MIT Is Digitizing a Huge Archive of Noam Chomsky’s Lectures, Papers and Other Documents & Will Put Them Online

Image by Andrew Rusk, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

If you’re a lin­guist, you’ve read Noam Chomsky—no way of get­ting around that. There may be rea­sons to dis­agree with Chomsky’s lin­guis­tic the­o­ries but—as Newton’s the­o­ries do in physics—his break­throughs rep­re­sent a par­a­dig­mat­ic shift in the study of lan­guage, an implic­it or explic­it ref­er­ence point for near­ly every lin­guis­tic analy­sis in the past few decades.

If you’re on the polit­i­cal left, you’ve read Chom­sky, or you should. Even if there are sig­nif­i­cant rea­sons to dis­agree with what­ev­er con­tro­ver­sial stance he’s tak­en over the years, few polit­i­cal the­o­rists have approached their sub­ject with the degree of dogged­ness, intel­lec­tu­al integri­ty, and eru­di­tion as he has. Chom­sky began his sec­ond career as a polit­i­cal activist and philoso­pher in the late six­ties, speak­ing out in oppo­si­tion to the Viet­nam war. Since then, he’s writ­ten major­ly influ­en­tial works on mass media pro­pa­gan­da, Cold War pol­i­tics and inter­ven­tion­ist war, eco­nom­ic impe­ri­al­ism, anar­chism, etc.

Now an emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor from MIT, where he began teach­ing in 1955, and a lau­re­ate pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona, Chom­sky has reached that stage in every pub­lic intellectual’s career when archivists and cura­tors begin con­sol­i­dat­ing a doc­u­men­tary lega­cy. Librar­i­ans at MIT start­ed doing so a few years ago when, in 2012, the MIT Libraries Insti­tute Archives received over 260 box­es of Chomsky’s per­son­al papers. You can hear the man him­self dis­cuss the archive’s impor­tance in the short inter­view at the top. And at the MIT Library site unBox Chom­sky Archive, you’ll find slideshow pre­views of its con­tents.

Those con­tents include the 1953 paper “Sys­tems of Syn­tac­tic Analy­sis,” which “appears to be Chomsky’s first for­ay in print of what would become trans­for­ma­tion­al gen­er­a­tive gram­mar.” Also archived are notes from a 1984 talk on “Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent” giv­en at Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty, out­lin­ing the ideas Chom­sky and Edward S. Her­man would ful­ly explore in the 1988 book of the same name on “the polit­i­cal econ­o­my of the mass media.” And in the cat­e­go­ry of “activism,” we find mate­ri­als like the newslet­ter below, pub­lished by an anti-war orga­ni­za­tion Chom­sky co-found­ed in the 60s called RESIST.

MIT hopes to “dig­i­tize the hun­dreds of thou­sands of pieces” in the col­lec­tion, “to make it acces­si­ble to the pub­lic.” Such a mas­sive under­tak­ing exceeds the library’s bud­get, so they have asked for finan­cial sup­port. At unBox­ing the Chom­sky Archive, you can make a dona­tion, or just peruse the slideshow pre­views and con­sid­er the lega­cy of one of the U.S.’s most for­mi­da­ble liv­ing sci­en­tif­ic and polit­i­cal thinkers.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Noam Chomsky’s Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent and How the Media Cre­ates the Illu­sion of Democ­ra­cy

Noam Chom­sky Explains the Best Way for Ordi­nary Peo­ple to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunt­ing

Read 9 Free Books By Noam Chom­sky Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

25 Million Images From 14 Art Institutions to Be Digitized & Put Online In One Huge Scholarly Archive

Dig­i­tal art archives, says Thomas Gae­ht­gens, direc­tor of the Get­ty Research Insti­tute, are “Sleep­ing Beau­ties, and they are wait­ing to be dis­cov­ered and kissed.” It’s an odd metaphor, espe­cial­ly since the archive to which Gae­ht­gens refers cur­rent­ly con­tains pho­to­graph­ic trea­sures like that of Medieval Chris­t­ian art from the Nether­lands Insti­tute for Art His­to­ry. But soon, Pharos, the “Inter­na­tion­al Con­sor­tium of Pho­to Archives,” will host 25 mil­lion images, Ted Loos reports at The New York Times, “17 mil­lion of them art­works and the rest sup­ple­men­tal mate­r­i­al.” The archive aims to have 7 mil­lion online by 2020.

