This weekend welcomes public sector and academic folklorists, community scholars, students, and others interested in traditional culture. There’s still time to submit a paper proposal for the conference; the deadline is Monday, January 10, 2011.  Please see the Call for Papers for more information.  Professionals, graduate, and undergraduate students are welcome to submit proposals.

Papers and plenary sessions will be held April 8-9, with a MAFA gathering the evening of April 7.  MAFA will also offer additional field trips on Saturday afternoon, April 9.  Full agenda and registration information will be available late winter.  Please contact Sally Van de Water (410/539-6656 x 107) for more information.

We hope to see you in Harrisburg!

Simon J. Bronner

Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg

Writing in 1968 as head of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University, Richard M. Dorson bemoaned the lack of opportunities in higher education for studying the “home turf” in America of many budding folklorists. He had been trained in the History of American Civilization at Harvard and had been the first doctoral candidate (and he claimed the last) to choose folklore as one of five American fields. He considered folklore essential to an understanding of American culture, especially with the folklorist’s eye for discerning theories regarding the function of tradition and methods of field work and working with human and archival sources. He looked around at an upsurge of interest among students scattered among a variety of disciplinary silos investigating ethnic, occupational, regional, and gendered cultures in the United States and predicted, “Among the new generation of students are some comajors in folklore and American Studies who will master comparative, historical, and critical thinking, and they may produce the sound, perceptive treatments of folklore in American literature or American history that are yet to be written.”  He may have been thinking of literature and history because of his orientation derived from his Harvard days (he was an undergraduate major in “history and literature”), but he probably did not fully anticipate the “cultural turn” that embraced American traditions as a specialization with the added tools of ethnography and sociological and psychological analysis and the applications of public folklore, cultural resource management, new media, heritage and museum studies.

Shortly after Dorson’s complaint was aired, a dramatic shift occurred in the view of folklore as a living tradition close to home that enabled American folklore to expand as a field of study. Before 1975, Dorson could cite surveys of folklore coursework in the United States and Canada that showed world folklore and the ballad dominating the American collegiate curriculum. By the 1980s, however, American folklore rose to the top of the list of the most common courses in folklore offered in American universities. One entire major program begun in 1966 in Cooperstown connected to the State University of New York offered a stand-alone M.A. degree in “American Folk Culture” that stood apart from other programs operating at the time at the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University, University of Texas, and UCLA in its emphasis on material culture, folklife and ethnology, and museum studies in the United States. In the next decade, students could declare “folklife” as a specialization on the way to receiving a Ph.D. in American Studies at George Washington University. At Dorson’s home institution of Indiana University, the American Studies Program allowed students to hold a double major in folklore and American Studies. Beginning as an interdepartmental “curriculum,” the Folklore Program at University of North Carolina moved into the Department of American Studies by century’s end with a commitment to regional folklife, particularly in the South. Although Cooperstown shut down its folklore program in favor of a concentration in history museum studies, a new program at Penn State Harrisburg compensated for the loss by offering a folk culture subfield with their American Studies Ph.D.

These developments raise questions about the preparation for scholarship and careers in the twenty-first century that focus on the American context for folk traditions, particularly in the educational incubator of the Middle Atlantic Region that had long been viewed as a microcosm of America with its plural ethnic identity, location as source of American cultural movements, and regional “middleness.” The conventional routes into folk cultural study in the twentieth century primarily had been through literature (often in departments of English and languages) and anthropology. The kinds of folklore studied often varied, and were limited, according to the disciplinary focus. Understandably, an emphasis on literature and speech in language departments influenced the consideration of folklore as narrative. Anthropology courses on folk culture primarily presented material on custom and narrative, primarily in non-Western societies. It certainly became possible to take folklore as a major at a few universities, including Dorson’s beloved Harvard, but American material often was a minor segment of the curriculum, in favor of a global, comparative perspective. I recall when I taught at Harvard in 1996-1997, my course offerings in American folklore to my surprise broke new ground, even though they attracted the notice of the Harvard Crimson for being “must-have” electives in an otherwise esoteric curriculum. UCLA couched folklore courses under a World Arts and Culture department and an American folklife course at Indiana University, long a mainstay of the curriculum, disappeared along with Dorson’s own famed course in “Folklore in American Civilization.”

