Topic: “‘A Foreign Sound To Your Ear”: Digital Image Sonification for Historical Interpretation
Abstract:
How do digital technologies offer new opportunities for studying the past? The idea of visualizing data has been all the rage in the emerging field of digital humanities, but in an essay published in a new essay collection, Digital Sound Studies (Duke University Press, Fall 2018), cultural and digital historian Kramer flips the script. As part of his new research into the interplay of technology and tradition in the American folk music revival, he remediates visual media such as maps and photographs as sonic data. His avant-garde methods of “sonification” demonstrate that sound-based research can be meaningful for scholars working with visual culture. A historian by training, Kramer listens to seemingly “silent” visual artifacts from the historic Berkeley Folk Music Festival archive, showing how to interpret the sounds encoded in images through a deeply multimodal praxis that digitally reinvigorates core historical questions about how we study the past through archival artifacts.
Biography:
Michael J. Kramer works at the intersection of historical scholarship, cultural criticism, the arts, and digital technology. He is the author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (Oxford University Press, 2013; paperback, 2017). His current book project, This Machine Kills Fascists, explores the relationship between technology and tradition in the US folk music movement from the early twentieth century to the present. It is linked to a digital history project about the Berkeley Folk Music Festival, which took place annually on the University of California campus between 1958 and 1970, and Kramer is also is engaged in more technical digital history research on image sonification for historical interpretation, machine-learning sound analysis software, deep mapping, and models for global digital humanities collaboration. He teaches history, American studies, and digital humanities at Middlebury College, where he is Acting Director of the Digital Liberal Arts Initiative. He previously taught at Northwestern University, where he co-founded NUDHL, the Northwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory and helped to design the Graduate Engagement Opportunities program at Northwestern’s Center for Civic Engagement. He has also worked as an editor at the website of the New York Times and in the Design, Publishing, and New Media Department at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago as well as served as a dance and theater dramaturg. He has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, First of the Month, The National Memo, The Point, Theater, and Newsday, and he blogs at Culture Rover and Issues in Digital History. His website is michaeljkramer.net.