notes on digitizing folk music history, 2011.
I’m going to keep notes here about the process of designing and teaching my digital history course, Digitizing Folk Music History: The Berkeley Folk Festival. Here is the note I sent out to students. More soon on how great it has been working with the incredibly talented and smart Northwestern librarians.
Dear Digital Folkniks,
I am very much looking forward to studying the American folk music revival with you this spring quarter as we examine it through the lens of digital history. We have an action-packed, banjo-ringing—and yes, also, since this is an upper-level research seminar, a work-filled—quarter ahead. To paraphrase Woody Guthrie, we’ll be doin’ a lot of readin’, listenin’, watchin’, talkin’, special guest visitin’, archive researchin’, writin’, and digital tinkerin’. I think you will find the course challenging but, if you commit to it, very rewarding.
During spring break, our collective blackboard website and wordpress website will become available. The able Josh Honn, graduate student in library and information sciences (http://www.joshhonn.com/) will be assisting us as a technology consultant available to help you during the spring as you begin to develop a digital history project around the Berkeley Folk Festival archive. And I’ll be helping you too, of course.
Note that we are working at the cutting-edge of digital history in this course, so we’ll have some adventures, bumps along the way, disappointments, and, we hope, great successes as we set to thinking about and trying to put into practice examples of new digital history scholarship.
So while we get the technology side of things up and running over spring break, here is a link to a draft of the syllabus. This will give you a sense of what to expect in the course: http://www.issuesindigitalhistory.net/?p=24.
See you on Tuesday, March 29th. Let me know if you have any questions before then: mjk@northwestern.edu.
“This course was made for you and me…,”
—Professor Kramer