Mapping the Digital Diaspora of a Dissertation Research Blog
At the onset of my field research in summer 2007, I launched a blog – YellowBuzz.org – with the intention to: 1) archive and organize my field notes in textual and audio-visual form; 2) convey my research purpose and progress to informant musicians and the public; 3) self-position as a “participant” in the scene. Since then, I have made over 160 posts, some directly linked and others tangentially related to my research findings about the activities and media of Asian American indie rock musicians. Over the past one and a half years, my field research blog has received attention from both print and online media. Evidently, this blog has constructed a community consisting of musician- and music-enthusiast-visitors with an interest in Asian American and transpacific music-culture. Read the rest of this entry »
About the Author
Wendy Hsu
Wendy Hsu is a PhD candidate in the Critical and Comparative Studies Program in the music department. Read her research blog @ YellowBuzz.org.
Pandora and the “genes” of music genres
Hello, it’s been a while since I blogged. You may remember me as the music Ph.D. student who was last heard from pondering the uses of Google Scholar. I’m on a new mission this semester, studying for my comprehensive exams. One of the topics I am researching and preparing an essay on is about genre in popular music. The concept may seem initially so self-evident, you may wonder what there is to write about it, per se. Oh, but there’s lots. This is because the issue of genre always involves the issue of classification, which inherently provokes debate. Take, for instance, a star performer like Beck. His music often includes acoustic guitar, and he’s covered Mississippi John Hurt. So he must be a folkie. Oh wait, but he also apes Prince on some funky jams. So maybe he’s a pop star. But he also headlines a bunch of big rock festivals, and we find his music in the “Rock” section at the record store (wait, what’s a record store?). So I guess we’ll call him a rocker.
My point being, popular music can be difficult to pin down using genre tags. You’ll find this evidenced in any number of press interviews with musicians who, when pressed by a journalist, pull out that time-worn chesnut that their sound is “unclassifiable”. Genre tags, be it pop, country, rock, hip-hop, salsa, what have you are almost like identifying pornography: I’ll know it when I see it. It’s often somewhat easier to identify what a genre isn’t than what it actually is. Read the rest of this entry »
Hide and Seek: Blacklight’s Smart Search Functionality
Bethany wrote recently in praise of Bess Sadler’s work on Blacklight, and its recent release (as “VIRGObeta”). I’d like to offer my own (admittedly anecdotal, perhaps insignificant) praise.
Electronic Text Analysis and the Wary Humanist
For a long list of complicated reasons, most practitioners of my discipline—political theory—tend to be suspicious of, if not altogether opposed to, the integration of computer technology into their research and teaching. While some scholars cite the superfluity of computer technology to the discipline (excepting, of course, Microsoft Word), others argue that the introduction of certain technologies might somehow actually endanger both thinking and learning (and who wouldn’t find the reduction of Plato to a series of PowerPoint slides, well, a tad reductive?).
Mining and Mapping Apocalyptic Texts, Part 2
As I explained in my last blog post, my dissertation will compare several statements about the final fate of humankind in Paul to similar statements in apocalyptic texts. In that post, I described how text-mining could help with the interpretation of the texts which stand at the center of my dissertation. In this post, I will discuss how geographic information systems (GIS) can help to visualize geographic relationships among texts. My ideas here, as in my first blog post, are the result of conversations with other staff members here at the Scholars’ Lab. The question that I pose and answer in this blog post is, What does geography have to do with the analysis of biblical texts? The short answer is, “Much, in every way.” But I can’t just assert that, I need to show it.
About the Author
Matthew Munson
Matt is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies and a Scholars' Lab graduate consultant.
Read more about Matt and access his other posts here.
A Kindle for Every Student?
The blogosphere has been abuzz with diverse opinions on the release of Amazon’s new Kindle 2. So far, most of the news has surrounded the controversial text-to-speech function and whether or not it violates copyright law (more on this here and here). Regardless of its legality, the speech sounds mechanical, and I don’t see this posing a threat to genuine audio books read with intonation by real people. But my interest is not in this primarily, but in reading via ebook itself.Read more…
Mapping Regional Language Use
So for the thousandth (or so it seems) time I’ve gotten into this discussion with my friends from the East Coast and Midwest (I’m from Texas) about the correct way to refer to a sweet carbonated beverage, and I have finally got to thinking about ways to map locally spoken slang and jargon using GIS. Starting a database of ‘events’ where a person uses unique language in reference to a common-place item or occurrence (I have a friend from Wisconsin who calls the drinking fountain a “bubbler”) would be an insightful way to examine how jargon or slang starts and spreads geographically.Read more…
Rome Reborn
My wife and I frequently engage in a strange kind of “culture war.” She thinks ancient Rome is the more interesting civilization, and I’m partial to ancient Greece. In these debates, I always tell her that I prefer philosophers to politicians. Still, I was excited when I first encountered Rome Reborn, a joint project between UVA’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, a few other schools, and Google (who allows access to the project through Google Earth). Read more…
On “Asian American” Digital Identity Politics
Everyday, I receive Google Alerts about any websites, blogs, or news feeds containing the keywords “Asian / American / music” in whatever order and combination that Google search engine finds. Most of the Alerts, unsurprisingly, point to stories related to U.S. politics. Interestingly, around the time of the 2008 Presidential Election, my InBox experienced a minor Google Alert “explosion” with news stories and criticisms listing all the color-based social groups, connecting Obama’s racial politics to the now dominant American ideology of multiculturalism. To my disappointment, none of these news stories included anything substantial information with regards to the Asian American (if there is such a thing) perspective on the Obama and Biden duo. Read more…
About the Author
Wendy Hsu
Wendy Hsu is a PhD candidate in the Critical and Comparative Studies Program in the music department. Read her research blog @ YellowBuzz.org.
Peer Review for Visual Aids?
How frustrating is this: You sit down to take in some form of scholarly work (be it a book, an article, or a talk) and you find yourself increasingly confused with a bombardment of information from graphs and figures and maps which don’t make sense because they either have too much or too little information contained within them or the information is poorly labeled (if at all). Or even worse, you are the person writing the book/article or giving the talk and instead of fielding questions on your scholarly processes, you are repeatedly explaining to the audience what your visual aids actually represent.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but if it is not a language your audience speaks, where have your efforts gotten you?Read more…
