Blog

NC Jukebox Renewed with Bass Connections; Open House on 1/27/2016

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.

STEAM Challenge Deadline February 1, 2016

We are hosting several info sessions for the STEAM Challenge, which is thematized around “Digital Humanities” this year as part of the Duke Digital Humanities Initiative and co-sponsored by the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs. The initial project proposal deadline is February 1, 2016. Members of the STEAM Challenge Advisory Board will be on hand at the info sessions, and are also available for consultation about potential projects.

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CLIR “Hidden Collections Grant”

iphone-music-nohandGreat 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

 

Bass Connections: Information, Society, and Culture

Just announced that I’m the new co-director, with Robert Calderbank, of the Bass Connections: Information, Society, and Culture theme. This is pretty exciting because it brings together a lot of my interests. Given that the Information Science + Studies Program Certificate is also the Bass ISC Certificate, and that I’m working on increasing visibility and opportunities on campus through the Digital Humanities Initiative at FHI this all comes together nicely. Looking forward to working on this with everyone/

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Spring 2016 Teaching

I will not be teaching courses in Spring 2016 as I will be on leave working on augmented reality research projects and reading upon the latest theories and possibilities for augmenting the public presence of the humanities through digital cultural heritage application development. In addition, I will continue to develop the Bass Connections NC Jukebox project with our team of faculty/staff/students/partners, as well as explore alternatives to Metaio, and work on plans for the Visualizing Venice Ghetto and Duke/Durham Ghosts mobile applications. I’ll also continue to develop the Digital Humanities Initiative at FHI and co-direct the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge.

Summer 2016 Visualizing Venice Workshop

In Summer 2016 I’m very pleased to be co-teaching the Visualizing Venice summer workshops again. This year’s theme will be the 500th Anniversary of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice. I’ll be working on some Venice AR projects in Spring 2016 in anticipation of the workshop, as well as developing the curriculum with our team in the Wired Lab and in Venice. Last year we had a fabulous, international cohort of participants for the highly competitive workshop. Hoping for the same again this year.  Updates at http://dukewired.org on applications etc.

Duke STEAM Challenge 2015-16: Digital Humanities

Excited to announce the new Duke STEAM Challenge, which is co-sponsored by the Office of Academic Affairs, the Digital Humanities Initiative at FHI, and Information Science + Information Studies, along with support from Innovation and Entrepreneurship, HASTAC at Duke and more. The STEAM Challenge is a competition for students to bring together STEM with Arts and Humanities to make a difference in the world. This year’s theme, Digital Humanities, reflects special attention to humanities data, broadly conceived, and to ways in which humanistic inquiry can enrich our understanding of the ethical and critical stakes of scientific interventions. Hoping to see a lot of great applicants. We are doing a few info sessions this December and then again in January, with a deadline for initial project proposals on February 1, 2016.

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DukeSTEAM Poster

Duke STEAM Challenge Website

Duke STEAM Challenge Facebook Group

Fall 2015 Teaching

In Fall 2015 I am teaching two classes:

HCVIS 580S/ISIS 580S/VMS 580S: Historical and Cultural Visualization Promseminar 1

This course is the first semester proseminar for the Wired MA in Historical and Cultural Visualization. The whole course is basically about the idea of data in the humanities, and about how “digital humanities” can become multimodal. We start out with some HTML and CSS, move on to archives and metadata, turn to basic data viz, and then get into historical GIS and digital mapping tools. We try to emphasize tools that are accessible for teaching as well as research, and methods that are reproducible on a budget. The best part of the class is when everyone fully appreciates how much of a critical and structural point of view is embedded in our “tools” and how inseparable those considerations are.

Overview | Historical and Cultural Visualization Proseminar 1

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HISTORY 390S/ISIS 390S/: Topics in Digital History/Digital Humanities: NC Jukebox 

This is a Bass Connections Information, Society, and Culture and Rubenstein Archives Alive  course. NC Jukebox is focused on taking the Frank Clyde Brown collection of 1930s songcatcher recordings from Western NC and making them available to the public. The course is about researching the singers and songs, thinking about how we construct cultural histories, how we create multimodal physical and virtual exhibitions and archives, and the ethics and legalities involved in all of it. We are developing a public online archive, a physical exhibit for the Rubenstein Library to open in Summer 2016, and another exhibit to set up in the Mountain Music Museum of Western NC. The project will continue as a group research effort in Spring 2016 and hopefully beyond.

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