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 »
Illuminating Historical Architecture
Following up on my introduction to using 3D models to recreate archaeological sites and perform meaningful academic analysis on simulated virtual environments, I will discuss in further detail my current project concerning the recreation of the House of the Drinking Contest in Seleucia Pieria, the port city of Roman Antioch.
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?).
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…
Mining and Mapping Apocalyptic Texts, Part 1
I have used computer technology to help my work in biblical interpretation for a while. I learned to do complex digital word searches with the Bibleworks software package early in my graduate career. When I started working at the Scholars’ Lab in the summer of 2006, I was introduced to digital humanities. I found these technologies fascinating. But how, I asked, could they help me interpret ancient religious texts in their original languages? I recently posed this question to some of my colleagues in the Scholars’ Lab and was pleasantly surprised by the answers. Read more…
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.
Research Applications for 3D Models in Art History
These days, it is difficult to find a television documentary detailing an archaeological site that does not feature a representation in the form of a 3D model. Computer models make good teaching tools. A class of students may not have the opportunity to travel to Rome to view the Colosseum first-hand, and even if they did, they would have great difficulty visualizing what the mostly-ruined structure looked like 1,900 years ago. A model based on the most recent archaeological research, however, can help fill in the gaps left by time and the elements. Read more…
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…
Social Media and the Inauguration
Join us in the Scholars’ Lab Monday morning through Wednesday night next week, as we project the social media landscape surrounding next week’s historic presidential inauguration.
We’ll be showing real-time Twitter and Flickr feeds that record people’s responses to the event and their efforts at citizen-journalism. We’ve also created a home-grown geospatial visualization so that you can follow the worldwide conversation!
Visit the Lab for a little social interaction of your own, or access the site (which includes more information and related links) online.
Map “Vocabularies”
For the past year, I have been working on the Scholars’ Lab Geospatial Data Portal, the lab’s effort to make our GIS data sets readily available to UVA students, faculty, and staff via the world wide web by using a suite of open source, open standards-based applications. A particular aspect of this project that I have enjoyed exploring is the way in which we display our visual information.
Stop to think about the last paper map you used. Minor roads were probably displayed with a line of a certain color and thickness, highways with another. Green spaces were colored differently from open water and buildings etcetera. Cartographers have long toiled to develop visual representations of our environment and make them identifiable for the greater use. Read more…
