QUEST is a unique cross-platform science journalism collaborative that creates and distributes content for radio, television, interactive, and education audiences. The project collaborative comprises six leading public media providers representing markets across the country: KQED (San Francisco), Nebraska Educational Television (NET) and Radio, UNC-TV (North Carolina), WVIZ/ideastream (Cleveland), Wisconsin Public TV (WPT) and Radio, and KCTS (Seattle). QUEST is built on the success of the local, cross-editorial QUEST model, in which professionals from multiple disciplines--radio, television
The Science Cartoon (Sci-Toons) initiative, an informal education program, was developed to engage STEM and non-STEM students and faculty in the creation of science animation. Housed within Brown University’s Science Center, Sci-Toons projects incorporate several students and faculty each semester from both STEM and non-STEM majors. Team members are provided with technical training in animation, storytelling, and scientific concepts. The Sci-Toons model is a new approach for communicating scientific research and concepts to a broad audience via storytelling, animation, high-quality multimedia, and art.
A recent collaboration between the production staff of DragonflyTV and 29 institutions of informal science learning pushed beyond the traditional roles of museum-media partnerships by engaging museum professionals in the production of television content and featuring the partner institutions on the TV show. The 14 DragonflyTV episodes produced as part of these partnerships were subtitled "DragonflyTV GPS: Going Places in Science" and were produced over two production seasons. The collaborations involved both large and small institutions, including hands-on science centers and natural history
Concord Evaluation Group (CEG), led by Dr. Christine Paulsen, was hired by WGBH to perform an evaluation of NOVA’s Making Stuff Season 2 series (MS2), website, and outreach activities. CEG also conducted a separate set of formative evaluation activities during the early stages of resource development. The findings from the formative evaluation have been delivered separately. The goal of the summative evaluation was to explore the extent to which MS2 activities were successful at achieving NOVA’s intended impacts: 1. To increase public understanding that basic research leads to technological
The mission of QESST public outreach is to provide a platform for engaging the community; students, parents, teachers, and the general public; in discussions about solar energy. Although there is a growing interest in advances of solar energy, many misconceptions prevail amongst the general community. Community outreach serves as a mechanism for engaging people and drawing them in. It is often the hook that creates interest in parents who pass that interest onto their children, or lures young students into more formalized QESST programs. Our outreach events range in scale from small workshops, large university wide open houses, and participation in educational television.
INTO THE DEEP: America, Whaling & the World: a two-hour documentary film for national broadcast on PBS in 2010, directed by Ric Burns and co-produced by Steeplechase Films, American Experience, and WGBH/Boston, explores the history, culture and significance of the American whaling industry from its 17th century origins in drift and shore-whaling, through the golden age of deep ocean whaling in the 18th and 19th centuries, and on to the industry's demise in the decades following the American Civil War. Combining stunning archival material with powerful on-camera interviews, evocative live cinematography, dramatic reenactments, and underwater footage of whales at sea, the film will bring alive the complex reality and extraordinary experience of American whaling as the nation rose to the threshold of global power, all the while registering the larger forces, economic, social, cultural, technological and environmental, that shaped and propelled American Whaling.
This two-hour documentary, John Muir in the New World [working title], shot on high definition for PBS' American Masters, will follow the life of the Scottish-American naturalist and place his writing, his beliefs, and his activism in the context of late 19th and 20th century American history. We will show how, through his writings and associations, Muir became an early and influential spokesman for the conservation movement of the United States. Visually, this film will be strongly rooted in the locations of Muir's life, from Scotland to California, which were the prime influences on his thinking and writing. While preparing this documentary, we will look specifically at the emergent field of environmental history and the new scholarship on the definition of wilderness.
The Chicago Architecture Foundation will produce "One Nation, Under Construction," a weekly web and radio broadcast program that engages people in learning the stories behind the building – conceptual and physical – of America’s spaces, places, and structures. Each week, the show will address a humanities theme through exploration of architecture, infrastructure, urban history, planning, and landscape. While drawing on the latest scholarship, each 60-minute broadcast will surprise, engage, and move viewers as it investigates the link between the ways of building and the values of the builders. The innovative power of this project derives from its approach –featuring the everyday voices and stories that illuminate humanities themes discussed by featured scholars and experts – combined with an internet-based strategy linked to a national scholarly network and the Chicago Architecture Foundation's extensive programming.
This is a request to the National Endowment for the Humanities for funds to support the production of Panama Canal, a two-hour special presentation of American Experience, for national broadcast on PBS. Focusing primarily on the decade-long American construction effort, it places the American Canal against the backdrop of the calamitous French effort that preceded and haunted it. It traces the roots of the American commitment to a trans-Isthmian canal in Theodore Roosevelt’s expansionist vision of American power, and shows how advances in public health, technology and engineering made it possible for the Americans to succeed where the French had failed. It examines how the leadership of the canal dealt with the challenges of recruiting and managing an immense and diverse work force, and explores the risks borne by workers building one of the planet's most remarkable structures in one of the most hostile environments on earth.
THE DUST BOWL is a 2-part, 4-hour documentary film series that will explore a decade-long natural catastrophe of Biblical proportions and the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history, a collective tragedy that nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation. The series will be broadcast nationally in prime time on PBS in 2012, and will be accompanied by extensive educational outreach materials and a major promotional campaign to drive tune-in. In addition a web site will be created for the film to be housed on pbs.org.
The Kitchen Sisters will support the production of Hidden Kitchens World, a new multimedia series that explores life and culture through food across the globe. Inspired by the original NEH-funded NPR Hidden Kitchens series, this new on-air and online collaboration will feature stories exploring what people eat and grow, how food marks our sameness and differences, and how food culture adapts in the face of globalization, socioeconomic conditions and environmental changes. Each story will include perspectives from scholars, as well as video, music, photographs, curriculum and links to a curated library of resources relating to the themes raised within the stories. Funding from the NEH will help produce a multi-faced project featuring 8 stories on NPR, 1 hour-long radio specials distributed nationwide, 8 podcasts, research and development of a smart phone app, and a collaborative, humanities-rich website with audio, video, recipes, images and writings from around the world.
This award will support the production of a two-hour documentary about one of the great milestones in the history of flight: the 1935 crossing of the Pacific Ocean by a Pan American Airways flying boat called the China Clipper. The Pacific crossing was a technological achievement that captured the world’s imagination in much the way the space program did a generation later. It also began the era of transoceanic flight – an era that would lead to profound changes in American foreign policy, commerce and the very way Americans saw the world. Produced by one of the makers of "Forgotten Genius," NOVA's NEH-funded, Emmy Award-winning biography of black chemist Percy Julian, "Across the Pacific" will combine dramatic re-enactments, interviews with scholars, and films and photographs drawn from the rich archival record about the early days of commercial aviation.