Associate Director for Academic Technology Services & Academic Information Associate for Fine Arts & Languages

A version of Aisling’s interview with Tam is available in the DLA Newsletter from December 2021. Tam is part of Macalester’s incredible Academic Technology team and collaborates with faculty, staff, and students on innovative digital projects that incorporate a variety of tools and methods. 

Digital Storytelling: I worked with Serdar Yalcin (Assistant Professor of Art History) in conjunction with the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The students got to work with a program that they have called Art Stories, and tell a story about a work of art from the collection. Having some of my old co-workers come in and talk to the class about using the technology to tell stories and applying it in a whole new way has been really fun, too.

I also worked with Julie Rogers (Professor of French and Francophone Studies). Her French class made a Google Site based on different aspects of what they had learned during the semester and it worked very similar to Art Stories. They used the same sort of template to create the different pages. Some of them also used Padlet to create timelines or maps that they also added to the Site.

3D Scanning and Images: Working with Andy Overman (Harry M. Drake Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Fine Arts) and Scott Legge (Associate Professor and Chair, Anthropology) was a highlight of the semester. I got to come in and we talked about the 3D image and how there’s the wireframe beneath and what all the triangles mean, and how the outer image wraps around it. And then we ended up talking about the ethics of 3D imaging and model-making.  We looked at the Cast Court at the V&A Museum, where they have all these replicas going back to the 1800s of things that they’ve made in different media just to think about the history of copy-making.

We had a cool conversation about the value of 3D scanning. Why are we doing it? And what’s the actual benefit? And you know, there’s obviously some objects that are more sacred in some respects, and should those be scanned? Should they be made publicly available like that?