Critical Digital Humanities@Illinois: Scholarly Commons Brown Bag is on December 7, 2016 at 12:00 p.m. in the IPRH Seminar Room, Levis Faculty Center, Fourth Floor (919 West Illinois Street, Urbana, IL). They will focus on the Case Study: "The Globalization of the Phonograph Industry, 1905-1914: A Statistical and Visual History" with Harry Liebersohn (History), Harriett Green (English and Digital Humanities Librarian), and Zachary Riebeling (PhD, History).
Culture has undergone an unprecedented globalization over the past century and a half, whether in literature, theater, visual arts, or music. It is easy to find anecdotal examples of the transformation – but how can we get a larger, fuller panorama? Digitalization comes to the historian's rescue: optical scanning at the Scholarly Commons (Main Library) can now process large amounts of data from trade journals into spreadsheet tables for display as charts and statistics. With the help of a UIUC Research Board award, Harry Liebersohn and his research assistant, Zachary Riebeling, are creating a quantitative picture of the phonograph industry’s rapid globalization at the beginning of the twentieth century. The result is a surprising story of how mechanized sound reached from great metropolises to tiny towns around the world.
Thanks to the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for this information item.
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