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Three faculty members in the School of Communications were
approved for Faculty Research and Development grants.  Janna Anderson
’s research project will assemble an ethnographic
multimedia online site with unparalleled data from the first
Internet Governance Forum, held in Athens, Greece, in late
2006. Her research crew recorded video and audio interviews
and still photographs with 26 people from 16 different
nations at the historic first IGF conference. Included in the
group were internet pioneer Vinton Cerf and UN leader Markus
Kummer. The research step being funded is the sorting of the
materials, assessment, editing, packaging and presentation.
The ethnographic content recorded at the IGF meeting will be
packaged in the best format possible to serve as historic
documentation and as material that can be used to inform
future policy. The funding will help support added depth to a
collection of ethnographic materials that are already being
used at national and international levels to help project
futures and advise policy decisions. The site address is www.imaginingtheinternet.org.
Harlen Makemson
received a Faculty Research and Development Grant to support a history
project on television news programming in 1968. The grant
will go toward acquiring videotapes from Vanderbilt’s
Television News Archive for two subjects:
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ABC’s move to condense the party conventions into a
90-minute nightly summary—standard practice today,
but in 1968 a huge departure from the gavel-to-gavel norm.
The research will examine media criticism of ABC’s
decision and analyze the network’s coverage. In
addition, the research will focus on the nightly Gore Vidal
vs. William F. Buckley debates, a forerunner of programs
such as CNN’s “Crossfire.”
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Television coverage of the Apollo 8 mission, the first
space flight to orbit the moon. The mission had religious
and spiritual meaning for many Americans, not only because
the mission occurred during the Christmas holiday, but also
because the crew read from Genesis during the orbit.
 Randy Piland received a grant to document
the global community of Scouts gathering in Chelmsford,
Essex, England for the 100th Anniversary of International
Scouting (Boy Scouts and Girl Guides). As a photojournalist,
Piland will engage a combination of visual ethnography and
photojournalism to expand his visual understanding of how one
contributes to the other. This event will provide the
backdrop of a significant historical and cultural exchange in
which visual storytelling and ethnographic study fuse. The
scene will consist of 35,000 Scouts and leaders attending
this event from more than 100 countries. He will focus on the
common thread of Scouting within this diverse mix of
cultures.
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