Graphics Co-ordinator's Report

AGOCG Web Site

The AGOCG web site is currently undergoing a reorganisation, in order to provide more structured access to the large number of resources now available. Comments on the site are very welcome, and should be addressed to Sue Cunningham.

Visualization and the Social Sciences

The report from the workshop on 'Advanced Visualization and Virtual Reality in the Social Sciences' held at the University of Leeds in September is available on the AGOCG web site. An edited set of 'Case Studies of Visualization in the Social Sciences', funded by JISC and ESRC through AGOCG (eds. Peter Fisher and Dave Unwin, Universities of Leicester and London), are also now available on the AGOCG web site. The nine case studies aim to show how visualization techniques are being used in the social sciences, and provide a source of technical information on the software and hardware systems used.

VRML in Art and Design

Neil Ashdown and Simon Forestiero have produced a 'A Guide to VRML 2.0 and an Evaluation of VRML Modelling Tools'. The first section of the report provides an introduction to VRML, and looks at some of the browsers available. The second section looks at VMRL modelling tools, examining in more detail six tools capable of producing VRML97 scenes. The report can be found at the VRML / Java3D Information Centre: http://www.scs.leeds.ac.uk/vrmljava3d/

Cooperative Working

A new briefing paper on CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Working) is available online (http://www.agocg.ac.uk/AV/briefing.shtml). The paper draws on some of the work reported in the JISC Assist workshop on Collaborative Working, also available online from the JISC web site.

Presentation Technologies

The JTAP project APT (Applied Presentation Technologies in Higher Education) has produced a Presentation Toolkit. The toolkit covers planning, designing, creating and delivering multimedia presentations, and provides a review of several presentation packages. The toolkit is available on the APT web site: http://www.umist.ac.uk/apt/index.htm

New JTAP Reports

Several new reports are available from projects funded under JTAP (http://www.jtap.ac.uk). These include:

Metropolitan Area Networks, Fast Servers, and the Creation of a Multimedia Library
The Omni.Bus A Remote Advisory Case Study
The NEAT System Video Conferencing over Scotland's Metropolitan Area Network
The Web Concordances.

Several short reports on digitising data (image, video and sound) have been produced by the Virtual Seminars project. These and other reports from the project are available from http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/reports/

Online and Distance Learning

Issue 8 of Active Learning, the journal of the CTI, looks at the evaluation of C&IT projects, including the use of the WWW and other network based resources to enhance classroom based learning, and methods of evaluation. Active Learning is freely available to academic staff from HEFCE, SHEFC, HEFCW or DENI funded institutions. For more information see http://www.cti.ac.uk/

Sue Cunningham
AGOCG
Manchester Visualization Centre
Manchester Computing
University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL
UK
Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6095
Fax: +44 (0) 161 275 6040
sue.cunningham@mcc.ac.uk http://www.agocg.ac.uk/