Development Phase
January 2003 - January 2005
he EVIA
Digital Archive project is a joint effort of Indiana University
and the University of Michigan to establish a digital archive of ethnomusicological
video for use by scholars and instructors. Currently in a development
phase funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Indiana University,
and the University of Michigan, the archive is being designed by experts
in the fields of ethnomusicology, archiving, video, intellectual property,
and digital technology. Ultimately, the EVIA Digital Archive intends
to preserve video recordings and make them easily accessible for teaching
and research, providing an alternative to physical archives whose
unique materials are available only to people who travel to the archive
location. We intend to use the guidelines fashioned by ethnomusicologists,
technologists, librarians, archivists, and intellectual property experts
during a year-long planning project funded
by the Mellon Foundation to create a functioning digital repository
and delivery system containing approximately 150 hours of digital
video and accompanying metadata. Part of this metadata will include
annotations and analysis of video content by the scholars who made
the recordings. Using the bandwidth capabilities of Internet2, we
will provide high quality video streams to scholars for new research
endeavors and to teachers for creating rich learning experiences.
he field
of ethnomusicology has depended throughout its history on
the latest recording technology to help document and subsequently
analyze the musical practices of people all over the world. Closely
allied with the disciplines of anthropology, musicology, and folklore,
ethnomusicologists analyze both music itself and music as one of many
interrelated cultural systems. Research for ethnomusicologists may
involve library or archival work, but what makes them different from
many other scholars in the humanities is that most ethnomusicologists
conduct ethnographic research or "fieldwork" as well. Because
music events around the world rarely involve music-sound alone, ethnomusicologists
attend to the multiple channels of creative communication that surround
these events and thus regard video as an extremely useful research
tool. Musical performances recorded on video in the last two decades
will be the centerpiece of this project. Unfortunately, data on videotape
deteriorates quickly. Hence, a high level of urgency surrounds the
immediate preservation of these recordings.
See the Development
Phase Proposal for more details about the project [1
MB pdf].