It must be that time of year again. Politicians on the right are lining up to censor history— specifically, what texts can be used in the classroom. And, once again, they’re pulling out their copies of Howard Zinn, shaking them in the air, and decrying writers who challenge their triumphalist versions of U.S. history. This time it’s the president—a person who, I can say with relative confidence, has never read more than a few pull quotes from the book.
Read MoreToday, I am going to work with you on some basic audio editing techniques. As you will remember from class, we could use any number of programs to edit, such as GarageBand or Audacity. Since we all have a free subscription to Adobe Audition, I am going to demonstrate with it.
While the techniques that I am showing you today look different in different programs, all audio editing programs have the functionality that I am demonstrating.
Read MoreWe’ve finally gotten to microphones. A quality microphone might be the most important factor in creating a good recording rather than a bad recording.
I have already talked about onboard microphones a bit in the first entry in this series on recording devices. That’s pretty much all I have to say about built-in mics. They’re fine for getting the job done—if content is more important than quality.
For many public history applications, we would much prefer to have great content and a quality recording. To do this, we need good microphones that are set up so that they record what we want them to record and ignore what we want them to ignore.
Read MoreIn this second installment for “Digital Audio for Public Historians,” I want to have a look at one of the basic recording options available on mid-range recorders: the option to have a mono or stereo recording. We will use sample recordings from the 1960s to illustrate a few key principals, including recordings of James Baldwin, The Beach Boys, and The Beatles.
Read MoreAs we discussed in yesterday’s class, public historians might use audio recordings for a number of different projects: oral histories, podcasts, audio clips for exhibitions, documentaries, among other things.
We were able to play a bit with different recording devices—from smartphones, to computers, to low and and high end voice recorders.
It became obvious very quickly that both the equipment we used and the recording conditions had a huge effect on the quality of our recordings.
Over my next several posts, I am going to review some of the things that we discussed in class as well as go into a little bit more detail about how to use the hardware and software for public history applications.
Today, I want to talk a little bit about recording devices.
Read MoreAs part of the publicly engaged research project, Museum of the Anthropocene, this map provides a field scan of exhibitions that attempt to make interventions in our understanding of the concept of the Anthropocene.
Read MoreIndiana ranks 43rdfor its infant mortality rate (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017). Over the past 5 years in Indiana, an average of 596 babies have died annually, approximately one baby every 14 hours (Indiana State Department of Health, 2017). Twenty-nine of Indiana’s 988 (2.9%) zip codes account for 27% of Indiana’s infant deaths. Major contributors to the persistence of poor birth outcomes in Indiana’s high risk zip codes are racial/ethnic, geographic and socioeconomic disparities in birth outcomes. Clinical interventions alone cannot reduce these disparities because birth outcomes, like overall health, are the product of one’s environment, opportunities and experiences.
Equipping grassroots leaders to be health and social change agents is the first critical step in creating and sustaining a community culture that promotes individual, family and neighborhood health. We train and mentor grassroots maternal and child health leaders (GMCHL) in Indiana zip codes at high risk for infant mortality to help build the capacity of these neighborhoods to foster improved pregnancy and infant development outcomes.
Read MoreFor the past year, I have been working with a team of scholars from across the IUPUI Campus to develop a few public art projects. In addition to commissioning two new works of art, we have created a Public Art Walking Tour app. Right now, the app is in beta and focuses exclusively on sculpture on the IUPUI campus. In the next six months, we will be adding architecture and painting to the the app. You can try out the app by clicking here.
Read MoreUsing An Anthropocene Primer as our case study, this essay is organized into three sections. The first section introduces the primer as a tool that bridges disciplinary boundaries to advance critical and timely sociocultural research examining changing earth systems and the human experience. The second section examines the ways that anthropologists might productively engage with the dominant interdisciplinary debates and metanarratives about the Anthropocene and the role that tools such as the primer might play in this. The final section reflects on how the primer is one model of multimodal pedagogy that answers the needs of formal, informal, traditional, and continuing education in relation to serious play. In part, then, An Anthropocene Primer is one form of anthropological educational practice that might be used to prepare the next generation of researchers and partners with frameworks to pursue ethnography in the Anthropocene that is truly applied, interdisciplinary, and multimodal at the outset.
Read MoreThis essay offers a brief history of the commons and protest through the story of Kennington Common, relating it to contemporary debates over the Occupy Movement and the rights of assembly and protest.
Read MoreThis year, Indiana Humanities has curated a selection of talks by experts in the sciences and humanities on various themes related to Frankenstein. As one of the individuals on the "Frankenstein Speakers Bureau," I am giving talks on "Frankenstein and the Year without a Summer."
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