Pharos is the joint effort of 14 dif­fer­ent insti­tu­tions, includ­ing the Get­ty and the Frick, the Nation­al Gallery of Art, the Yale Cen­ter for British Art, Rome’s Bib­lio­the­ca Hertziana, the Cour­tauld Insti­tute, and more. Even­tu­al­ly “users will be able to search the restora­tion his­to­ry of the works, includ­ing dif­fer­ent states of the same piece over time… past own­er­ship; and even back­ground on relat­ed works that have been lost or destroyed.” As Art­net puts it, “art his­to­ry just got a lot more acces­si­ble.”

Once the pri­ma­ry domain of well-appoint­ed pro­fes­sors with insti­tu­tion­al con­nec­tions and the bud­get to fly around the world, the dis­ci­pline can soon be pur­sued by any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion, though there is, of course, no vir­tu­al sub­sti­tute yet for engag­ing with art in three-dimen­sions. Claire Voon explains at Hyper­al­ler­gic, “Pharos’s data­base is pri­mar­i­ly aimed at scholars—although it is freely avail­able for all to use—and is ded­i­cat­ed to upload­ing a work’s attri­bu­tion and prove­nance as well as con­ser­va­tion, exhi­bi­tion, and bib­li­o­graph­ic his­to­ries.” All of the infor­ma­tion, in oth­er words, required for seri­ous research.

Cur­rent­ly fea­tur­ing almost 100,000 images and over 60,000 sep­a­rate art­works, Pharos con­tains clas­si­cal and Byzan­tine art and mosaics from the Frick; ear­ly Chris­t­ian art from the Nation­al Gallery; many pho­tographs of Roman pot­tery, sculp­ture, and stat­u­ary from the Bib­lio­the­ca Hertziana, and much more. The Frick com­pris­es the bulk of the col­lec­tion, and the muse­um is Pharos’s pri­ma­ry part­ner and “home to the very first pho­toarchive in the Unit­ed States, thanks to the ini­tia­tive of its founder’s daugh­ter.” (Most of the images cur­rent­ly in the Frick archive are in black and white.)

While the cur­rent insti­tu­tions are all based in North Amer­i­ca and Europe, the “data­base will even­tu­al­ly expand,” writes Voon, “to include records from more pho­toarchives around the world.” Schol­ars and art lovers world­wide may not nec­es­sar­i­ly think of these trea­sures as kiss­able “sleep­ing beau­ties,” but their plen­ti­ful appear­ance in such rich detail and easy acces­si­bil­i­ty may indeed seem like a fairy tale come true.

Enter the Pharos data­base here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Muse­um Cre­ates 3D Mod­els of the Roset­ta Stone & 200+ Oth­er His­toric Arti­facts: Down­load or View in Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

The Smith­son­ian Design Muse­um Dig­i­tizes 200,000 Objects, Giv­ing You Access to 3,000 Years of Design Inno­va­tion & His­to­ry

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

New Digital Archive Puts Online 4,000 Historic Images of Rome: The Eternal City from the 16th to 20th Centuries

The poet Tibul­lus first described Rome as “The Eter­nal City” in the first cen­tu­ry BC, and that evoca­tive nick­name has stuck over the thou­sands of years since. Or rather, he would have called it “Urbs Aeter­na,” which for Ital­ian-speak­ers would have been “La Cit­tà Eter­na,” but regard­less of which lan­guage you pre­fer it in, it throws down a daunt­ing chal­lenge before any his­to­ri­an of Rome. Each schol­ar has had to find their own way of approach­ing such a his­tor­i­cal­ly for­mi­da­ble place, and few have built up such a robust visu­al record as Rodol­fo Lan­ciani, 4000 items from whose col­lec­tion became avail­able to view online this year, thanks to Stan­ford Libraries.

As an “archae­ol­o­gist, pro­fes­sor of topog­ra­phy, and sec­re­tary of the Archae­o­log­i­cal Com­mis­sion,” says the col­lec­tion’s about page, Lan­ciani, “was a pio­neer in the sys­tem­at­ic, mod­ern study of the city of Rome.”

Hav­ing lived from 1845 to 1929 with a long and fruit­ful career to match, he “col­lect­ed a vast archive of his own notes and man­u­scripts, as well as works by oth­ers includ­ing rare prints and orig­i­nal draw­ings by artists and archi­tects stretch­ing back to the six­teenth cen­tu­ry.” After he died, his whole library found a buy­er in the Isti­tu­to Nazionale di Arche­olo­gia e Sto­ria dell’Arte (INASA), which made it avail­able to researchers at the 15th-cen­tu­ry Palaz­zo Venezia in Rome.

