Hearing the Americas

FAIN: MD-253238-17

George Mason University (Fairfax, VA 22030-4444)
Sheila A. Brennan (Project Director: June 2016 to June 2019)

Development of a website that explores the transnational history of American popular music.

George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is seeking a Digital Projects for the Public Discovery grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to plan an accessible, digital public humanities project that will increase users’ understanding of the transnational roots of American popular music. The digitized music collections available in the Library of Congress’s (LC) National Jukebox and the University of California at Santa Barbara’s (UCSB) Cylinder Audio Archive will provide the building blocks for the team to design a digital project that will ask users how well they know their music history and invite them to discover a rich contextual network of other historical collections. The grant funds will allow the team to research the audio and archival collections; conduct audience research; draft the information architecture, test with users, and to produce a design document that will lay out how the project will proceed in future phases.