IRLS 688 Documenting Diverse Cultures and Communities

This seminar addresses themes of cultural memory and identity as evidenced by the practice of collecting and the desire to preserve knowledge for present and future generations. The course will explore the meaning of documenting cultures and communities through individual and organizational collecting behavior in libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions and among physical and virtual community projects.

As a seminar this course will present an array of readings designed to stimulate class discussion and students? research interests. All students will participate in and lead classroom conversations over topics set by the instructor, and prepare three short papers (5-7 pages each). Doctoral students will be provided with additional readings.

Textbooks: Margaret Dittemore and Fred Hay, Documenting Cultural Diversity in the Resurgent American South (ACRL, 1997); James P. Danky and Wayne Weigand, Print Culture in a Diverse America (University of Illinois Press, 2001); Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (Norton, 2000); James Griffith, Hecho a Mano: The Traditional Arts of Tucson's Mexican American Community (University of Arizona Press, 2002); Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt. Little Labels, Big Sound: Small Record Companies and the Rise of American Music (Indiana University, 2001); Lori Grove and Laura Kamedulski, Chicago's Maxwell Street (Arcadia, 2002). Other readings as assigned.

Topics

August 23: Introduction
Film: Living Memory (excerpts)

August 30: Cultural Memory and Authenticity; Collecting and Connectedness
Daniel Traister, ??You Must Remember This??; or, Libraries as a Locus of Cultural Memories,? in Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity, ed. Dan Ben Amos; Dittemore and Hay, ?Introduction.? See also: Robert Cherny, "An Interview with Douglas Greenberg", OAH (Organization of American Historians) Newsletter (February 2001) [http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/2001feb/greenberg.html;]; Roger Chartier, ?The World as Representation,? from Histories: French Constructions of the Past, 544-558; David Grazian, ?The Symbolic Economy of Authenticity in the Chicago Blues Scene,? in Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual, edited by Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson; Emma Jones Lapsansky, ?Patriotism, Values, and Community: Museum Collecting and ?Connectedness,?? The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography CXIV (1), January 1990, 67-82.

September 13: Documenting Living Traditions
Dittemore and Hay, Part One, Terkel, Hard Times (Introduction).? Film (tentative): Jazz Parades: Feet Don?t Fail Me Now (Alan Lomax documentary)

September 20:? Using Text to Document Culture and Community
Danky and Weigand (entire book); Bethel, ?Journals and Voices? (from Dittemore and Hay). Suggested reading: D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (available through Sabio as an e-book)

Sept 27: Not Captured in Print: Storytelling, Music, and Social Drama
?Portraits of Louisiana: Empowering People Through Diversity? (from Dittemore
and Hay). See also: Anthony Balcomb, ?The Power of Narrative: Constitution Reality through Storytelling,? Orality, Memory & the Past, 49-62.
Film: (tentative) Distant Voices, Thunder Words (excerpts)??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

October 11: Collecting Oral History
Terkel (entire book); Martin-Perdue and Perdue, ?Talk about Trouble? (from Dittemore and Hay). See also: Carl Wilmsen, ?For the Record: Editing and the Production of Meaning in Oral History,? Oral History Review (Winter/Spring 2001): 65-85; Alessandro Portelli, ?The Death of Luigi Trastulli: Memory and the Event,? The Oral History Reader (1998): 1-26 (Portelli?s book, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, is available through Sabio as an e-book)

October 18 & 25: Visual Documentation: Chicago and Tucson
Grove and Kamedulski; Griffith; Patterson, ?Case for the
Folklife Documentary Film? (from Dittemore and Hay)
Film: And this is Free Assignment #1 due October 18

November 1: Audio Projects, Recordings, and the Radio
Patterson, ?Bridging the Gap: an Indexing Project? (from Dittemore and
Hay, Kennedy and McNutt (entire book)
Sample Audio Projects: David Isay's StoryCorps [http://storycorps.net/], This American Life [http://www.thislife.org ], I Can Almost See the Lights of Home ~ A Field Trip to Harlan County, Kentucky Charles Hardy III & Allesandro Portelli in Journal of MultiMedia History 2 (1999) ?http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol2no1/lights.html [see especially Hardy?s essay, ?On Making an Essay-in-Sound.?]

November 8: And What about those Blogs?
Readings: TBA. Suggested reading: Salam Pax, Baghdad Blog (2004) or on the Web at Baghdad Blog Assignment #2 Due November 8

November 29 & December 6: Class presentations on Assignment #3

Assignment #3 due December 6

Assignments:

1.? Select an essay or two from Danky/Weigand and Terkel.? Write a brief essay about the use of evidence in print in comparison to the way in which oral history captures the ways that people choose to remember events in their own lives.?

2.? Select a topic of your own choosing where you believe that culture will likely be represented in media other than print.? Conduct a search for information using WorldCat to determine the availability of nonprint materials on your topic, including audio or visual materials.? Conduct the same search using your favorite search engine.? Compare and? contrast the results.

3.? Select from one of the following two:

a. Identify a digital collection of relevance (collection, zine, etc.) to this course and evaluate it for its utility and content.

b. Track an active Weblog or group of Weblogs for several weeks, then address the question: is its content ephemeral or worth keeping??

More information about these assignments will be provided over the course of the semester.