Enter a team of pro­fes­sors, archae­ol­o­gists, and tech­nol­o­gists from Stan­ford and else­where, who with a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foun­da­tion, and in part­ner­ship with Italy’s Min­istry of Cul­tur­al Her­itage and Activ­i­ties and Tourism and the Nation­al Insti­tute, began dig­i­tiz­ing it all. Their efforts have so far yield­ed an exhi­bi­tion of about 4,000 of Lan­cian­i’s draw­ings, prints, pho­tographs and sketch­es of Rome from the 16th cen­tu­ry to the 20th. Not only can you exam­ine them in high-res­o­lu­tion in your brows­er as well as down­load them, you can also see the loca­tions of what they depict pin­point­ed on the map of Rome. That fea­ture might come in espe­cial­ly handy when next you pay a vis­it to The Eter­nal City, though for many of the fea­tures depict­ed in Lan­cian­i’s col­lec­tion, you hard­ly need direc­tions. Enter the dig­i­tal col­lec­tion here.

via Stan­ford News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Rome in 179 Pod­casts

Ancient Rome’s Sys­tem of Roads Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

200,000+ Vintage Records Being Digitized & Put Online by the Boston Public Library

It may be a great irony that our age of cul­tur­al destruc­tion and—many would argue—decline also hap­pens to be a gold­en age of preser­va­tion, thanks to the very new media and big data forces cred­it­ed with dumb­ing things down. We spend ample time con­tem­plat­ing the loss­es; archival ini­tia­tives like The Great 78 Project, like so many oth­ers we reg­u­lar­ly fea­ture here, should give us rea­sons to cel­e­brate.

In a post this past August, we out­lined the goals and meth­ods of the project. Cen­tral­ized at the Inter­net Archive—that mag­nan­i­mous cit­i­zens’ repos­i­to­ry of dig­i­tized texts, record­ings, films, etc.—the project con­tains sev­er­al thou­sand care­ful­ly pre­served 78rpm record­ings, which doc­u­ment the dis­tinc­tive sounds of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry from 1898 to the late-1950s.

Thanks to part­ners like preser­va­tion com­pa­ny George Blood, L.P. and the ARChive of Con­tem­po­rary Music, we can hear many thou­sands of records from artists both famous and obscure in the orig­i­nal sound of the first mass-pro­duced con­sumer audio for­mat.

Just a few days ago, the Inter­net Archive announced that they would be joined in the endeav­or by the Boston Pub­lic Library, who, writes Wendy Hana­mu­ra, “will dig­i­tize, pre­serve” and make avail­able to the pub­lic “hun­dreds of thou­sands of audio record­ings in a vari­ety of his­tor­i­cal for­mats,” includ­ing not only 78s, but also LP’s and Thomas Edison’s first record­ing medi­um, the wax cylin­der. “These record­ings have nev­er been cir­cu­lat­ed and were in stor­age for sev­er­al decades, uncat­a­logued and inac­ces­si­ble to the pub­lic.”

The process, notes WBUR, “could take a few years,” giv­en the siz­able bulk of the col­lec­tion and the metic­u­lous meth­ods of the Inter­net Archive’s tech­ni­cians, who labor to pre­serve the con­di­tion of the often frag­ile mate­ri­als, and to pro­duce a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ver­sions, “from remas­tered to raw.” The object, says Boston Pub­lic Library pres­i­dent David Leonard, is to “pro­duce record­ings in a way that’s inter­est­ing to the casu­al lis­ten­er as well as to the hard-core music lis­ten­er in the research busi­ness.”

Thus far, only two record­ings from BPL’s exten­sive col­lec­tions have become avail­able—a 1938 record­ing called “Please Pass the Bis­cuits, Pap­py (I Like Moun­tain Music)” by W. Lee O’Daniel and His Hill­bil­ly Boys and Edvard Grieg’s only piano con­cer­to, record­ed by Fred­dy Mar­tin and His Orches­tra in 1947. Even in this tiny sam­pling, you can see the range of mate­r­i­al the archive will fea­ture, con­sis­tent with the tremen­dous vari­ety the Great 78 Project already con­tains.

While we can count it as a great gain to have free and open access to this his­toric vault of record­ed audio, it is also the case that dig­i­tal archiv­ing has become an urgent bul­wark against total loss. Cur­rent record­ing for­mats instant­ly spawn innu­mer­able copies of them­selves. The phys­i­cal media of the past exist­ed in finite num­bers and are sub­ject to total era­sure with time. “The sim­ple fact of the mat­ter,” archivist George Blood tells the BPL, “is most audio­vi­su­al record­ings will be lost. These 78s are dis­ap­pear­ing left and right. It is impor­tant that we do a good job pre­serv­ing what we can get to, because there won’t be a sec­ond chance.”

