MediaNOLA: Making the History of New Orleans Cultural Production Part of the Present

FAIN: HD-51229-11

Administrators of the Tulane Educational Fund, The (New Orleans, LA 70118-5698)
Vicki Alexis Mayer (Project Director: October 2010 to April 2014)

A planning grant to assist archivists and community media practitioners in designing a multi-media, GIS-enhanced, interactive digital archiving site for New Orleans' cultural productions and oral histories.

MediaNOLA seeks to locate the people, processes, and places through which a city makes its culture. Through a research and reference portal, MediaNOLA would educate scholars, students, and citizens about origins of this culture, the ways it develops from the social networks located across the city’s human landscape. This planning grant would help archivists and community media practitioners work together with technical staff to devise an interactive site that joins and maps digital archival images of the city's cultural production with oral histories that have a through-line based around work, from the trades people who supported the city’s thriving print, music, and audiovisual cultures to the consumers who become part of the performance for Mardi Gras and second-line parades.