A first question to ask is whether the American focus is too limiting for a boundary-crossing phenomenon like folklore.  The answer necessarily takes in the vastness and diversity of the American social and physical landscape. Further the spatialization of folklore with “America” forces analysis of the connection of folklore to national, regional, and local contexts that are often political as well as cultural. Perhaps this tendency is why American Studies has been especially attractive to considerations of public engagement, heritage, and application.  That is not to say that transnational connections and global diffusion are excluded. Americanists, well aware of the migrant nature of their subject, also take as a given the necessity of seeking sources and precedents outside the continent for American cultural phenomena. That orientation leads to a twin concern for synchronic and diachronic analysis, that is, using ethnography to document the present and historical chronology and context for precedents. The explanatory goal of American Studies often led to an additional step beyond identification common in folkloristic essays: psychological or cognitive sources of traditions. For its evidence, American Studies is not limited by a discipline to a type or genre. Therefore, material culture, folk arts, beliefs, and  bodylore that went overlooked in English, history, and anthropology were avidly picked up to address the issues of an American environment.

A second question is where folklore fits into an intellectual organization by geographic area. The answer to this one is that a natural fit of folklore with American Studies occurs because of the special concern for interpreting the patterns and ideas evident in American culture. Americanists therefore called for looking at interrelations of folk, popular, and elite culture rather than delimiting or excluding material for study. Dorson offered a visual representation of a conventional disciplinary view of culture with bounded boxes piled on top of one another. Folk rested on the bottom and elite sat at the top of the heap. In an Americanist orientation, culture is presented as a series of relationships with folk interacting with popular, mass, and elite. This orientation is one of the reasons, I believe, that the social interactional approach emphasizing the situations and scenes of American everyday life has been an especially important contribution of folklore to American Studies (Bauman and Abrahams 1976: 375-76). Folklore provides expressive evidence of America’s pluralism at the grassroots. As such, area studies have inspired a number of interdisciplinary spinoffs that have the potential to complement cultural area and national work and emphasize folkloristic perspectives: ethnic studies, regional studies, gender studies, cultural studies, religious studies, and cultural sustainability, among others. Perhaps because of the weak regional identity of the Middle Atlantic and ethnic pluralism compared to the South, West, and New England, however, much of the interdisciplinary effort in the Middle Atlantic States has been in American Studies as an umbrella for local and ethnic studies.

If American Studies is so broadly conceived, however, one might worry that folklore would get swallowed up or relegated to the margins of study.  A mitigating factor from the intellectual heritage of folkloristics is that a body of scholarship exists covering many groups and genres that have been overlooked by the big disciplines. In the search for cultural coverage in American Studies, folkloristics often gets noticed more than in other disciplinary homes. Additionally, folklorists more than anthropologists have been willing to examine one’s own backyard, so to speak, as a research field to query issues of identity, function, and symbolism. Familiarity with one’s culture did not exclude researchers from taking an objective stance; in fact, “dealing with one’s own” was encouraged. It also often led to an applied aspect where the results of research could lead to social action including education, cultural programming (e.g., preservation projects, exhibitions, festivals), and public policy advocacy.

