This week we’ll examine various historical methods, including oral histories and archival research, and we’ll look at the work of building and maintaining media archives. Depending upon students’ interests, we’ll either visit a local media archive or invite an archivist or archival scholar to visit us in class. For those of you planning to apply historical methods in your own projects, I encourage you to explore the methods classes in Penn’s History department and its History and Sociology of Science department.
We’ll also spend some time thinking about project management and tools that can aid our research – including, perhaps, our work on the collaborative Methods Toolkit.
FIELD TRIP, 4:00-6:30pm: Today we’re visiting the Parkway Central Free Library, where curators from their art, children’s literature, circulating picture collection, government documents, maps, newspapers, and orchestral music collections; and technicians in the digitization lab, are preparing a tour for us! If you can stay a bit longer, we’re all welcome to attend the opening of their new The Art and Influence of John Dowell exhibition, which highlights materials from across the Free Library’s archival collections! We’ll meet in the lobby at 1901 Vine Street at 4pm!
To Read for Today:
- Lisa Gitelman, “Introduction: Media as Historical Subjects” in Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT Press, 2006): 1-22.
- Lauren S. Berliner, “Towards a Methodology of Unwatched Digital Media,” Feminist Media Histories 8:2 (2022): 219-30.
- Check out this call for proposals (CFP) for a special issue of Feminist Media Histories on “contemporary historiographies, metahistories, and methods,” edited by Katherine Groo, author of the excellent Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
- Skim through Laura Schmidt’s “Using Archives: A Guide to Effective Research” from the Society of American Archivists (updated 2016).
- Skim through the Oral History Association’s “Best Practices.”
Because this semester’s guests’ work happens to focus on visual and interactive media, I encourage you to spend some time today thinking specifically about sound 🎧. We probably won’t have much time to discuss this in class; thus, it’s primarily for your own edification 🙂
- Josh Garrett-Davis, “American Indian Soundchiefs: Cutting Records in Indigenous Sonic Networks,” Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture 1:4 (2020): 394-11.
- Check out the “Critical Media Archives” collection that Josh Sheppard, chair of the Radio Preservation Task Force and author of a fabulous book on the history of American public broadcasting, edited for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 7:6 (Fall 2022). Please read the intro and skim through the rest. Browse through JCMS’s Archival News bulletin, too.
- And in recognition of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, let’s listen to the Kitchen Sisters’ “Archiving the Underground – Hip Hop at Harvard & Cornell,” PRX [podcast: 31:26].
- See also the Cornell Hip Hop Collection, the Harvard University Hip Hop Archive, and its Instagram. Consider what it means for hip hop to be archived at two elite institutions 🧐.
- It’s worth noting that many hip-hop histories, including Jonathan Abrams’ The Come Up, draw on oral histories. We can also look out for Mark V. Campbell and Murray Forman’s Hop-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production, which is due to be published by Intellect this month!
On Project Management:
- Skim Jessica Calarco, “Staying on Track in Your Program,” A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum (Princeton University Press, 2020): 119-51.
- Here’s how some graduate students use various tools to manage their projects, time, and resources. I share these references not to be prescriptive — some of these folks’ approaches can indeed feel a bit tech-fetishistic! – but, rather, to invite you to explore, test, adopt, and reject tools as you see fit.
- Emily Hokett, “Project Management in Craft Docs: Here’s My Experience with a Tight Academic Schedule,” Medium (May 7, 2022); Research Craft (a video interview series featuring historians) on “Academic Productivity Hack #1: Capturing, Organizing, and Accessing PDFs,” YouTube (2020) [video: 6:38], and on using Tropy [video: 29:01], a tool to support archival research; Genevieve Shanahan, “PhD Tips: How I Get Organized,” Medium (September 23, 2019); Mariana Viera, “Plan Your PhD with Notion,” (2022); and this, among other relevant threads, on Reddit’s r/PhD. Note that Penn Libraries offer tutorials on many citation management tools.