via WBUR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

25,000+ 78RPM Records Now Pro­fes­sion­al­ly Dig­i­tized & Stream­ing Online: A Trea­sure Trove of Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Music

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

BBC Launch­es World Music Archive

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Enter the The Cornell Hip Hop Archive: A Vast Digital Collection of Hip Hop Photos, Posters & More

The music and the cul­ture of hip-hop are insep­a­ra­ble from the Bronx, Queens, Harlem, and Brook­lyn, NY. And now that the form is a glob­al cul­ture that exists in online spaces as much as it does where peo­ple meet and shake hands, its doc­u­men­tary his­to­ry may be more valu­able than ever. Hip-Hop began, unques­tion­ably, as a region­al phe­nom­e­non, and its for­mal qual­i­ties always bear the traces of its matrix, a con­flu­ence of African-Amer­i­can, Caribbean, and Latin Amer­i­can socio-cul­tur­al expe­ri­ences and cre­ative streams, meet­ing with new con­sumer audio tech­nol­o­gy and a dri­ve toward coun­ter­cul­tur­al exper­i­ments that took hold all over New York amidst the urban decay of the 70s.

Pho­to by Joe Con­zo, Jr.

We know the sto­ry in broad strokes. Now we can immerse our­selves in the dai­ly life, so to speak, of ear­ly hip hop, thanks to a par­tial dig­i­ti­za­tion of Cor­nell University’s vast hip hop col­lec­tion. The phys­i­cal col­lec­tion, housed in Itha­ca New York, con­tains “hun­dreds of par­ty and event fly­ers ca. 1977–1985; thou­sands of ear­ly vinyl record­ings, cas­settes and CDs; film and video; record label press pack­ets and pub­lic­i­ty; black books, pho­tog­ra­phy, mag­a­zines, books, cloth­ing, and more.”

Pho­to by Joe Con­zo, Jr.

While this impres­sive trove of phys­i­cal arti­facts is open to the pub­lic, most of us won’t ever make the jour­ney. But whether we’re fans, schol­ars, or curi­ous onlook­ers, we can ben­e­fit from its cura­to­r­i­al largesse through online archives like that of Joe Con­zo, Jr., who “cap­tured images of the South Bronx between 1977 and 1984, includ­ing ear­ly hip hop jams, street scenes, and Latin music per­form­ers and events.”

Pho­to by Joe Con­zo, Jr.

While still in high school, Con­zo became the offi­cial pho­tog­ra­ph­er for the ear­ly influ­en­tial rap group the Cold Crush Broth­ers. The posi­tion gave him unique access to the “local­ized, grass­roots cul­ture about to explode into glob­al aware­ness.” Cornell’s site remarks that “with­out Joe’s images, the world would have lit­tle idea of what the ear­li­est era of hip hop looked like, when fabled DJ, MC, and b‑boy/girl bat­tles took place in parks, school gym­na­si­ums and neigh­bor­hood dis­cos.”

Anoth­er of Cornell’s col­lec­tions, the Bud­dy Esquire Par­ty and Event Fly­er Archive, pre­serves over 500 such arti­facts, the “largest known insti­tu­tion­al col­lec­tion of these scarce fly­ers, which have become increas­ing­ly val­ued for the details they pro­vide about ear­ly hip hop cul­ture.” Local, grass­roots scenes like this one seem increas­ing­ly rare in a glob­al­ized, always-online 21st cen­tu­ry. Archives like Cornell’s not only tell the sto­ry of such a cul­ture, but in so doing they doc­u­ment a crit­i­cal peri­od in New York City, much like punk or jazz archives tell impor­tant his­to­ries of Lon­don, New York, D.C., Paris, New Orleans, etc.

The third dig­i­tal col­lec­tion host­ed by Cor­nell, the Adler Hip Hop Archive, comes from jour­nal­ist and Def Jam Record­ings pub­li­cist Bill Adler. The mate­ri­als here nat­u­ral­ly skew toward the indus­try side of the cul­ture, doc­u­ment­ing its leap from the New York streets to “glob­al aware­ness” and a spread to cities nation­wide, through mag­a­zine pho­to spreads, ads, pro­mo­tion­al pics, press clip­pings, and much more.

Some of these col­lec­tions are eas­i­er to nav­i­gate than others—you’ll have to wade through many non-hip-hop pho­tos in the huge Joe Con­zo, Jr. archive, though most of them, like his Puer­to Rican por­traits and land­scapes for exam­ple, are of inter­est in their own right. Con­zo’s pho­to jour­nal­ism of the Bronx in the late 70s and 80s has all the inti­ma­cy and can­dor of a fam­i­ly album or col­lec­tion of year­book pictures—charmingly awk­ward, exu­ber­ant, and a stark con­trast to the high-pro­file glam­our of com­mer­cial hip-hop eras to fol­low.