Although journals abound with calls for linking the evidence of folklore with American Studies, material on devising a curriculum oriented toward folkloristics hardly exists. An intriguing exception is Tremaine McDowell’s description of the efforts by the American Studies program at the University of Minnesota to emphasize folklore “as sources of information concerning America” (McDowell 1948: 44). The alteration he proposed to disciplinary approaches in history and literature to folklore is to emphasize the relationship of folklore to American life rather than letters or events. Formal instruction did exist within the department of history (by Philip Jordan and at least once by Richard Dorson). McDowell was quick to point out that “the student’s work in folklore is done within the frame of reference not of history alone but the much wider frame of American culture as a whole” (1948: 46). The radical statement for its time, however, was that “This broad overview is organized and systematized for seniors in a final proseminar in American Studies” (1948: 46).  In other words, folklore is the foundation as well as capstone of students’ American cultural education.

Minnesota did not sustain this orientation that just may have been ahead of its time, although folklorists taught there through the end of the twentieth century. I daresay, however, that Penn State Harrisburg with its new doctoral program (established in 2009) building upon its legacy of undergraduate and graduate education since 1972 is actively working to reframe “American culture as a whole.” Instead of a solitary course on folklore, several exist with different concentrations. Undergraduates can begin with “Introduction to American Folklore” and “Popular Culture and Folklife” at the 100-level and advance to “American Folklore” at the 300 level and “Folktale in American Literature” at the 400 level. Folklore is evident as it was at Minnesota in the capstone experience of “American Themes, American Eras” (491W). Additionally, students have access to a number of applied courses oriented toward public heritage careers such as “Museum Studies,” “Public Heritage,” “Historic Preservation,” “Archives and Records Management,” and “Oral History.” A Center for Pennsylvania Culture supports much of the regional public heritage work and provides research projects. With the passage of time and new areas of inquiry from the foundations of American Studies, new coursework involving folklore is available such as “Americans at Work,” “American Masculinities,” “Ethnicity and the American Experience,” “Ethnography of the United States,” and “American Expressive Forms.” These courses are tied together by an overarching goal “to advance the documentation and interpretation of the American experience, past and present, through research with a variety of evidence, including objects, still and moving images, practices and performances, and oral and written texts.”

The master’s program features coursework, internships, and independent studies in folklore and folklife, including “Topics in Folklore” and “Material Culture and Folklife.” Regularly offered courses in “Ethnography and Society,” “Local and Regional Studies,” “Seminar in Public Heritage,” “Topics in Popular Culture,” and “Field Experience in Americans Studies” conspicuously complement the strong folkloric component of the program. Special topic graduate courses taught by folklorists have included “Foodways,” “Public Folklore,” “Folk Art,” “Folk Medicine,” “Folk Music,” and “Festival.” The culminating experience is a thesis or project (including exhibitions, documentaries, catalogues, and creative productions) that allows for alternative forms of scholarship. Many of these projects have been on folklore including published versions on legend trips, Pennsylvania German folklife, folk crafts, vernacular architecture, folklore in education, and children’s.

Many teachers and public heritage professionals may “stumble” upon folklore and then embrace it in their graduate coursework as part of a general plan of study. At the doctoral level, students tend to declare folk culture as a specialization. Other fields that complement it at Penn State Harrisburg are defined as course sequences in “Public Heritage and Museum Studies,” “Interdisciplinary History and Politics,” “Society and Ethnography,” and “Regional, Urban, and Environmental Studies. Doctoral students declare two of these subfields and most budding folklorists claim “Society and Ethnography” or “Public Heritage and Museum Studies” along with folk and popular culture. Even if they do not identify themselves as folklorists, they get a strong dose of folkloristics in their American Studies preparation that serves them for projects that have included food, media, and art studies. Indeed, the first dissertation to come out of the program was on a folkloristic topic of folkloric responses to disaster on the Internet followed by projects on Jewish dress, backpacking narratives, and food recipe transmission. The program is also home to the Middle Atlantic American Studies Association which sponsors research conferences involving students and professionals, such as the upcoming “Heritage and the State” conference co-sponsored with the Middle Atlantic Folklife Association at the State Capitol. Faculty also encourage students with editorial and research projects such as the Jewish Cultural Studies Series, Encyclopedia of American Folklife, Susquehanna Heritage, McCormick Family Papers, International Journal of the History of Sport, and Pennsylvania-German Research Guide.

My prediction for the twenty-first century, maybe even bolder than Dorson’s uttered for the twentieth century, is that the new generation of students in the United States desiring to work in folklore will find a home in American Studies and its interdisciplinary spinoffs rather than in the “conventional” disciplines of English, anthropology, and history—and even folklore. And in the process, the face of folklore will contain more folklife, material culture, and public heritage concerns than in years past. The theoretical orientations may also shift, too, with attention to cultural history, everyday life, media and contemporary practices, and folk-popular culture relations. The institutions of the Middle Atlantic can lead the way.

References

Baker, Ronald L. 1971. “Folklore Courses and Programs in American Colleges and Universities.” Journal of American Folklore 84: 221-29.

________. 1986. “Folklore and Folklife Studies in American and Canadian Colleges and Universities.” Journal of American Folklore 99: 50-74.

Bauman, Richard, and Roger D. Abrahams. 1976. “American Folklore and American Studies.” American Quarterly 28: 360-77.

Bronner, Simon J. 1996. “American Studies and Folklore.” In American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand, 24-27. New York: Garland.

Cohen, Hennig. 1959. “American Folklore and American Studies: A Final Comment.” Journal of American Folklore 72: 241-42.

Dolby, Sandra K. 1996. “Essential Contributions of a Folkloric Perspective to American Studies.” Journal of Folklore Research 33: 58-64.

Dorson, Richard M. 1950. “The Growth of Folklore Courses.” Journal of American Folklore 63: 345-59.

Dorson, Richard M. 1971. “Folklore in Relation to American Studies.” In American Folklore and the Historian by Richard M. Dorson, 78-93. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McDowell, Tremaine. 1948. “Folklore and American Studies.” American Heritage 2 (old series): 44-47.

DIGITAL PRESERVATION

It is probably safe to say that where once there were producers of “media products” and audiences/consumers for those products, the distinctions have blurred such that the differences grow ever more indistinct.  From DIY websites to laptop recording studios to desktop publishing to recording devices that fit in the palm of your hand, digital technologies have exploded the range of ways in which individuals and communities document and represent themselves reflexively and to the wider world. Arts and educational institutions and practitioners whose mission it is to document the daily stuff of expressive traditional culture, not to mention community members, have also benefited by the leaps in technology.

But in the specific world of cultural institutions that are charged with caring for the raw and the cooked materials generated through such documentary efforts, the view on the digital revolution is much more muted (or ought to be) in contrast to the euphoria which accompanies the release of the nth iteration of the next killer app or the terrabyte capacity flash drive or the gazillion pixel resolution camera that’s as thin as a wafer. In the rest of this text, and given the space considerations, not to mention the sometimes overwhelming complexity of the topic of “digital” itself, I will confine myself to a prolegomena, offering pointers and links to sites produced by like-minded colleagues for further clarification and for inciting discussions.

Gone, gone, gone…and it ain’t never coming back

On a bright sunny day in early 1985 I walked into the offices of the then- Office of Folklife Programs at the Smithsonian Institution to start work as senior ethnomusicologist Tom Vennum’s Assistant Film Editor. Memory fades, but I remember that the welcoming handshake was immediately followed by the hand-over of 40 rolls of raw 16 mm film footage and synch sound on Rajasthani puppets, accompanied by orders  to start cutting a film on the topic for the Smithsonian Folklife Studies film-monograph series. During my subsequent tenure at the Smithsonian, I edited film and coordinated shoots, worked on Festival sound crews and stages and also got a hands-on course in film preservation methodologies.  To reduce a complex process to its essence, this consisted of making a duplicate negative of the raw film footage and putting it away in cold storage, while using the original negative for cutting the finished film.

