SDR Deposit of the Week: Improving educational equity
Open reel tapes, head blocks, and unconventional track arrangements at the Stanford Media Preservation Lab
Part of audio preservation work includes working with media that has peculiar characteristics. Sometimes the atypical qualities are a byproduct of how the recording was made by the recordist. An example of this type of problem that we occasionally see at the Stanford Media Preservation Lab is when an open reel tape is recorded over and there is remaining content hidden in certain spots of the tape. This presents specific problems in capture since tape heads are built for use with specific physical configurations of tracks and thus capturing the hidden spots outside of the normal range of track configuration is near impossible. With this in mind SMPL recently worked on obtaining equipment to address this challenging scenario.
SDR Deposit of the Week: Disputed boundaries
It's one thing to talk about an area of land under dispute, and it's another thing entirely to see it on a map. Professor of Political Science Kenneth Schultz demonstrates the validity of this statement with his recent work, "Mapping Interstate Territorial Conflict," which was published in December in the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
Upcoming seminar by digital humanities and internet studies scholar
Dovetailing our recent announcement of documentation of resources for research using web archives, we will be visited next month by an individual who has done much to advance web archives as materials of scholarly interest and exploration.
SDR Deposit of the Week: Facilitating reproducibility
Many scientists are making the reproducibility of their research a much higher priority these days than they used to. But it's a time consuming task, which means that many are searching for tools and workflows to help facilitate their efforts.
Hatef Monajemi, a PhD student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and his PhD advisor Professor David L. Donoho, have developed a new piece of software that can make reproducibility an easier goal to achieve. His new software is called Clusterjob (CJ). This software can be used to develop reproducible computational packages and make the generation of data for a research study fully reproducible. CJ is an open-source software available on GitHub.
Lacuna @ Dartmouth
Lacuna, a digital reading, writing, and annotation platform I developed, is now in use as part of a MOOC being run at Dartmouth University. An author for their EdTech blog recently wrote up the experience. Here's my favorite part of the post:
Resources for research using web archives
Since our collaboration with political science researchers using web archives to understand the 2014 U.S. congressional elections, we've seen (and, hopefully, helped foster) growing interest in web archives as primary source material. This trend parallels a similar refocusing by other web archiving programs toward enhancing access services and facilitating research use. The maturity and the variety of these efforts, as well as the accumulating body of resulting research, provide an expanding list of references with which to orient and entice prospective researchers to the potential of working with web archives.
“Porgy and Bess” CD release draws on Riverwalk Jazz archive
The producers of Riverwalk Jazz, the popular public radio program dedicated to presenting, preserving and promoting classic jazz, recently issued their acclaimed live production of “Porgy and Bess: A Jazz Transcription” on CD. The original program masters, recorded in 1992 on analog quarter-inch tape, were paged from the Riverwalk Jazz collection held by the Archive of Recorded Sound and digitized at the Stanford Media Preservation Lab for the release.