Publisher's Synopsis
This index includes more than 450 'Zine summaries of Bill H. Ritchie's private essays compiled by his daughter, Nellie Sunderland. Meant to be a way to "pick a professor's brain," each entry is an abstract of journal notes and essays on the wide-ranging interests of Professor Ritchie. Video art was one of the focusses of his teaching when he was active at the University of Washington School of Art be-tween 1966 and 1985. He writes: " Imagine you are an art student, and you are living in your professor's rental where she keeps her library. Would you be curious? Would you browse?" Ritchie experienced this in college. His painting professor, Sarah Spurgeon, gave him free run of her library. After college Bill became an art professor, like she, and believes free access to his professors' private libraries shaped his teaching philosophy. He was hired to teach printmaking, but when he realized printmaking was one of many forms of media art, he branched out to video as an art form, and then to computer graphics. His meditations on his journey are the topics covered in this index. As an early adopter of new technologies in the 1990's, he mastered electronic publishing on the Cloud. In the process he learned about expert systems, knowledge engineering, AI, and data mining. It is how students can access their teachers' digital libraries. He decided to make digital files of his private journals and un-published work. Although long retired from formal college teaching, he wonders what it would be like to be an art student experiencing distance-learning in a Massively Open Online Course - a MOOC. Would students be interested in picking an art professor's brain online? An abstract appears on the back cover of this index from an essay about a Seattle Printmaking Center concept being tossed around in 1969. On the Internet, such buried treasures may await art and history students studying online. Digital libraries like this is likened to accessing all the worlds' art teachers' private thoughts. In this Ritchie Mined series, one can drill into this professor's library to mine for ideas in selected musings - like mining for nuggets of wisdom and finding veins of his thoughts touching on many topics. Bill's daughter Nellie Sunderland compiled this index of 460 entries - insights into Professor Ritchie's art and teaching philosophy and his old professor's way
