Cagli Project / Armagh Project

Learn 21st Century Media in Ancient European Towns

Armagh, N. Ireland	Cagli, Italy

Sign up now for the Summer 2008 Cagli or Armagh media bootcamps

The Cagli Project offers communications students the chance to spend a summer immersed in the charming Italian town of Cagli, nestled in the foothills of the Apennine Mountains not far from the Adriatic beaches. Students learn storytelling, digital photography, video, and web design to produce a multimedia Webzine about the community. Cost: $4,995 - Apply now with refundable $500 deposit. Six college credits transferable to Loyola. Guaranteed admission for Loyola students.

Organized by the Institute for Education in International Media (ieiMedia) in Cagli, Italy, and now Armagh, N. Ireland. Visit our web site www.ieiMedia.com to learn about our programs in Italy (www.inCagli.com) and Ireland (www.InArmagh.net), or email Italy ( CagliProject@gmail.com) or Ireland ( ArmaghProject@gmail.com). Download Cagli/Armagh 2008 flier for more information. Download Cagli or Armagh program application forms. Go to Loyola College 2008 Summer Transfer Request webpage. Deadline April 15, 2008.

Ghosts of Armagh

A Multimedia Reporting Boot Camp Flourishes in the High Seat of the Irish Queens and Kings

By Arielle Emmett

There were no monsters in the hills above Armagh, Northern Ireland. There were no billboards or cigarette ads, no leprechauns disappearing over pots of gold, no IRA rebels bombing art galleries, no naked women dancing in the streets.

Instead, American co-eds -- the multimedia students of the Armagh Project -- were scurrying up Vicar's Hill in a rainstorm, their heels clicking and tapping on the oldest cobblestone street in Ireland. This was the place where the ghost of the Green Lady was supposed to be captured in a bottle and bricked up in the window of her house on Vicar's Hill, just a stone's throw away from St. Patrick's first Christian Church of Ireland, and where Brigid Carey, 18 years old, from Spokane, Washington, made a rainy night discovery:

"The rain slowly seeped into my sweater, hair, and skin, and silence filled the air with an undeniable music," Ms. Carey wrote in her on-line journal. "To some this street could have looked sinister, with its many shadows, dark golden and red hues, and only the sounds of a distant rainfall for comfort, but it made my heart swell... mesmerized me more than any once-in-a-life experience could. I don't believe I could ever find this moment in America."

Ms. Carey was joined by 19 other students on their way back from a nighttime performance of Frank Pig Says Hello, a contemporary drama staged at the Armagh Market Place Theatre & Arts Center. All of them, students from all corners of America, were responding to the new and old beauties of Northern Ireland. Like modern investigators, these young reporters carried pens and notebooks, digital video cameras, and backpacks loaded with Macintosh laptops and chewing gum. In four short weeks, they pried where they shouldn't, listened where they could, and wrote and produced multimedia stories that could not have been written at any other time and place than this -- the here, now, of the new Northern Ireland.

Through IEImedia, a project begun in 2001 by Loyola journalism professor Andrew Ciofalo, these students participated in a technology and cultural "bootcamp" of great intensity. They were tasked within four weeks to organize themselves quickly into teams, to case the town of Armagh -- the oldest city in Ireland, and the seat of the High Irish Queens and Kings -- and find stories of people and places they could write about, convey visually through still photography and film, slide shows, and text -- and then to design Web sites where all the work was displayed in sight and sound.

I'm not sure why the experience got to me -- to all of us. But in less than four weeks, these students of just about every color and ethnicity tramped around Armagh, a city of culture and conflict, and made it their own.

"Friday night was very chilly," wrote student Lauren McKean Perraza, "and photography professor George Miller, film professor Dustin Morrow, and students Andrew, Christine, Meg, and I were all drawn to Kelly's bar to warm up and to listen to traditional Irish music. As soon as we walked into the bar, a group of five natives of Armagh ranging in age from 25 to 60 years old pulled us into their booth affectionately and eagerly... For a second I thought someone in our group must have known one of these people from a previous encounter -- but no, none of us knew any of them. Orla, a friendly Irish woman in her mid-forties, literally lured us into the booth with her eager handshake... Meg and Andrew were pulled and squeezed into the center of the half-circle booth and began deep conversation immediately with Orla and the others. Of course, having learned the nature of the Irish [is] to be kind, the rest of us sat right down and began chatting. We lost all sense of time and simply enjoyed the conversation, even during difficult moments, and the music."

How did the students handle Armagh? They dove in. Multimedia training by nature demands quick study, especially for young people who have one week to find a suitable story and work in teams to flesh it out.

Student Kyle Saadeh visited the curator of the Armagh museum and wrote about the discovery of the Viking chieftains who sacked St. Patrick's church in 832 AD, leaving behind silver bracelets and rivers of blood (the Anglican Church of Ireland, now a stout Norman-style structure, has been rebuilt 17 times throughout Ireland's turbulent history, most recently in 1840.)

