calderwood

In the last week or so, I’ve come up with a few ideas for a possible web site.  Unfortunately, each of these ideas involves its own set of problems, difficulties, and complications, so I’m not sure whether any of them are worth pursuing.

My first idea was to create a web site that would serve as a complement to my master’s thesis.  My thesis involves representations of African Americans in film noir from the 1940s and 1950s, so, ideally, a web site could help illustrate my thesis by including still images/streaming video from particular films in which African Americans appear.  I imagine, though, that such a project would run against copyright issues.  From a legal standpoint, how safe would it be to include small samples from these films?  Even if such a project would not place me in any significant jeopardy, I don’t think I currently have the hardware or expertise to even copy a still image from a movie already on DVD.

Another way a web site could (vaguely) complement my thesis is by collecting other people’s stories.  In this case, my focus would not be African Americans in film noir so much as people’s experiences viewing film noir.  It might be interesting to learn how different people first learned about film noir, what was the first film noir they ever watched, and how they define noir.  Although, as far as I know, no one has bothered to collect people’s stories about film noir, it is already the subject of countless web sites.  This situation might make it difficult for potential visitors to find my site.  I’m sure I could get a few people’s stories through word of mouth, but how would I proceed to collect even more stories?

Leaving aside the subject of film noir, I also though about providing lyrics from blues recordings from the 1920s and 1930s.  I know that many of these lyrics have already made their way into print, and that many of these recordings have been digitized, but I’m not sure whether anyone has bothered to provide, in machine-readable text, the lyrics from a large selection of blues recordings online.  Such a project would allow people to do quick searches for specific words among a large selection of songs, thereby enabling new forms of scholarship.  Assuming that such a project has not already been done and that I went about doing it, then I would run against the problems inherent in transcribing the lyrics of musical recordings: how can I be sure I am hearing the right words?  The fact that these particular recordings are often full of pops and crackles, not to mention that they are often sung in deep Southern accents, makes accuracy even more difficult to achieve.  Besides the difficulty of ensuring accuracy, I would also have to confront the problem of how to register the accent of the singer faithfully while still making the lyrics easy to search.  For example, in one song, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup pronounces “questionaire” as if it were “question-air-ee,” but if I wrote the word that way, then a person looking for “questionaire” would not be able to find this particular song.

If anybody has a response or feedback to any of these ideas and questions, I’d greatly appreciate hearing it. 

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 5th, 2006 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.