It’s difficult to say, twenty-odd years after the fact, that the preservation methods that we aspired to at Folklife was standard practice for small or even larger production outfits. It seemed to me from talking to filmmaker colleagues that they admired the concept of making preservation copies, but in practice, especially given the home-made nature of much of the enterprise, and the tight budgets for cultural documentary film-making, that enthusiasm faded or wasn’t really entertained as a viable strategy. In the end, what was usually preserved was the edited final product, which was a very small percentage of the total footage that was originally captured. The rest of the footage, the outtakes, may have been vaulted, but often was not, and it is generally the case that what survives of cultural film documentaries are the positive workprints, the copies which were used in reviewing and editing the rough cut edits of the final show. Whither the negatives – the originals?

But even as we did our due diligence with the materials we generated, the mediascape was dramatically and fundamentally changing and with it the practices and protocols for capturing, preserving and disseminating the images and sounds of cultural life.  From the late 1980’s on, digital technologies and process became established in the recording and preservation realms, vaulting over magnetic tape formats in a way that’s hard to comprehend for someone such as myself who can still remember the miles of videotape that was used for documentation and the confident “save it to tape” exhortations of preservation practitioners.

Enter the new

This is the point at which I would like to step back and make a few observations about the “digital domain.”  One of the first of these is that “digital” aspires to reach the condition of “naturalization,” to borrow a term from Pierre Bourdieu, and has already achieved that status in the world at large.  Digital is the thing that goes without saying because it comes without saying, so ubiquitous and prevalent in its usage that its wider meaning is understood immediately, or thought to be understood and employed in daily discourse while remaining largely unexamined, like “electricity.” Practice follows discourse, so that all sorts of activities are subsequently labeled digital. Some of these are perfectly benign and mundane, like picking up a phone to sticking a thermometer in the Sunday roast to reading the temperature gauge.

When digital practices are going to be deployed in the cultural production and preservation field, however, mundane is neither the condition nor the practice to which we, as cultural workers, caretakers and custodians, should subscribe. It is an unalterable fact of life in the cultural promotion and presentation field that anyone or any entity engaged in the business of caring for other people’s cultural property has to be cognizant of the basic, critical issues in data capture, management and security (or at least how to defrag your hard drive!). For instance, why using  the term ”archival” in conjunction with “CD” or “DVD” is not just a contradiction in terms, but a virtual guarantee of a problem in the near distant future for your data. Or what the issues are with lousy compression of images or audio. Or why metadata is essential for the long and short term life of your files. This is a far cry from the days when all you had to know about archival storage was whether the shoeboxes you had would hold all your cassette tapes.

Everything Old is New Again

Like the pharmaceutical industry, the digital world that presses upon us workers in the arts, educational and cultural fields must be examined closely for both the promises that are made and the caveats that come attached to the products and processes. The cautions and caveats are sometimes easy to miss in the hyperbolic promotion of some devotees and manufacturers. In the world of pharmaceuticals, it is hard to avoid the TV and internet ads that feature happy, shiny people twirling around the living room in slo-mo, kissing puppies or partners, while the soothing voice of Big-Pharma promises the drug fix for whatever problem ails you. The part that gets muted in the visuals and the promises is the possibility that the solution might have some unwanted consequences.  The “digital domain” is also to be entered into with the same caution.

Guha Shankar

June 2010

I suggest the following sites for reading up on “best practices” (for now) in the realm of digital technology, documentation and digital preservation:

Digital Documentation:

Oral History Association The website provides a range of information from an introduction to digital audio recording technology to a comparison of the technical specifications of several commonly used portable digital recorders, with informative insights by our friend and colleague, Doug Boyd.

Transom.org -  Guide to Field Recording Tools A bit idiosyncratic and too wide-ranging at times; for instance, they consider the iPhone seriously as a recording device. However they conduct extensive tests and provide detailed specs on a range of gear.  The site is probably best read against the grain of the solid advice of other organizations such as the Vermont Folklife Center, where Andy Kolovos dispenses thoughtful advice with the insights of the consummate archivist and bit preservationist: Vermont Folklife Center Audio Equipment Guide.

http://www.digicamhelp.com/ A serviceable site that provides usually helpful advice on makes and models of digital still cameras.

Kodak, Inc. As much about methods and techniques for still photography from one of the industry leaders in the field.

Tools for the Archival Preservation of Digital Objects:

Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative This site is a collaborative effort by federal agencies formed as a group in 2007 to define common guidelines, methods, and practices to digitize historical content in a sustainable manner.

Sound Directions – a joint project of Indiana University and Harvard University One major goal of the project was to test emerging standards and develop best practices for audio preservation. The project created a number of software tools that may be placed into service including the Harvard Sound Directions Toolkit – a suite of forty open-source, scriptable, command line interface tools that streamline workflow, reduce labor costs, and reduce the potential for human error in the creation of preservation metadata and in the encompassing preservation package.

EVIA (Educational Video for Instruction and Analysis) Digital Archive, Indiana University.  The Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive Project was begun by scholars at Indiana University and the University of Michigan in an effort to establish a preservation and access system for ethnographic field video annotated by scholars and made available to educators and researchers online.

Describing, Managing and Providing Access to Archival Collections:

Library of Congress Authorities & Vocabularies. Using Library of Congress Authorities, you can browse and view authority headings for Subject, Name, Title and Name/Title combinations; and download authority records in MARC format for use in a local library system. This service is offered free of charge.

Library of Congress Metadata Encoding and Transmissions Standards The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium. The standard is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress, and is being developed as an initiative of the Digital Library Federation.

Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) (Society of American Archivists, 2007) is an output-neutral set of rules for describing archives, personal papers, and manuscript collections, and can be applied to all material types. It is the U.S. implementation of international standards (i.e., ISAD(G) and ISAAR(CPF)) for the description of archival materials and their creators.

Technical Documents on Archiving and Preserving Digital Recordings:

Bradley, Kevin. Risks Associated with the Use of Recordable CDs and DVDs as Reliable Storage Media in Archival Collections – Strategies and Alternatives (UNESCO, 2006)

International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, 2009.
Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects (TC04 Second Edition).

The following ten point list (not quite commandments) is adopted from my colleague Marcia Segal’s presentations on digitization or transforming cultural legacy materials to present-day formats.

Marcia Segal’s Digitization Tips, Hints, and Clues

1) Before you embark on a digitization project, conduct research on related projects successfully completed at other institutions.

2) Bigger institutions than yours can literally afford to make mistakes.

3) Talk to people who have been involved in digitization work at different institutions, with a variety of concerns, audiences, and budgets.

4) Your goals will define everything you do.

5) Treat a digitization project as your only chance to get the work done.

6) Digitize with both preservation and access in mind.

7) Metadata provides context for digital files.

8)  It takes a year to make a click possible. [online content doesn't appear automatically: it takes a good deal of planning and preparation to make it possible to click a link and retrieve content]

9) Digital files are fragile.

10) Once you’ve finished a project, don’t retrofit it when new and better digitization methods become available.

11) Items 1 through 10 are subject to change

Guha Shankar is the Folklife Specialist in the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. He has experience and training in media production, digital assets management, intellectual property and cultural heritage management for traditional communities, public programs and educational outreach (festivals, concerts, symposia and seminars), and teaching documentary field methods for community cultural heritage initiatives. At the AFC he works with a number of archival media collections in the area of digital preservation and production. His research interests include diasporic community formations in the Caribbean, ethnographic media, visual representation, and performance studies. Shankar received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin in 2003, from the Department of Anthropology, with a concentration in Folklore and Public Culture. He received his M.A., from the University of Texas, Austin in 1996, in Folklore and Public Culture, in the Department of Anthropology. He obtained his B.A. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1982, with concentrations in Radio Television and Motion Pictures and Political Science.