Ok, so today we are working on sound files and using sound files. I’m hoping to show that you can listen to a really cool guitar clip here.Click here to hear! I hope this works. I think it does.

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Today in DoingDH16 we learned about the loudness war, the music industry’s nefarious business of comprehension, and played with Garage Band and Audacity. We also used SoundCite to embed sound clips to your WordPress blog. Check out listen St. Louis blues

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Perhaps the most valuable thing I’ve gotten out of DDH is a new confidence in my ability to work with technology. I now realize that I could have created and maintained a blog (or edited a podcast, or created a digital exhibition) a long time ago. I just never knew it. I’m still no expert in any of these technologies, but I know believe that with some work I can become proficient.

Back to the question at hand … USF has a sizable collection of oral histories which I might be able to incorporate into a class project. My Spring 2016 seminar on the Civil Rights movement created a web exhibition of primary source documents located in USF special collections. As part of this project, each student had to select and analyze one of the oral histories from the collection. At that point, I had no idea how to work with the audio files, but I’m now more confident in my ability to manipulate them. I hope to more fully incorporate these resources into my teaching in the future.

I may also ask students to make a podcast related to local history utilizing oral history sources. If the students left my classroom with a new sense of technological confidence — “I CAN make a podcast!” — I’d consider it a teaching victory.

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Testing soundcite. Listen to this! (listen)

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On two occasions I have dedicated the first part of the U.S. History survey to sound.  The course was built loosely around the ideas expressed in Mark Smith’s Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, i.e., that antebellum perceptions of sound were different in the North and South and that disconnect contributed to the divisions that ultimately resulted in the Civil War.  I used multiple ‘sound bytes’ found on the internet, youtubes and films with the screen ‘muted’, and CDs to bring the consideration of soundscape into the classroom.  Each student was required to write a paper that focused on sound, pending approval of their proposal and annotated bibliography.

I had laid that focus down for the time being but the technological resources that we have explored here (audacity, garage band, OHMS as a repository, podcasting) has brought the idea back into my planning for the future.  Even more important is the atmosphere of brainstorming prompted by the readings and the seminar discussions (both in-session and in the hallway, at lunch, during the walk to ‘campus’, — fellowship).  I can now provide students with much better instruction of the possibilities for innovative projects — and thus, fairly require that of them. Instead of simply requiring papers I would work with them to create outward facing online expressions of their overall research topics using wordpress and omeka at a minimum.

Additionally, in the fall of 2017 I will be team-teaching a COPLAC (Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges http://www.coplac.org/ ) course.  My teaching partner is Leland Turner of Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, Texas.  Our students will hail from 8 campuses around the country (two per school).  Obviously this is an online course (skyped for common meetings).  We will focus on immigration into the various communities from which the students range.  I now can envision sound and video becoming a part of the ‘outward facing’ projects that are an element of this overall program.  I envision each duo of students creating several “Public Service Announcements” about the immigration history of their communities.  Imaging approximately one minute in length both sound and image would be incorporated into these ‘spots.’  These video podcasts would then be embedded in the sites that each student group would build. The possibilities for ‘doing’ local oral history should abound given this focus and strategy.

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Listening to the sounds of Cuba in late 19th century Central America — 

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Music was a significant part of both Native California and Spanish colonial culture. In the context of the missions, music was introduced as a part of the worship practices and as a way to train Native peoples in the traditions of western music as an element of creating, in the view of the Padres, “gente de razon” or civilized people. Reconstructing the musical practices of the missions has been a project of many historians and musicians listen. For example, see Craig Russell’s From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions and the history of the Jose Carabajal violin at Mission San Miguel.

These efforts to perform historic music raise many interesting questions. What were the soundscapes of the colonial period missions and how did music fit in? How did the missions differ from the soundscapes that Native peoples were familiar with prior to the arrival of the Spanish? Even if the performances of mission music is accurate, how can we know how Native people heard and understood the sounds? And beyond the sonic experience of the music, what can we understand about the significance the embodied experience of performing the music in which bodies were simultaneously generating motions and sounds synchronized under the direction of a choir director? What is the potential of performing historic music on historic instruments to engage audiences in new ways? And finally, how does the interpretation of music in the context of colonial missions shape how those audiences understand the past? Was training in western-style music beneficial or can it be seen as yet another imposition of Spanish expectations on Native bodies?

Music clip from:
Cantar Quiero
Music of the California Missions

Recorded at Loyola Marymount University
Produced by John Fleherty
Associate Producers:
Ron Schmidt, SJ and Luis Proenca, SJ

A collection of engaging music that highlights the artistic contributions of the Franciscan friars who develeoped the California Missions. Music was an integral part of life in all of the Missions, marking the day´s activities. Listen and enjoy the many styles here, from Latin Mass settings and Gregorian chant to new compositions set for multiple vocal parts and Hispanic folksongs with memorable melodies and lively rhythms.

