The historical question I have is why does the poor quality of audio from the 1930’s create a more authentic feeling for the listener? I believe it’s because when listening to older audio, we can expect certain things. In the context of slave narratives, we talked about and were warned that we could expect racism and that a lot of what was written or asked was from what the white people expected the black slaves had gone through 1. And we accept this because we understand that the 1930’s were a different time. So when we listen to an interview from the slave narratives, like this one with David White, we understand and accept that the quality is poor because the technology was new and wasn’t as refined as we have now 2. In this interview, I especially found it difficult to understand what was being said and even the transcript mentions it. But in a way, this poor audio is part of the experience of listening to older audio. If there was a crystal clear recording from the 1930’s, no one would believe that it’s actually from that time period. Even the songs from the time period have a static quality to them 3. So if the quality is so bad from that time period, then why do modern day people romanticize it? There are new songs today that mimic the static quality, “I Have Friends in Holy Spaces” by Panic! At the Disco comes to mind, and even in places like Instagram there are filters that are supposed to make your pictures look old 4. This all comes down to what I believe is nostalgia and purely aesthetic. Not many people actually want to live in the 1930’s, they want just the good parts. Whether that’s good or bad isn’t up to me, but it’s when we take the history away from that context that things get messy. As technology advances, historians are going to have to continually adapt how they are able to listen or see or interact with data created on outdated pieces of technology 5. So by being able to fake static or pictures to make them look older than they are, digital historians are going to have to reinvent the ways that they date a lot of content they study.
- I feel as though this source helps me prove to the reader that the expectations we have for people and archives from the 1930’s are very different from the ones we have today, as they should be. However that doesn’t make the racism from the 1930’s okay, but it contextualizes it. A Note on the Language of the Narratives, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/note-on-the-language-of-the-narratives/#note
- Turner, Lorenzo Dow, and Dave White. Interview with Dave White, St. Simons Island, Georgia,part 2 of 2. Saint Simons Island, Georgia, Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1984011_afs25666b
- Cowell, Sidney Robertson, Collector. Root, Hog, or Die. 1936. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017701379/
- Panic! At The Disco, I Have Friends in Holy Spaces, YouTube, 28 August, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TN5bJ1v03E
- Milligan’s article helps me add context to the difficulties that digital historians have today for older technology, while also helps me prove my point that digital historians today are going to have to work very hard to be able to distinguish real sources from fake sources Milligan, Ian, Historians’ archival research looks quite different in the digital age, The Conversation, 19 August, 2019, https://theconversation.com/historians-archival-research-looks-quite-different-in-the-digital-age-121096?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitterbutton
