"Aur-Och: The Origins of Speech and Gesture" is the title of a CD ROM-Internet hybrid. It is being developed by PROLARTI: The Project on the Language-Art Interface at Brown University. It aims to offer a solution to three distinct problems in contemporary education: (1) the widening gap between the sciences and humanities in the academy--a problem with theoretical consequences; (2) the subordination of visual data in the study of human behavior, not only in the sciences but, ironically, in the humanities and social sciences, as well--a problem with epistemological consequences; (3) and the rapid growth of content deficient multimedia--a problem with pedagogical consequences. PROLARTI's goals for Aur-Och are theoretical, epistemological and pedagogical. The central theoretical and pedagogical questions around which Aur-Och will be developed are the following: What can we learn about human communication generally by studying speech and gesture together -- communication systems that are visual and verbal, iconic and symbolic? What role does the voice play in communication? What role does the rest of the body play? What role does the body play when the voice does not or cannot play a role? How might the methodologies, data, and theories from the various sciences (social and life) as well as the humanities help us to understand the totality of speech-and-gesture's communicative qualities, their biological necessities, their evolutionary beginnings, their cultural components, their neurological constitution, their aesthetic dimensions? In presenting the material, Aur-Och will exploit the new CD ROM and Internet technologies. Rather than be course specific, it will be modeled as an electronic library of multimedia "tomes". These tomes will consist of open-ended laboratories, tutorialq, classic experiments, texts, lectures, profiles and discussions (debates and dialogues). It is hoped that Aur-Och will appeal to a broad national audience of university/college students and profe ssors as well as to other learning communities. Aur-Och is scheduled for classroom beta-testing in 1998. A final version 1.0 will follow, pending further sponsorship.
