Three CURI projects will be funded by the Digital Humanities on the Hill initiative during Summer 2016.

Please join us in congratulating Louis Epstein, Reinaldo Moya, and Ka Wong. DHH funding for these projects is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Louis Epstein, Music: The Musical Geography of 1920s Paris

How can digital mapping help recreate the sound world of the past? By researching and visualizing the musical geography of 1920s Paris,
we will explore the iconic sounds of the “capital of the world” at a particularly exciting moment in the city’s history. Our interactive, chronological map–the first of its kind–will allow students, scholars and the general public to explore the city’s musical riches in new ways. To populate our map with musical events, including concerts, political rallies, sporting events, film showings, and church services, we’ll use digitized and archival primary sources (especially historical newspapers). We’ll also curate a digital archive of primary source materials (accessible via the map) and produce pieces of writing that will contextualize what users can see, hear, and manipulate when using the map.

This project expands on last summer’s work by pursuing a broader chronological scope. While our study into music in 1924 Paris rendered the city’s soundscape through the model of thick description, this summer, by broadening our focus to the 1920s as a whole, we’ll be more attuned to historical trends and changes in performance practices or repertories over time.

Reinaldo Moya, Music: A Visual Representation of Wagner’s Music

Students will analyze an act from an opera by Richard Wagner and trace the harmonic and melodic flow according to whether or not the material is normative according to the standards of the time. Once the students have defined the “normative” and “non-normative” poles, they will create a time map where they can track the percentage of the music in the opera that adheres to the traditional standards of harmonic and contrapuntal construction of the time. This graph will allow the students to see the overall shape of the tension and release within the arc of the act. In addition to tracking harmonic features, other layers will be added, such as tempo and dynamics, text, and orchestration. I envision this project as a computer/multimedia graph where each of the layers of information can be projected onto the time-grid of the act.

Ka Wong, Asian Studies: Asia in Minnesota

Forging interdisciplinary collaborations among cultural studies, ethnography, oral history, and digital humanities, this project aims to produce interactive digital modules for preserving and presenting the unique Asian American experiences in Minnesota. The 2010 US Census indicates that Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the United States, with a 47 percent increase in growth in the Midwest since 2000. Unlike the established narratives from the East and West Coasts, however, the Asian population in the Midwest, especially in the rural areas like Northfield, has been largely overlooked in extant research. This “invisibility” poses challenges for educators and students, and thus invites new concepts and contents in the study of Asian American communities across various disciplines. This project will be the third installment of the Asia in America series: Asia in Northfield and Beyond the Barbed Wire: Japanese Americans in Minnesota, putting forward faculty-student collaboration on collecting, documenting, and analyzing Asian American stories from uniquely Midwestern perspectives. Asia in Minnesota will bring the issues of diversity, visibility, and connectivity of these vital minority groups to the forefront of civil discussion, especially on race, immigration, citizenship, and democracy.