Time is rushing forward and we are almost to the end of another school year at Mountainland Applied Technology College. Students in my Multimedia classes have been working daily to complete the alpha or “Director’s Cut” versions of their group video projects.
Altogether, four projects will be completed within the next three weeks. These include projects titled: The Art and Science of Blown Glass (that group is currently creating their B-roll titles, images, and animations); The Art and Science of Stained Glass (this group is doing rough edit); High Pressure Alchemy: The Story of Synthetic Diamond (this group is capturing and editing the narrations); and The History of the Tintic Mining District (currently being captured and transcribed).
Eureka, Utah c. 1925
This last project came about rather unexpectedly; the Tintic District is centered around the town of Eureka, Utah and was one of the richest mining areas in the West in the late 1800s. By 1960, the mines had closed and the town has since fallen on hard times. It is now designated as an EPA Superfund Site, and millions have been spent to cover up old tailings piles and replace contaminated soil.
We had a team of students last year that filmed the area, but we didn’t have a good Subject Matter Expert that could tell the story. After driving through the town in early April, I saw that many of the historic buildings downtown are literally falling down and that this story needs to be told now rather than waiting for funding (my biggest challenge, besides having a full-time teaching job, is that I have no sponsorship as yet to support this project). I had one group of students that was going to do a project on pottery, but we hadn’t located a good site to visit. So I contacted June McNulty, who runs the Tintic Mining Museum in Eureka and arranged for him to be interviewed and to show us through the museum (which is only open by appointment) in an effort to preserve the history of this area before the reclamation efforts change things forever.
June McNulty in front of Eureka City Hall
On April 21 we took this team of students to Eureka and interviewed June and filmed the contents of the museum. Now I am going to be working on a final synthesis of two year’s worth of footage into two or more podcast episodes – one will tell the history of the mines, the other the history of the town and what life was/is like there, and perhaps a third will talk about the recent clean-up efforts and their impact on the town.
The four projects will be completed by students and myself to an alpha test level by May 21, when we will have students from other classes at MATC watch the episodes and make comments and suggestions. At that point we will be too close to the end of the year for the students to do much more editing, so I will probably work on them over the summer to tighten the presentation/story and polish the images and audio.
Drawing of Iron Blossom Shaft 3
It will be a challenge getting this all done over the summer, since I will be in Philadelphia for three months researching background information and collecting images and photos on the history of chemistry in general at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, where I have been selected as a 2008-09 Fellow, sponsored by the Societe de Chimie Industrielle (American Section). This effort at CHF will result in at least two episodes as well, in addition to the four episodes this year and two from last year that I will be doing final edits on. My goal is to have 8-10 episodes completed and posted to this site and to iTunes and YouTube by the end of August. So far I have completed one episode on the rationale for this project. I will post that episode before leaving for Philadelphia (May 28) so that we can at least have a presence on iTunes and YouTube over the summer. I have been waiting until May 22 when I will be teaching the students how to compress and add metadata to podcasts; I’ll demonstrate how with this episode and take it all the way through posting and uploading to iTunes.
Later today or tomorrow I will be adding a new post on how you, as an individual interested in this topic, can conduct similar research in your own community, or how you can participate to evaluate episodes or to provide sponsorship for this project.
June McNulty by mine hoist cage.
The Elements Unearthed 