Multimedia Resources (3)

Grandes Festivales de España (Great Festivals of Spain). Prod. Harry E. Babbitt Ph D., Oswaldo Salas, Dr. José Regalado. 2004. DVD. Babbitt Instructional Resources, 2004.

Dr. Harry E. Babbitt is a Spanish instructor who earned a Master’s and a PhD from the Universidad Nacional de Mexico. After years as an AP teacher, he felt there was a lack of good visual information that is so pertinent to teaching the linguistic and cultural aspects of another country. He created Babbitt Instructional Resources which specializes in filmmaking for foreign language instruction. His 45-minute film features five different festivals in Spain, including the Fallas in Valencia, Holy Week in Seville, the April Fair in Seville, the Fiesta of Santiago in Galicia, and the Fiesta of San Fermín in Pamplona. The video would benefit a journalist or researcher because it not only provides information about the festivals, but the person is able to actually hear the music and see the art, monuments, construction, and the religious aspects that are particular to each festival. This video captures and clearly exhibits the immense diversity among the festivals in different regions of Spain.

“Hogueras de San Juan de Alicante.” 6 June 2006. Online video clip. YouTube. Accessed 01 June 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5krW96uwikQ.

This video clip comes from one of the national television stations from the Community of Valenicia, Canal 9. It features the Hogueras festival in Alicante, Spain from 2006. It features the 178 monuments that are burned during the last night of the festival. This clip is particularly interesting because it shows not only the burning of the monuments, but other important behind-the-scenes aspects of the festival. Some of these include the traffic that floods the city, the late-night fireworks, the firemen who extinguish the monuments, and the post-party clean-up crew. These lesser-seen activities that are involved in the festival process would be extremely helpful for any journalist interested in the topic because it would provide them with an all-encompassing view of the festival.

Paris-Bouvret, E and Pérez-Gironés, En Una Palabra, Sevilla, España: A CD-ROM for Exploring Culture in Spanish. CD-ROM. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

This CD-ROM is published by the Georgetown University Press, a company that publishes scholarly books and journals for globally diverse audiences. It is a multimedia tool that allows researches to learn about Spanish culture interactively. This would be particularly helpful for non-Spanish journalists because the interactive CD-ROM allows the participant to understand how cultural values are embedded in the practices of a culture—for example, through fiestas. The information is given in the form of interviews of people from Seville, Spain, which makes the information extremely important because the user is connected with the cultural aspects on a personal level.