About us
Resounding Culture is a multimedia web portal that recontextualizes the various histories of music and music-making within a distinctly Canadian context. The portal accesses various cultural resources from archival collections housed at the University of Alberta. Searching through the portal offers a unique and multi-stranded network of histories that intersect, influence, complement, and exist in tension with each other. Building on a reconceptualization of national music histories, Resounding Culture links digitized cultural resources— drawing on the multi- and intercultural nature of musical practices and the potential for innovative use of technology and speaking to the diversity of perspectives and practices of music and music-making in Canada— to create an alternative to traditional narrative approaches to history.
Our aim is to develop cross-disciplinary datasets of online cultural materials available through the University of Alberta. From this, we establish a framework modeling music metadata curation, ensuring the security and sustainability of current resources, and allowing the addition of new resources as permissions are received. By selecting, curating, contextualizing and linking within these resources, we model an approach to digital music histories that speaks to the diversity of perspectives and practices of music and music-making in Canada.
Resounding Culture is a multimedia web portal where you can explore the histories of music and music-making in Canada
Contributions
Resounding Culture is designed to facilitate research for a broad community including: music scholars interested in Canadian culture, students, research assistants, teachers, and anyone interested in learning, thinking, and writing about music and music-making in Canada can benefit from the results of this project. Through this portal, researchers can gain knowledge of particular aspects of music in Canada; valuable experience in reading existing histories not only as sources of information, but as interpretations of selected sources from particular perspectives; archival research skills; improved digital literacy relating to multimedia materials across multiple disciplines; and experience in working as part of a research team. The project can contribute to teaching at the university level. The work that the researchers carry out will immediately and directly benefit their own teaching, enriching student experience in both general courses on music in Canada and in specialized seminars. Furthermore, this project reaches receptive instructors at other institutions. Because the historiography of music and nation is an issue throughout the international field of musicology, this work can have an impact internationally, especially in countries shaped through settler colonialism— most prominently the United States and Australia. In the long term, scholars will also benefit from the new presentation of source documents in its various formats prepared through this work.
Team
Mary Ingraham, David Gramit, Sean Luyk, Kamal Ranaweera, UAlberta Arts Resource Centre
Research Assistants: Jamie Meyers-Riczu, Morteza Abedinifard, Caitlin MacRae, Holly Pickering, Quincy Hiscott
Webpage Design: Alicja Warszynski, Sarah Hilliard
Acknowledgements: Geoff Harder, Sharon Farnel, Sonya Betz, UAlberta Library, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada