Karl Erickson, Marylhurst
University
Nature of the Request: Sounds and Words, a Project for the Preservation of
Domestic Humanities endeavors to safeguard precious audio and video
recordings of renowned United States’ authors, poets, and playwrights before
they are lost to future generations of readers and scholars. Its goals extend
beyond becoming merely a comprehensive repository for these audio and visual
recordings; the project aims to unearth new and forgotten content reflecting
professional and personal sides of our country’s greatest writers.
A successful project would be evidenced by not by preservation efforts alone,
but also by making these works more available to the public. As envisioned,
this project will accomplish what no other online media source has before
attempted: a comprehensive, searchable, and intuitively-accessed audio and
video content of our country’s greatest writers. It is hoped that similar endeavors may also
be sparked in other parts of the western world.
In order to accomplish this project, we are seeking necessary funds to
begin the first phase of this important work.
Humanities
Content: In an earlier Digital
Humanities project entitled William Stafford & Theodore Roethke, A DigitalHumanities Project, I demonstrated
the irreplaceable value found in recordings of the writer’s thoughts and
readings in his own voice. Is this context or background required for the
appreciation of the writers’ work? Usually, it is not. However, if one wishes
to delve more deeply into the complex mind of the writer, there is great value
in this audio and visual content of a wide-ranging nature. From old and
forgotten interviews to recovered family recordings, these snapshots of time
are our heritage; the time has come to step forward and preserve them for
future generations.
There is perhaps a
tendency by some in the field of humanities to too quickly pigeonhole or
characterize great authors after only a single novel or collection of poetry is
read. Sounds and Words, a Project for the Preservation of Domestic Humanities
aims to make more widely available a diverse range of media, which will
shed direct light on the true nature, character, and thought of those to whom
we owe such a great debt for the work of their minds. This way perhaps we may
begin to see these writers in a deeper and less stereotyped sense.
Unlike the other DH
project mentioned above, this new project would focus on all (United States
born) great authors, poets, and playwrights of the last century, or so. While
its scope extends greatly beyond the original Stafford/Roethke project, I
believe it could be a successful long-term endeavor. Restricting focus to United States writers
would likely encourage more thorough efforts into discovering and legally
acquiring use of new recordings into the repository; a worldwide writer focus
is believed to be too monumental a project to reasonably undertake at this
time. Once a sufficient number of media
resources have been acquired, efforts would begin to focus on the creation of a
website dedicated to the purpose of sharing the acquired media with students,
researchers, and the general public.
Project Format: The archive or media repository will be restricted to audio and
visual recordings featuring (United States born) great authors, poets, and
playwrights. With few possible exceptions, these will be the writers themselves
as opposed to talks or discussions about them. The media content would be
tagged in such a way that complex searches will be possible—e.g. family
recordings of novelists. This ease of user searchability would help encourage
greater use as a new academic resource.
As touched on earlier, the
project will allow both researchers and the public to have a greater
understanding and appreciation of the viewpoints and differences of thought and
art of selected writers.
Audience Distribution: A multi-prong approach is intended to increase audience size
(demographic distribution) and interaction. First, letters and other media
forms will be utilized when the project is ready for Beta Testing. It will
invite a select group to utilize the repository for a time without any cost in
exchange for sharing feedback and completing surveys. Second, social media will
endeavor to build interest in Sounds and Words, a Project for the
Preservation of Domestic Humanities by highlighting particularly important
and interesting media discoveries. It will invite new users to join in the
research and discovery at the heart of the project. Third, it is also our
intent to consider ways of employing a crowdsourcing technique with regards to
media tagging. This will not only build involvement and interaction, but it
will improve tagging quality.
As found in “By the
People, For the People: Assessing the Value of Crowdsourced, User-Generated
Metadata” from the Digital Humanities Quarterly (2015, Volume 9, Number
1), there is great potential found in harnessing the power of crowdsourcing.
As of now, there remains
debate about the comparative value of traditional and folksonomic metadata as
organizational systems for today’s information needs. Nonetheless, there is
growing recognition of the fact that folksonomies offer libraries with an ideal
return-on-investment scenario [Syn and Spring 2009] with minimum cost (much of
which can be off-set by digital humanities grants), maximum output of data
[Bischoff et al. 2009] [Noll and Meinel 2007], as well as the chance to
increase community engagement with their patrons. As the findings of the
present study demonstrate, folksonomic metadata, when used in tandem with
traditional metadata, increases findability, corrects preventable search
failures, and is by and large accurate. Furthermore, the data suggest that
given the same tagging conditions, librarians and non-librarians produce a
surprisingly similar distribution of useful metadata. Collectively, these
findings point to the potential to change the way we search for and organize
our most treasured media.
Works Cited:
Manzo, Christina, Geoff
Kauffman, Sukdith Punjasthitkul, and Mary Flanagan.
""By the People, For the People": Assessing the Value of
Crowdsourced, User-Generated Metadata."
DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: By the People, For the People:
Assessing the Value of Crowdsourced,
User-Generated Metadata. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 1 Sept. 2015.
Web. 06 Mar. 2016.
Erickson, Karl Bjorn.
"William Stafford & Theodore Roethke, A Digital
Humanities Project." Karl Bjorn Erickson, Author. Karl Erickson,
n.d. Web. 06 Mar. 2016.
