UD and Apple team up for course in Antarctica

Y ou don't typically plan a trip to Antarctica in January unless you've been banished there. Or, unless hotel space in Siberia is all booked.

But this is no punishment for a zealous team of 16 student researchers from the University of Delaware who are charting such an expedition for this January. The three-week mission in photojournalism will document the unique issues of life in Antarctica, ranging from its cold war history to its environmental, wildlife and scientific importance.

"It will not be a day at the beach, certainly, but this team is ready to take on the challenge," explained trip leader Ralph Begleiter, Rosenberg Professor of Communication and a former world affairs correspondent for CNN.

The students will first travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they will establish a mobile digital publishing classroom at the University of Palermo. The expedition begins and ends in Buenos Aires, because it is here the team will ultimately merge the elements of journalism, political science, photography and research it will collect via a host of digital technology tools.

The team will then travel to Antarctica and the Shetland Islands aboard the Peregrine Mariner, a Russian research vessel, for about 10 days.

Using Apple iBook laptop computers to collect data, capture digital images, share files and wirelessly communicate, the students will make daily excursions from the vessel in Zodiac rafts and kayaks to explore the habitat, scenery and wildlife of Antarctica.

In some cases, the team will camp overnight on the ice.

In all cases, they will experience the challenges of 24-hour sunlight amid Antarctica's "summer" season.

"Here we'll teach photojournalism, wildlife photography and a political science writing course designed to teach students that taking pictures is a lot more than point-and-shoot," Begleiter, who has logged nearly 2 million worldwide miles traveling for CNN, said. "It's about the substance of the story they want to tell, about the composition of the combined written and photo product and about the ethics of photography and journalism."

Some aspects of the trip will be dictated by weather and other unforeseen conditions. Antarctica's weather in January is not what one might suspect–typically 0 to 50 degrees with little snow–but that doesn't rule out the possibility of a snap storm or squall. Still, there's a better chance of encountering an unpredictable penguin or whale than the fierce Antarctic storm endured by Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated expedition in 1914.

In fact, it is recollections of Shackleton's horrific journey that has led to a recent surge in polar tourism. When the Soviet Union fell, Russian polar-research ships, and their well-trained crews, became available to tour groups and fact-finding missions. South Polar tourism took off in the '90s, and last season jumped to an estimated 9,400 visitors to the region, according to the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators in New York.

Joining the crew will be Jonathan Cox, a well-published naturalist photographer who teaches at UD. Cox's plan is to shoot entirely digital photography, both stills and video, on the expedition.

He will assign his students to "process" their photographs, write their captions and stories, edit their iMovie footage and publish their finished products on their iBooks, ultimately creating and posting web pages they design aboard the ship while still in Antarctica.

Cox also envisions creating a wireless Apple AirPort network among all computers on the ship, allowing students to share files and images and work collaboratively in a floating digital photojournalism studio.

Students will be given a variety of photojournalism assignments, ranging from people to wildlife to nature. They also will be asked to experiment with photograph manipulation on their iBooks, using Mac OS X and Photoshop to perhaps create two-headed penguins or to falsify photos by removing artifacts or extraneous parts of a scene. It's all part of Begleiter's lesson on ethics in photojournalism.

"Manipulation of a photo in one circumstance might be perfectly acceptable, while the same manipulation in another circumstance might be completely unethical," he explained.

Another prospect for technology on the voyage may be the live transmission of digital content–including video, photos, text and presentations–directly from the Peregrine Mariner to a web site at the University of Delaware. CNN has agreed to lend the team substantial portable communication technology to enable such transmissions, provided weather and satellite circumstances are favorable.

If transmission is possible during the voyage, CNN is encouraging the team to report on its adventure with personal accounts and digital content broadcast live via videophone–right from the Antarctic ice–to a potential worldwide audience.

The trip concludes back at base camp in Buenos Aires. The weeklong stay will enable students to edit and polish their projects and to post content to web sites back at the University. The projects in their final form also will be prepared for potential publication in other media outlets, such as magazines, newspapers and commercial web sites.

This is the second collaborative venture between the University and Apple that challenges technology in extreme conditions. Last October, Delaware students aboard the research vessel Atlantis sailed to Puntarenas, Costa Rica, for a 17-day mission to explore one of the hottest, most demanding environments on Earth--hydrothermal vents nearly two miles deep on the Pacific Ocean floor.

With the help of Power Mac G4 and PowerBook G4 computers, the international team of marine biologists, geologists and graduate students used the technology to gather and relay groundbreaking scientific data from ship to shore.

For more information on the University of Delaware's voyage to Antarctica, visit [http://www.udel.edu/ studyabroadprograms/ winter 2003/antarctica/ Antarctica.htm].