Full Panel
Panelists
Mary Caton Lingold, Duke University; Darren Mueller (Panel Facilitator), Duke University; Whitney Trettien, Duke University; Nicholas Bruns, Cornell University; Michael J. Kramer, Northwestern University; Robin James, UNC Charlotte
Biographies
Mary Caton Lingold is a doctoral student in English, specializing in the eighteenth-century Afro-Caribbean. She is particularly interested in historical memory and the language of consumption in writings about slavery and colonization.
Darren Mueller is a doctoral candidate in Music, specializing in jazz, musical performance, and social culture surrounding sound reproduction. His dissertation research focuses on the cultural history of the long-playing (LP) record and its influence on artistic production and historical construction in jazz.
Whitney Anne Trettien is a doctoral candidate in English, specializing in book history (especially of early modern England) and media studies. She’s been involved in many digital projects both creative and critical.
Nicholas Bruns is a masters candidate in Computer Science, specializing in the implementation of robust machine learning systems. Applications have focused on large scale extraction of knowledge from media, to date including images, natural language, maps and sound.
Michael J. Kramer is a lecturer in History and American Studies and an Undergraduate Academic Adviser in Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. He specializes in twentieth-century United States cultural and intellectual history.
Robin James is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC Charlotte. Her work focuses on the role of sound in contemporary forms of knowledge, value, pleasure, embodiment, and capital.
Panel Description
SoundBox, a two-year project funded by the new PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge at Duke University, explores new ways of incorporating sound into digital scholarly productions. It does so primarily by hosting a series of “provocations”—essays, experiments, and events both digital and local—that challenge those who experience them to imagine a sonically-based form of scholarship. These provocations are being digitally curated by the three-member SoundBox team: Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, and Whitney Trettien.
Unlike many other Digital Humanities projects, SoundBox does not intend to produce a tool but generate creative spaces that provoke new expressive forms. These spaces are by their nature hybrid, multidisciplinary, and inter-institutional, bringing together artists, audio engineers and scholars from universities, museums, public libraries and commercial studios. By fostering and encouraging these creative partnerships, SoundBox perceives its role primarily as facilitating and archiving sonic interventions in research, scholarship, and teaching.
For the 2013 HASTAC conference, the SoundBox team will moderate a conversation with collaborators Nicholas Bruns (Cornell), Dr. Robin James (UNC-Charlotte) and Dr. Michael J. Kramer (Northwestern). After a short explanation of the SoundBox project’s goals, methods, and current activities, each panelist will briefly discuss his or her current work at the intersection of sound and new media. At the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Nicholas Bruns has been developing acoustic recognition tools to help researchers identify bird songs in lengthy field recordings. Dr. Kramer, director of the Digital Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project, will discuss his current research on Alan Lomax, Harry Smith, and the Proto-Digital Study of Folk Music. Dr. James will share her creative-critical sound projects, including, most recently, her Sound Semiotics of the Kitchen, a sound- and social-media-based reperformance of Martha Rosler’s 1975 video “The Semiotics of the Kitchen.” Throughout, panelists will highlight innovative digital techniques for playing with the audible world, leading into an open conversation with audience members.