Recap of Digital Ethnomusicology talk at SEM (slides with notes)

I came back from the 2013 Society of Ethnomusicology meeting in Indianapolis. Our roundtable on Digital Ethnomusicology went well and was superbly productive. The roundtable consisted of 4 young scholars’ take on digital methodology in their work [read abstracts].

A group of engaged interlocutors participated from the audience. Our short presentations on respective digital methods provoked questions related to the ethics, privacy, licensing, and boutique and vernacular tools for digital ethnomusicological research. In addition, a discussion about technological literacy was sparked providing a context for the roundtablists to speak to how each of us came to engage with digital practices as researchers, but more importantly, to foreground the necessity of collaboration in digital projects.

This was probably the first time words like “digital ethnomusicology” and “big data” (ala Daniel Shanahan‘s paper “Using Big Data to Examine the Effect of Environment on Listening Habits”) appeared on session titles at SEM. In the coming year, I hope to further organize this conversation into a formalized and better distributed form.

I’ve  posted my the slides with notes from my talk “Multimodality and Scalability: A Deepened Engagement with Software and Physical Materiality of Music-Culture” here. Let’s keep the conversation rolling.

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