The core of Cornell’s col­lec­tion came from author, cura­tor, and for­mer record exec­u­tive Johan Kugel­berg, who donat­ed his col­lec­tion in 1999 after pub­lish­ing Born in the Bronx: A Visu­al His­to­ry of the Ear­ly Days of Hip Hop with Joe Con­zo, Jr. It has since expand­ed to 13 dif­fer­ent col­lec­tions from the archives of some of the cul­ture’s ear­li­est pio­neers and doc­u­men­tar­i­ans. Hope­ful­ly many more of these will soon be dig­i­tized. But we might want to heed Jason Kottke’s warn­ing in enter­ing the three that have: “don’t click on any of those links if you’ve got press­ing things to do.” You could eas­i­ly get lost in this incred­i­bly detailed trea­sury of hip-hop—and New York City—history.

Pho­to by Joe Con­zo, Jr.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Found­ing Fathers, A Doc­u­men­tary Nar­rat­ed By Pub­lic Enemy’s Chuck D, Presents the True His­to­ry of Hip Hop

The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6‑Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sam­pling Rev­o­lu­tion

Hip Hop Hits Sung Won­der­ful­ly in Sign Lan­guage: Eminem’s “Lose Your­self,” Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yel­low” & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Google Creates a Digital Archive of World Fashion: Features 30,000 Images, Covering 3,000 Years of Fashion History

Both the fash­ion and art worlds fos­ter the cre­ation of rar­i­fied arti­facts inac­ces­si­ble to the major­i­ty of peo­ple, often one-of-a-kind pieces that exist in spe­cial­ly-designed spaces and flour­ish in cos­mopoli­tan cities. Does this mean that fash­ion is an art form like, say, paint­ing or pho­tog­ra­phy? Doesn’t fashion’s ephemer­al nature mark it as a very dif­fer­ent activ­i­ty? We might con­sid­er that we can ask many of the same ques­tions of haute cou­ture as we can of fine art. What are the social con­se­quences of tak­ing folk art forms, for exam­ple, out of their cul­tur­al con­text and plac­ing them in gallery spaces? What is the effect of tap­ping street fash­ion as inspi­ra­tion for the run­way, turn­ing it into objects of con­sump­tion for the wealthy?

Such ques­tions should remind us that fash­ion and the arts are embed­ded in human cul­tur­al and eco­nom­ic his­to­ry in some very sim­i­lar ways. But they are also very dif­fer­ent social prac­tices. Much like trends in food (both fine din­ing and cheap con­sum­ables) fash­ion has long been impli­cat­ed in the spread of mar­kets and indus­tries, labor exploita­tion, envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, and even microbes. As Jason Daley points out at Smith­son­ian, “The craze for silk in ancient Rome helped spawn the Silk Road, a fash­ion for feath­ered hats con­tributed to the first Nation­al Wildlife Refuges. Fash­ion has even been wrapped up in pan­demics and infec­tious dis­eases.

So how to tell the sto­ry of a human activ­i­ty so deeply embed­ded in every facet of world his­to­ry? Expan­sive­ly. Google Arts & Cul­ture has attempt­ed to do so with its “We wear cul­ture” project. Promis­ing to tell “the sto­ries behind what we wear,” the project, as you can see in the teas­er video at the top, “trav­elled to over 40 coun­tries, col­lab­o­rat­ing with more than 180 cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions and their world-renowned his­to­ri­ans and cura­tors to bring their tex­tile and fash­ion col­lec­tions to life.” Cov­er­ing 3,000 years of his­to­ry, “We wear cul­ture” uses video, his­tor­i­cal images, short quotes and blurbs, and fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy to cre­ate a series of online gallery exhibits of, for exam­ple, “The Icons,” pro­files of design­ers like Oscar de la Renta, Coco Chanel, and Issey Miyake.

Anoth­er exhib­it “Fash­ion as Art” includes a fea­ture on Florence’s Museo Sal­va­tore Fer­rag­amo, a gallery ded­i­cat­ed to the famous design­er and con­tain­ing 10,000 mod­els of shoes he cre­at­ed or owned. Ask­ing the ques­tion “is fash­ion art?”, the exhib­it “analy­ses the forms of dia­logue between these two worlds: rec­i­p­ro­cal inspi­ra­tions, over­laps and col­lab­o­ra­tions, from the expe­ri­ences of the Pre-Raphaelites to those of Futur­ism, and from Sur­re­al­ism to Rad­i­cal Fash­ion.” It’s a won­der they don’t men­tion the Bauhaus school, many of whose res­i­dent artists rad­i­cal­ized fash­ion design, though their geo­met­ric odd­i­ties seem to have had lit­tle effect on Fer­rag­amo.

