose cost inflated in the run up to construction, especially for precast concrete; an absence of on-site security; and, perhaps most tellingly, a lack of serious support from local residents. The Boston Globe found fault within the very structure of HUD itself. “Money flowed into the cities during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s,” one 1977 article reads, “but the expertise needed to make the programs work (proper inspection of homes whose mortgages were to be federally insured, and educating the poor, first-time homeowner and provisions for escalating costs) did not come built into the programs.”

Please share your memories of the Infill Housing Program’s controversial history in the comment section below. What do you remember?

References:

  • *Roxbury neighborhood housing initiative  map courtesy Boston Public Library Government Documents and the Internet Archive, n.d., http://www.archive.org/details/roxburyneighborh00bost.
  • “Mrs. Hicks Denounces ‘Infill’ Housing Plan.” The Boston Globe 17 November 1969: 3. Boston Globe Archive. Web.
  • Ellis, David R. “Hub Council OK’s ‘Infill’ Housing; Rips White.” The Boston Globe 15 October 1968: 8. Boston Globe Archive. Web.
  • Flynn, Raymond L. “Roxbury Neighborhood Housing Initiative.” 1986.
  • Hartnett, Ken. “A failure in cooperative housing.” The Boston Globe 29 April 1976: 23. Boston Globe Archive. Web.
  • Osgood, Viola. “HUD housing a blight on city.” The Boston Globe 14 April 1977: 3. Boston Globe Archive. Web.
  • Rogers, David. “The Fall of Infill: Vacant lot housing program bankrupt, but salvage plans continue.” The Boston Globe 7 October 1973: A1. Boston Globe Archive. Web.
  • Yudis, Anthony J. “First Duplex Built in South End ‘Infill’ Housing Program.” The Boston Sunday Globe 8 September 1968: 44. Boston Globe Archive. Web.
  • ———. “‘Infill’ Housing Plan Receives Complaints.” The Boston Globe 20 April 1969: 36. Boston Globe Archive. Web.

Elliot Norton Reviews: Israeli Plays at Brandeis, 1980

Posted on by
Reply

by Jessica Green

As an intern at WGBH, I have watched over 50 episodes of the Elliot Norton Reviews in an effort to catalogue the successful series of theater-related interviews that ran from 1958 to 1982. While I have come across several plays that I am all too familiar with, including Richard III, The Threepenny Opera, Annie, The King and I, Pirates of Penzance, and The Elephant Man, I am grateful to have also been introduced to many plays that may have otherwise never crossed my path. Endgame at Kiryat Gat is one of the more interesting plays I have been exposed to and wish to share with all of you.

On March 4, 1980, Elliot Norton interviewed director Nola Chilton and actors Scott Richards and Ellen Finholt about two plays at the Spingold Theatre at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA in an episode of the Elliot Norton Reviews titled “Israeli Plays at Brandeis.” Naim is based on the novel, “The Lover,” by A.B. Yehoshua and adapted by Nola Chilton; Endgame at Kiryat Gat is based on a short story of the same name by John Auerbach, and adapted by Nola Chilton and Itzik Weingarten.

Coat of Arms, Kiryat Gat. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Perhaps because of my undying love for Samuel Beckett, I was immediately drawn to Endgame at Kiryat Gat, which takes place in an actual development town in the Negev Desert. Chilton explains to Norton that the Moroccan Jews who immigrated to this town in the 1950s, came from a culture based on agriculture. As they developed into an industrial town, however, the second generation became quite different from the first.

She goes on to talk about the relevance of this play in regards to the current relationship between the European or Ashkenazi Jews and the influx of Moroccan Jews, which she referred to as “Oriental Jews.” In her opinion, the relationship between the two groups was becoming strained as the “Oriental Jews” were beginning to outnumber the European Jews as 55% of the population. Of this turbulent relationship, she tells Norton, “Where people are, there cannot be equality. Where people are, there’s conflict and there’s a kind of struggle and there is always a confrontation and I think that the healthy survive. And that’s our only hope.” Since this episode aired, a large population of Jews from the former Soviet Union immigrated to this town in the 1990’s.

Chilton explains that the play is about several members of this second generation of Moroccan Jews, who set up a little theater in an effort to bring respect to their family’s name. Scott Richards plays the theater director and Ellen Finholt’s husband. In Chilton’s words, “a crazy hippy American” comes wandering through town and has the idea that he can get the theater to put on Samuel Beckett’s play, Endgame. He believes this modern generation of Moroccan Jews can relate to the “nowhereness, pain, and suffering” in the play. He does his best to change them, break them down, and make them feel these things. In the end, however, they are strong and he is the one that breaks down in sorrow and emptiness.

What message do you take from this play?
How might this play be performed differently today, over 30 years later?
Can you see another setting that would work for this type of plot?

Diving into the Digital Humanities at WGBH

Posted on by
Reply

By Kenny Whitebloom

In case you happened to miss the news: through a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we’ll be publishing our full catalog of the Media Library and Archive’s holdings online later this summer.

We’re seeking students, scholars, and filmmakers to enhance our records with valuable metadata on a variety of levels. From filling out a short survey describing item(s) used, to mining the catalog and curating an entire online collection, scholars will play a crucial role in helping to make the WGBH Digital Library a resource suitable for research purposes.

