(Reposted from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s DH Fellows blog. See the original entry here.)
I spent the Fall 2017 semester in the Public Projects Division. Since the end of the Spring 2017 semester, as well as over the summer, I have been primarily working with the Hearing the Americas team to complete an NEH planning grant. This digital project will explore the history of the early music industry by recontextualizing digitized recordings from the LOC Jukebox, UCSB Cylinder Archives, and the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project. Working on this project has been an excellent opportunity to connect my interests in music history and digital public history. I first conducted content research, reading through secondary sources on the history of the early recording industry and locating primary sources that can complement the digitized recordings. Drawing from this research, I created some sample content that reflects the kinds of information and pathways that the site will provide. This sample content included Music Trivia questions, which will give users in depth explorations of important artists, songs, or themes, as well as sample Omeka item pages that include artists, songs, and genres. In addition to textual sources, I also helped to compile a sample set of visual primary sources including advertisements and catalogs that will be included as content as well as guide the aesthetic design.