Lauren Hicks and Janine Quarles climbed 410 steps to interview and film the 82 year-old carilloneur of St. Patrick's Catholic Cathedral on Sandy Hill. Then the girls did the exact same thing at the Anglican St. Patrick's Church on neighboring Sally Hill, round the corner from Dean Jonathan Swift's house, where he wrote Gulliver's Travels.

In their single month in this city of twin Cathedrals, the students explored Bramley apple orchards and the town's 18th century astronomical observatory, still perfectly preserved and conducting modern observations of the stars. Alexandra Cavallo wrote about the proprietress of Cloud Cuckoo, an Aristophanes-inspired novelty shop, while Brigid Carey and her reporting team documented Roger Mallon, the philosopher king of the nearby Bagel Bean café. Brigid's older sister Meg Carey and teammates Cate Oliver and Nora Daly explored the green burial mounds of Emain Macha ("the Twins of Macha"), the Neolithic settlement known today as Navan Fort. Caitlin Robirds documented the life of Cathy Rafferty, a Sinn Fein Council Woman working toward reconciliation who was imprisoned for six years for her involvement in the IRA shooting of a British soldier.

Armagh spread a welcoming mat of intricate weave to these students, many of whom had Irish roots. Their interview subjects included Polish immigrants, barkeepers, priests and vicars, Gaelic football players, Irish road bowlers, Uilleann pipers, and a former IRA rebel who once bombed the very art gallery spaces he now owns.

I can't pinpoint any one technique or encounter that changed all. But by the end of the first week reluctance and confusion had turned into round-the-clock engagement. Within four short weeks we managed to do what most multimedia reporting classes of full semesters don't seem to do: Create high-energy, motivated journalists who uncover rich tapestries of stories and manage to tell them (quickly and convincingly) with digital tools.

Of course, that's one of the great blessings of boot camp experiences. Nobody sleeps. The group of story telling, video and photography faculty from Temple and Gonzaga University in Spokane airlifted these students from around the country to Belfast and then Armagh, saying: "Here, you're a stranger in a strange land. You've got 3 weeks to familiarize yourself with the people and the turf and what's hidden here and you'll work in teams to write, photograph, produce videos, and design your own Web sites to tell a unique story."

That was it. Nobody slept and everybody worked. We had morning classes in a modern technology center in town, located in a restored Georgian Building housing one of Armagh's four public libraries that serve less than 20,000 people. Each morning we had teas and coffees and fresh bagels in the shops. We all slept in a modest student hostel situated right next to Jonathan Swift's house (where he wrote Gulliver's Travels), with great views of the Gaelic football fields and twin Cathedrals of Armagh. A short walk across Vicar's Hill, the oldest cobblestone street in Ireland, ostensibly haunted by the Green Lady and the place where High King Brian Boru (Borhoime) sleeps, and we converged each weekday at "boot camp." Students got intensive training in writing, interviewing and reporting -- Temple professor Tom Petner and I handled story telling both from a broadcast and print perspective. The students also got speech and diction classes, learned Irish culture and history, practiced journaling, and did videography and editing on Final Cut Express, along with photography and Web design.After lunch, we unleashed them to go out into the city and surrounding countryside, find sources, and collaborate in teams on stories.

This total immersion approach is entirely driven by tag-team experience, not theory. The object is to give students digital basics, lots of professional handholding, but mostly a carte blanche to explore the ideas and people that seem most interesting to them. "The main point of education is to get students thinking for themselves and to be creative self-starters," said Loyola's Ciofalo. "Our converged media approach prepares students for a new media world, one in which individual initiative is more meaningful than working for "big media."

"We've been doing it for seven years," Ciofalo continued. In 2002, he rounded up a small staff of professional reporter-teachers, film makers, photographers, and Web designers to accompany a group of students to a small town in Cagli, Italy, on the ancient Via Flaminia near the Adriatic Sea. "That first year we arrived totally unprepared," he recalled, "not enough computers, cameras or videocams." When the students complained about lack of resources, Ciofalo retorted, "So what? Just do your work. There are no excuses out here. The ‘home office' needs our webzine in four weeks --- no excuses. We have never missed a deadline."

Ciofalo says that "an element of adversity" drives experiential learning. "The world isn't a neat place, so making sense of that world requires a flexible person dedicated to the job at hand." His object is to produce "backpack journalists" who can function in any international setting, he says. "I think we can drop off our best students with a gps laptop, a digital camera and a videocam and have them sending back relevant stuff within a week." The advantage of the international approach is "we awake students to the limitations of viewing a foreign society through an American prism."

Reporting in Armagh is learned in teams. Each student takes a different role on the team while sequentially finding and reporting stories -- first as writer/ story teller, then as photographer, videographer, and Web designer. In this way, everyone learns different modes of story telling through rotation, and a single team produces four entirely different stories in a single four-week stretch.