This goal — to validate the legitimacy of audiovisual materials for scholarly research — is really part and parcel of a broader movement in academia towards open access and the use of non-traditional mediums, a disciplinary movement known commonly as the ‘digital humanities’.

A brief and by no means complete definition of this burgeoning field can be understood as something like: the use of information technologies to analyze and interpret the humanities and other interdisciplinary subjects. Brett Bobley, the Director of the NEH’s relatively new Office of Digital Humanities (ODH), wrote in 2008 that the digital humanities embraces such topics as:

…open access to materials, intellectual property rights, tool development, digital libraries, data mining, born-digital preservation, multimedia publication, visualization, GIS [Geographic Information System], digital reconstruction, study of the impact of technology on numerous fields, technology for teaching and learning, sustainability models, and many others.

In many ways, the purpose of these new tools and methodological approaches is to make sense of the past decade’s digitized deluge; to organize, annotate, and interpret the masses upon masses of digital material now available to scholars online.

As a result of these new modes of investigation and new areas of support, many tools have been emerging for the individual scholar to utilize. Omeka, developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media at George Mason University, allows users to publish and arrange unique cultural heritage objects like photographs, maps, and text into digital collections. The Library of Congress’ Recollection tool, which essentially does the same thing, places its emphasis more on interactive timelines and maps. The Institute for the Future of the Book and the University of Southern California produced a tool called Sophie which lets users create shareable multimedia documents or, as the website suggests, books.

These are merely three tools amidst an expanding litany of others, many of which are currently in the works, but the common thread here is that the process by which original research is collected, interpreted, and published, once a solitary activity between author and text, has now become a collaborative, interactive experience.

But still: what do the digital humanities and other digital publishing communities actually produce? In many cases, projects considered to be within the digital humanities rubric are multimedia compendiums of text, audiovisual material, and sometimes user input on a specific topic or work. The Princeton Dante Project, for instance, is an annotated electronic text of the famous 14th century epic poem complete with images, audio, philology, commentary, and a variety of lectures. Others, like Columbia University and Vassar College’s ‘Mapping Gothic France,’ fuse images, texts, charts, and historical maps to create a spatial representation of historical trends and events. Crowd-sourced projects such as University College London’s ‘Transcribe Bentham’ and the New York Public Library’s ‘What’s on The Menu?’ invite users to transcribe digitized primary source documents so as to make them digitally searchable, and therefore accessible.

At the WGBH Media Library & Archives, our “Participatory Cataloging” digital library project aims to accomplish a mixture of the crowd-sourced and self-published works, as scholars and students contribute metadata to our catalog while curating collections of their own along the way.

For information on more tools and projects related to the digital humanities, head over to the ODH’s website and take a look at the July 2011 batch of grant recipients, or their library of previously funded projects. There you’ll find projects in which institutions are working on tools for computational analysis of film and other audiovideo materials, mobile apps that let users view musical theater multimedia, social network-like environments that allow scholars and students to share bibliographic information, and many, many more.

Along with the materials currently available for citation and sharing on this web site, we hope that researchers will soon take advantage of our full catalog, creating new and interesting scholarly products and helping us to increase the access points into our collection.

Al Pacino on Elliot Norton: A Mafioso Richard III?

Posted on by
Reply

by Jessica Green

As an intern at WGBH, watching Elliot Norton Reviews and writing summaries of them for the FileMaker database every Friday afternoon never gets boring. Just last week, I came across a massive ¾ inch tape with a title that caught my attention immediately: Al Pacino [!].

In this episode, which aired on February 16, 1973, Elliot Norton interviewed a young Al Pacino about his role as King Richard III at the Church of the Covenant on Newbury St by the Theater Company of Boston. Alongside actor Paul Benedict (Duke of Buckingham), and director David Wheeler, Pacino talks about his love of language.

In response to Norton’s question about why he chose to play Richard III, Pacino explains that he used to do soliloquies from Hamlet and Macbeth alone in his room and chose to perform Shakespeare scenes for acting classes. He is inspired by the language and feels that as an actor, “language serves you,” as opposed to the other way around. Pacino believes that today people are lazy and do not open their mouths to speak, so this is an opportunity to really use language. Although this is his first professional Shakespeare production, he talks about performing the first half hour of Richard III at the Actor’s Studio three or four years prior. In this production, he did not use a director, which he claims is the “best way to do it,” casting sheepish look at director David Wheeler.

Norton commends Pacino’s ability to balance playing the demon that kills his way to the crown and the comic that enjoys himself while opening up to the audience. He likes the way Pacino addresses the audience and sets it up as a ‘game’ in which he is enjoying himself and encourages the audience to do the same. Pacino feels that he connects so strongly with the audience that when he tells them about the crimes he committed, he starts to wonder about what they will do to him.

This production drew national attention because of Al Pacino, who had made his breakthrough the year before with The Godfather. Norton notes that Pacino started out opening night with a slight accent and he was nervous that the actor had “gone Mafia.” Pacino blames this on nerves, claiming that when he is nervous, he inadvertently slips into accents.

What I wouldn’t give to go back in time and watch Al Pacino play a Mafioso Richard III…

by Jessica Green