Tag Archives: digital ethnomusicology

event research

A couple of things for Open Access at SEM

Instead of a physical participation at the Open Access roundtable at the annual meeting of Society of Ethnomusicology (SEM) in Pittsburgh today, I’ve offered my thoughts in the form of an audio recording and a post for Ethnomusicology Review (reblogged by JustPublics@365 out of CUNY). In this post, I traced the lifecycle of two of publishing projects from fieldwork to journal articles and argued for a productive tension between blogging and academic writing.

To sum up the post, I end with the following:

Publishing, to me, in its simplistic sense, is to make something public. If our public precludes those who have been our research associates, or individuals without institutional affiliations or access to scholarly journals, then we should rethink how we communicate our scholarship. Lastly, I return to the question of research impact, an inquiry central to the ethnographic perspective and a critical step of the ethnographic feedback loop. The issue of transparency can set the course of impact of our research. Having an open and transparent channel of communication is the beginning of a meaningful dialogue we ethnomusicologists can foster with the public. Informational openness, however, is a complex discourse that requires further contextualization and its discussion would not complete without a full consideration of access, ethics, and responsibility (Christen 2012). We’re living in a moment where the value of scarcity associated with industrial mode of production (Suoranta and Vadén 2008:131) is being challenged by the dispersed openness afforded by digital media. The scholarly publishing industry itself is a cultural field with policies and infrastructures driven by commercial values (Miller 2012) that mostly defy public interests. We should maintain our critical viewpoints as we engage with our own scholarly communication practices.

For a more personal framing on the meaning of open access publishing for a young off-tenure-track scholar, listen to this short audio recording. It’s kind of a pep talk.

research

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.