"By the end of the first week I was scrambling [for stories]," admits Chrissy Doughty, a Temple University journalism major. "But there were no real problems on my team. We had four weeks to work it out, and the majority of the work crunch time was in the middle two weeks." Doughty found that even with the ups and downs -- some teams did have personality conflicts, and some struggled with microphones and work habits and film editing software that seemed downright scary â€"the synergies built. "The longer you stay and learn and know about the town, the more you want to do," Doughty observed. "You learn how to communicate better with the people you're working with, and when you go, you take a part of the town with you. You think about the relationships that have begun to foster within you."

Besides, she adds, the clouds of Armagh are drop-dead gorgeous. They have gold and silver flecks in them, and you can lost watching them any hillside. On clear days, when the air is especially crisp and chilly, you can rise from your lumpy bed in the youth hostel (where both faculty and students stayed) with a mantra on your lips: that global warming never existed, that childhood is part of your future, not your past, and that great Irish stories are still ripe for the taking.

"You're a stranger in a strange land," the mantra goes. "We've airlifted you here. You've got exactly 3-1/2 weeks to familiarize yourself with the people, the turf, and what's hidden here, and you'll work in teams to capture and document a unique story."

Janine Quarles said she wanted to write her long-form story on the new Northern Irish movement toward peace and reconciliation. She struggled at first to find sources. But within a week Quarles had located leaders of the four main political parties who gathered in Armagh's John Hewitt International Summer School to talk about their differences. They each agreed to interviews. "I presumed I was going to be the only black person in our program and one of the very few in the country," Quarles confessed. "I expected to be humbled. At first I kept headphones on and refused to engage the locals in conversation. But as I started to work and encountered the Catholic population, I realized how similar their struggle was to what black people in America had experienced," she continued. To her surprise, Quarrels said she was received warmly and well. "The people I met gave me their business cards and invited me to spend time with their families in Dublin," she said. In the pubs, men asked her to dance, touching and marveling at her hair.

Charlotte Levins. 19 years old, of Temple University, who had always loved ghost stories, met up with Armagh native Roisin (pronounced Ra-sheen) Kelly. Kelly was obsessed with finding "the truth behind the terror" of the Green Lady, an unfortunate girl named Bellina Prior. Prior, a nanny, lived on Vicar's Hill and was accused in 1888 of drowning a four-year old child in a vat of water (boiling or cool, depending on the story). "She was in fact a twenty-one-year-old girl described as being "very funny" and "full of mischief" in local papers at the time," according to Kelly. Most likely Prior was innocent of the crime -- details of the incident suggested an accident combined with Prior's own hysterical paralysis. She was found guilty and imprisoned in a lunatic asylum for years, emerging in Dublin as "an odd and antisocial" woman at age 40, Kelly wrote. Ultimately Prior was poisoned by her own mother, a woman bereaved by loss and abandonment, who then committed suicide herself.

Prior's soul is said to be confined in a green bottle -- hence the name "Green Lady" -- bottled up behind the window of her house on Vicar's Hill Reluctantly, Levins agreed to photograph and make a movie of the Green Lady tale with teammates Kelly, Cate Oliver, and camera woman Sarah Turner. "George Miller showed me how to photograph in the dark," Levins said. "And one night we were stopped as we were filming because this old lady came out in the fog to talk to us. She stayed with us talking for two hours, and I noticed she was paralyzed on one side because of a bombing [she endured] years ago on Scott's street."

I won't tell you what happened next during the filming; you can see the results of The Truth Behind the Terror on the web site. Suffice it to say that Charlotte Levins had an unexpected visitor on Vicar's Hill; and photographer and Web master captured the visitor on film, an experience Levin said caused a moment worthy of The Blair Witch Project.

Surviving that filming, though, Levins went on to interview John Nixon, a respected Armagh journalist and art gallery owner who was shot at age 17 and imprisoned for more than dozen years as an IRA activist. Nixon now tells a few horror tales of his own, according to Levins. "I came to Armagh thinking I'd never do a story on The Troubles; it's so ironic that I ran into Nixon and did," Levins said. "When he began telling these stories, I realized how bad things still are, that there is still a long way people have to go. But," she added, "the people are trying and that's what counts. They're moving away from that history of violence."

Infused with a sense of hope, Levins counts herself as one of the many "green ladies" of our Armagh program. Hers was the first multimedia class lucky enough to share in the full spectrum of colors and feelings in a city beginning to heal after thousands of years of conflict. But clearly, something more was at work here, as though multimedia were a lens to focus the most personal questions -- questions not only about Ulster and the life of its citizens, but about the students themselves, what they hoped and dreamed to do as writers and future reporters.

"Armagh reminded me of a forest fire, a land that slowly begins to grow again," said Temple's Chrissy Doughty. And I can't disagree with her. "Here we are, recording the people living with the past," she said, "and trying to hope for their future."

Congratulations to Loyola student Juanita Dudnhath who successfully completed the Armagh Project 2007.

Notice to Students, Concerning Changes in the Cagli Program