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].


 

 

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