As you might expect, the empha­sis here is on high fash­ion, pri­mar­i­ly. When it comes to telling the sto­ries of how most peo­ple in the world have expe­ri­enced fash­ion, Google adopts a very Euro­pean, sup­ply side, per­spec­tive, one in which “The impact of fash­ion,” as one exhib­it is called, spans cat­e­gories “from the econ­o­my and job cre­ation, to help­ing empow­er com­mu­ni­ties.” Non-Euro­pean cloth­ing mak­ers gen­er­al­ly appear as anony­mous folk arti­sans and crafts­peo­ple who serve the larg­er goal of pro­vid­ing mate­ri­als and inspi­ra­tion for the big names.

Cul­tur­al his­to­ri­ans may lament the lack of crit­i­cal or schol­ar­ly per­spec­tives on pop­u­lar cul­ture, the dis­tinct lack of oth­er cul­tur­al points of view, and the intense focus on trends and per­son­al­i­ties. But per­haps to do so is to miss the point of a project like this one—or of the fash­ion world as a whole. As with fine art, the sto­ries of fash­ion are often all about trends and per­son­al­i­ties, and about mate­ri­als and mar­ket forces.

To cap­i­tal­ize on that fact, “We wear cul­ture” has a num­ber of inter­ac­tive, 360 degree videos on its YouTube page, as well as short, adver­tis­ing-like videos, like that above on ripped jeans, part of a series called “Trends Decod­ed.” Kate Lauter­bach, the pro­gram man­ag­er at Google Arts & Cul­ture, high­lights the videos below on the Google blog (be aware, the inter­ac­tive fea­ture will not work in Safari).

  • Find out how Chanel’s black dress made it accept­able for women to wear black on any occa­sion (Musée des Arts Déco­rat­ifs, Paris, France — 1925)
  • Step on up—way up—to learn how Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s sparkling red high heels became an expres­sion of empow­er­ment, suc­cess and sex­i­ness for women (Museo Sal­va­tore Fer­rag­amo from Flo­rence, Italy — 1959)
  • See design­er Vivi­enne West­wood’s unique take on the corset, one of the most con­tro­ver­sial gar­ments in his­to­ry (Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, Lon­don, UK — 1990)
  • Dis­cov­er the Comme des Garçons sweater and skirt with which Rei Kawakubo brought the aes­thet­ics and crafts­man­ship of Japan­ese design onto the glob­al fash­ion stage (Kyoto Cos­tume Insti­tute, Kyoto, Japan — 1983)

Does the project yet deliv­er on its promise, to “tell the sto­ries behind what we wear”? That all depends, I sup­pose, on who “we” are. It is a very valu­able resource for stu­dents of high fash­ion, as well as “a pleas­ant way to lose an after­noon,” writes Marc Bain at Quartz, one that “may give you a new under­stand­ing of what’s hang­ing in your own clos­et.”

We wear cul­ture” fea­tures 30,000 fash­ion pieces and more than 450 exhibits. Start brows­ing here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kandin­sky, Klee & Oth­er Bauhaus Artists Designed Inge­nious Cos­tumes Like You’ve Nev­er Seen Before

1930s Fash­ion Design­ers Pre­dict How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

Punk Meets High Fash­ion in Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Exhi­bi­tion PUNK: Chaos to Cou­ture

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

New, Interactive Web Site Puts Online Thousands of International Folk Songs Recorded by the Great Folklorist Alan Lomax

These days everyone’s hung up on iden­ti­ty. But I don’t mean to talk pol­i­tics, though my point is maybe inescapably polit­i­cal: the iden­ti­ties our jobs and incomes give us—the sta­tus or lack thereof—become so cen­tral to who we are in the world that they eclipse oth­er essen­tial aspects, eclipse the things we do strict­ly because it gives us plea­sure to do them.

Music, dance, art, poet­ry.… These fall under what Alan Lomax called an expe­ri­ence of “the very core” of exis­tence, “the adap­tive style” of cul­ture, “which enables its mem­bers to cohere and sur­vive.” Cul­ture, for Lomax, was nei­ther an eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty nor a racial cat­e­go­ry, nei­ther an exclu­sive rank­ing of hier­ar­chies nor a redoubt for nation­al­ist inse­cu­ri­ties. Cul­tures, plur­al, were pecu­liar­ly region­al expres­sions of shared human­i­ty across one inter­re­lat­ed world.

Lomax did have some pater­nal­is­tic atti­tudes toward what he called “weak­er peo­ples,” not­ing that “the role of the folk­lorist is that of the advo­cate of the folk.” But his advo­ca­cy was not based in the­o­ries of suprema­cy but of his­to­ry. We could mend the rup­tures of the past by adding “cul­tur­al equi­ty… to the humane con­di­tion of lib­er­ty, free­dom of speech and reli­gion, and social jus­tice,” wrote the ide­al­is­tic Lomax. “The stuff of folk­lore,” he wrote else­where, “the oral­ly trans­mit­ted wis­dom, art and music of the peo­ple, can pro­vide ten thou­sand bridges across which men of all nations may stride to say, ‘You are my broth­er.’”

Lomax’s ide­al­ism may seem to us quaint at best, but I dare you to con­demn its results, which include con­nect­ing Lead Bel­ly and Woody Guthrie to their glob­al audi­ences and pre­serv­ing a good deal of the folk music her­itage of the world through tire­less field and stu­dio record­ing, doc­u­men­ta­tion and mem­oir, and insti­tu­tions like the Asso­ci­a­tion for Cul­tur­al Equi­ty (ACE), found­ed by Lomax in 1986 to cen­tral­ize and make avail­able the vast amount of mate­r­i­al he had col­lect­ed over the decades.

In anoth­er archival project, Lomax’s Glob­al Juke­box, we get to see rig­or­ous schol­ar­ly meth­ods applied to exam­ples from his vast library of human expres­sions. The online project cat­a­logues the work in musi­col­o­gy of Lomax and his father John, who both took on a “life long mis­sion to doc­u­ment not only America’s cul­tur­al roots, but the world’s as well,” notes an online brochure for the Glob­al Juke­box. Lomax believed that “music, dance and folk­lore of all tra­di­tions have equal val­ue” and are equal­ly wor­thy of study. The Glob­al Juke­box car­ries that belief into the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Since 1990, the Glob­al Juke­box has func­tioned as a dig­i­tal repos­i­to­ry of music from Lomax’s glob­al archive, as you can see in the very dat­ed 1998 video above, fea­tur­ing ACE direc­tor Gideon D’Arcangelo. Now, updat­ed and put online, the new­ly-launched Glob­al Juke­box web site pro­vides an inter­ac­tive inter­face, giv­ing you access to detailed analy­ses of folk music from all over the world, and high­ly tech­ni­cal “descrip­tive data” for each song. You can learn the sys­tems of “Chore­o­met­rics and Cantometrics”—specialized ana­lyt­i­cal tools for scientists—or you can casu­al­ly browse the incred­i­ble diver­si­ty of music as a layper­son, through a beau­ti­ful­ly ren­dered map view or the col­or­ful­ly attrac­tive graph­ic “tree view,” below.

Stop by the Glob­al Jukebox’s “About” page to learn much more about its tech­ni­cal speci­fici­ties and his­to­ry, which dates to 1960 when Lomax began work­ing with anthro­pol­o­gist Con­rad Arens­berg at Colum­bia and Hunter Uni­ver­si­ties to study “the expres­sive arts” with sci­en­tif­ic tools and emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies. The Glob­al Juke­box rep­re­sents a high­ly schemat­ic way of look­ing at Lomax’s body of work, and its ease of use and lev­el of detail make it easy to leap around the world, sam­pling the thrilling vari­ety of folk music he col­lect­ed.

It is not, and is not meant as, a sub­sti­tute for the liv­ing tra­di­tions Lomax helped safe­guard, and the incred­i­ble music they have inspired pro­fes­sion­al and ama­teur musi­cians to make over the years. But the Glob­al Juke­box gives us sev­er­al unique ways of orga­niz­ing and dis­cov­er­ing those traditions—ways that are still evolv­ing, such as a com­ing func­tion for build­ing your own cul­tur­al fam­i­ly tree with a playlist of songs from your musi­cal ances­try.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 17,000+ Tra­di­tion­al Folk & Blues Songs Curat­ed by the Great Musi­col­o­gist Alan Lomax

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

Leg­endary Folk­lorist Alan Lomax: ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Download 437 Issues of Soviet Photo Magazine, the Soviet Union’s Historic Photography Journal (1926–1991)

The ear­ly years of the Sovi­et Union roiled with inter­nal ten­sions, intrigues, and ide­o­log­i­cal war­fare, and the new empire’s art reflect­ed its uneasy het­ero­doxy. For­mal­ists, Futur­ists, Supre­ma­tists, Con­struc­tivists, and oth­er schools min­gled, pub­lished jour­nals, cri­tiqued and reviewed each other’s work, and like mod­ernists else­where in the world, exper­i­ment­ed with every pos­si­ble medi­um, includ­ing those just com­ing into their own at the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tu­ry, like film and pho­tog­ra­phy.

