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The NC Jukebox project was renewed within the Bass Connections Information, Society, and Culture theme. We are also supported by the Franklin Humanities Institute. This means we will be able to develop our exhibitions at the Rubenstein Library and in Western NC further this summer, and to offer another class in Spring 2017. Trudi Abel will also offer a MALS MA course in Summer 2016 with students who will help do background research on the singers and songs.
We will be advertising for new participants at the January 27, 2016 Bass Connections Open House event. We are especially interested in undergraduates and graduates who can help with the following:

• Categorizing the NC Jukebox music according to key, chords, genres and other musical categories. This is so the archive is more useful to contemporary musicians who continue to play this music.
• Documenting conversations (video) with the families and descendants of the original performers. Editing the video for use online and in our exhibition.
• Engineering a physical “jukebox” for the exhibitions in Rubenstein and in Western NC. We might repurpose an old jukebox, take out the innards of an old radio, or create an entirely new device for music playback.
• Researching the specific songs in the collection to see how the lyrics have changed over time and space. These will be presented as side-by-side transcriptions, as well as in searchable metadata suitable future future text-analysis and map-based visualization.
• Helping design the database infrastructure to facilitate “distant reading” and “distant listening” of the tracks in the collection.
• Researching the singers and their lives using census data, city directories, and other archival tools.
• Discovering historically-relevant imagery to use in our exhibitions and online in Duke’s archives, Library of Congress, NYPL etc.
• Working on an experimental NC Ghosts VR installation in the Duke DiVE VR space. This will involve creating 3D models of an rural NC porch, a kitchen, and perhaps other locales where users can rez “ghosts” by focusing their attention via mind entrainment.

Great news! CLIR funded the Rubenstein Library’s Hidden Collections grant to digitize the rest of the Frank Clyde Brown collection of wax cylinders and aluminum disks. These recordings of western NC singers and songs from the early 20th c. are a tremendous resource for historians, ethnomusicologists, and folk musicians as well as the current community members descended from the original performers.  This will be a great boon to the http://ncjukebox.org project, which we started up this past Fall with a class centered around exploring, researching, and categorizing these materials for public sharing. This summer we’ll mount an exhibit in Rubenstein Library and present on the project to the SE Music Librarians Association conference in October.

Update: Check out the announcement from Duke Libraries