Published by World Library Publications, ISBN 978-1-58459-307-2

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“Sound day” at Doing Digital History 2016 made me realize that as a historian, I privilege words over sound. Let me explain this with an example from the classroom. In the U.S. History survey course, I find it important for students to engage with historical speeches. In the past few years, I have moved toward showing video or audio clips of these speeches while students follow along with a transcript. These clips are fairly easy to find for the twentieth century, but (as we noted earlier today) a bit difficult to find for earlier periods. To solve this problem, I sometimes use recitations of historical speeches by actors. Mark Ruffalo reading Eugene V. Debs “Canton Speech” is one of my current favorites. This practice has its advantages and disadvantages, to be sure, and I am certain that if you are reading this, you can voice concerns about this practice with greater nuance than I can express in this brief post. I had never thought of it in the context of sound, though. With Ruffalo reading Debs, students get the words, but not the sounds. They hear Debs’ 20th-century speech, but with 21st-century inflections and a 21st-century audience. (I had thought of this point before, of course, and perhaps that isn’t so bad, considering that concerns about war and capitalism loomed large in the minds of both audiences, but this raises the question of how to bring sound from the past, not just words, into the classroom.) What follows are some ideas for integrating sound and video into teaching and perhaps even some public history.

• The sounds of the factory, the street, the dance hall, the political rally.  One of my colleagues today mentioned that they do this, so I apologize for lifting my first point from them (maybe I should have buried this later in the list), but it is a great idea to integrate the sounds of life into material I already use.  I often use the film below of the steam hammer at the Westinghouse Works, shot in 1904, to show students factory work in this period, and it is extremely effective.  The film doesn’t have audio, though, which I have come to like because we can talk through it and the students can discuss the work while they watch.  Again, privileging words over sound.  I’m going to look for some factory audio from the period, so I can introduce students to the historical experience in greater detail.  Perhaps we will begin with the silent film, discuss a bit, and then I’ll add the sound–something they may not have anticipated.

• Music.  Of course, I use music in my classes, but we talk about the lyrics, not the melody or the beat, or the process of making the songs.  Now that I have heard Michael O’Malley talk about Frank Sinatra, I can’t go back to handing out my sheet of Woody Guthrie lyrics, analyzing a verse of “If you ain’t got that Do-Re-Mi” and calling it a day.  I don’t know much about music at all, but I didn’t know much about labor unions or hardtack before I started teaching, and I made the effort to learn.  Perhaps the sound deserves some of the attention I have been paying to the words all of these years.
• Oral history.  I have always used oral history in the classroom.  Students read or listen to oral histories in my courses quite a bit.  I use oral history in my research.  I never considered myself a public historian, but I’ve been inspired by Preserve the Baltimore Uprising and NC HB 2: A Citizens’ History to try something new.  It will take some planning, but I’d like to assemble a group of interested partners to collect oral histories of the Topeka public school system.  As you may know, public schools are pretty controversial in Kansas, and before we lose sight of the stakes of this particular debate, we might want to explore public school history a bit more and let the people speak.  My son is a student in this school district, and I want him to be able to hear this history–words, voices, sound–so that he knows we understand it is important.

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“General Public,” sitting on the steps of the British Museum

The British Museum, London

Exhibit designers make all kinds of decisions to help visitors navigate through curators’ and educators’ plans for their learning. Linear narrative? Limit directional choices by making spaces narrower! Need to impress with a monumental message? Open up that gallery so visitors can see it all at once! Need visitors to go right? Put in a curved wall for them to flow by like water! There seems to be no end to design options for nudging visitors in the direction we want them to go.

The problem with all of them is that dyspeptic yet high-ranking old soldier General Public, the fickle, powerful fellow whom museum professionals study, love, and complain about. No matter when that beautiful, expensive, well-lit curved stopwall tells him to go right, he’s got other ideas. Maybe he’ll go right, maybe he’ll go left. When General Public comes up among museum professionals, it’s usually because he’s done something we don’t like (e.g. fail to read our long labels, sit on the floor in a gallery with no seats, or get fingerprints all over our clean plexi…geez-louise General Public, do you have to eat ice cream before pointing at objects?!).

In our field today, we know there is no one public, some mass of humanity that can be used as a catch-all for all museum users, and yet this fiction of General Public persists. Sometimes people do have behaviors in common that tempt us to treat them as a mass, but conceiving of museum users as an undifferentiated mass will lead us to ignore the very richness, the complexity, and diversity they bring to public institutions. If we let General Public stand in for all visitors, we miss opportunities to communicate effectively with people of differing abilities, experiences, concerns, and motivations for learning.

At The British Museum, I took a photo of visitors sitting all over the steps behind a sign that clearly says “Hey! No sitting on the steps, dumbass!” (Translated to American English by me.) I submit that the least productive response that professionals can make to such a seating situation is to bemoan the bad behavior of General Public and walk away grumping, wishing we had gone into a more lucrative field that didn’t involve so many…people. Maybe a better solution is to find a way to provide seating in a place that won’t be a problem if a fire alarm sounds. Lots of people, but not all of them, need a bit of a rest after a museum visit. Give these folks a place to rest their bums (American English translation: give them a place to park their asses).

So let’s just salute General Public one last time and let him retire to some rest. He’s just seen too much battle.

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We’ve been asked to consider if we would use text mining as we went over it today. I could see creating a corpus of documents written by the subject of my research (Augustin Smith Clayton 1783-1839) and then attempting variations of distant reading to see what topics might pop up that I hadn’t thought to include. I possess pretty much everything the guy ever wrote, so it is possible.There is the problem of preparing the hundreds of pages of his awful novel, The Mysterious Stranger (even people at the time thought it boring), as well as his many political essays, reports and speeches, not to mention all the notices of him in the newspapers, and the ghostwriting he did for Davy Crockett. All of that is done in the 1820s and 1830s. None has been well OCR’ed, which means I have to do it and correct it, just to see if text mining produces anything useful. My take is that while possibly interesting, the return on the investment of time and effort, for this project, would not be sufficient to justify all the work involved.

M

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