These two medi­ums, along with radio, also hap­pened to serve as the pri­ma­ry means of pro­pa­gan­diz­ing Sovi­et cit­i­zens and car­ry­ing the mes­sages of the Par­ty in ways every­one could under­stand. And like much of the rest of the world, pho­tog­ra­phy engen­dered its own con­sumer cul­ture.

Out of these com­pet­ing impuls­es came Sovi­et Pho­to (Sovet­skoe foto), a month­ly pho­tog­ra­phy mag­a­zine fea­tur­ing, writes Kse­nia Nouril at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art’s site, “edi­to­ri­als, let­ters, arti­cles, and pho­to­graph­ic essays along­side adver­tise­ments for pho­tog­ra­phy, pho­to­graph­ic process­es, and pho­to­graph­ic chem­i­cals and equip­ment.”

Sovi­et Pho­to was not found­ed by artists, but by a pho­to­jour­nal­ist, Arkady Shaikhet, in 1926 (see the first issue’s cov­er at the top). Though its audi­ence pri­mar­i­ly con­sist­ed of a “Sovi­et ama­teur pho­tog­ra­phers and pho­to clubs,” its ear­ly years freely mixed doc­u­men­tary, didac­ti­cism, and exper­i­men­tal art. It pub­lished the “works of inter­na­tion­al and pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phers” and that of avant-gardists like Con­struc­tivist painter and graph­ic design­er Alek­sander Rod­chenko.

The aes­thet­ic purges under Stalin—in which artists and writ­ers one after anoth­er fell vic­tim to charges of elit­ism and obscurantism—also played out in the pages of Sovi­et Pho­to. “Even before Social­ist Real­ism was decreed to be the offi­cial style of the Sovi­et Union in 1934,” Nouril writes, “the works of avant-garde pho­tog­ra­phers,” includ­ing Rod­chenko, “were denounced as for­mal­ist (imply­ing that they reflect­ed a for­eign and elit­ist style).” Sovi­et Pho­to boy­cotted Rodchenko’s work in 1928 and “through­out the 1930s this state-sanc­tioned jour­nal became increas­ing­ly con­ser­v­a­tive,” empha­siz­ing “con­tent over form.”

This does not mean that that the con­tents of the mag­a­zine were inel­e­gant or pedes­tri­an. Though it once briefly bore the name Pro­le­tarskoe foto (Pro­le­tari­at Pho­tog­ra­phy), and tend­ed toward mon­u­men­tal and indus­tri­al sub­jects, war pho­tog­ra­phy, and ide­al­iza­tions of Sovi­et life dur­ing the Stal­in­ist years. After the 60s thaw, exper­i­men­tal pho­tomon­tages returned, and more abstract com­po­si­tions became com­mon­place. Sovi­et Pho­to also kept pace with many glossy mag­a­zines in the West, with stun­ning full-col­or pho­to­jour­nal­ism and, after glas­nost and the fall of the Berlin wall, high fash­ion and adver­tis­ing pho­tog­ra­phy.

Fans of pho­tog­ra­phy, Sovi­et his­to­ry, or some mea­sure of both, can fol­low Sovi­et Pho­to’s evo­lu­tion in a huge archive fea­tur­ing 437 dig­i­tized issues, pub­lished between 1926 and 1991. Expect to find a gap between 1942 and 1956, when pub­li­ca­tion ceased “due to World War II and the war’s after­ef­fects.” Aside from these years and a few oth­er miss­ing months, the archive con­tains near­ly every issue of Sovi­et Pho­to, free to browse or down­load in var­i­ous for­mats. “Dig deep enough,” writes pho­to blog PetaPix­el, “and you’ll find some real­ly inter­est­ing (and sur­pris­ing­ly famil­iar) things in there.” Enter the archive here.

 

via PetaPix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Rus­sia in 70,000 Pho­tos: New Pho­to Archive Presents Russ­ian His­to­ry from 1860 to 1999

Thou­sands of Pho­tos from the George East­man Muse­um, the World’s Old­est Pho­tog­ra­phy Col­lec­tion, Now Avail­able Online

Down­load Russ­ian Futur­ist Book Art (1910–1915): The Aes­thet­ic Rev­o­lu­tion Before the Polit­i­cal Rev­o­lu­tion

Behold a Beau­ti­ful Archive of 10,000 Vin­tage Cam­eras at Col­lec­tion Appareils

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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