“To Undeaf Their Ears: The spoken word in a multimedia world”

FRIDAY, October 17, 2003
3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. in the Frick Fine Arts Auditorium
Reception follows in the Frick Fine Arts Cloister

Abstract: The ability to store and retrieve sound marked a milestone for civilization. To be sure, texts and scores are storage devices but they provide only the bare elements of the sounds we hear. Audio recordings (wax cylinders, reel-to-reel, cassettes, CDs) preserve our cultural heritage in the form it was created - the sounds themselves - whether the source is voice, instrument or ambient sound. It is hardly worth observing that the musical experience - and the musical tradition - has been transformed by ready access to recordings. And as the medium by which we have captured sound evolves, so have the methods of distribution. It is difficult to adequately capture in a metaphor the effects of music file sharing over P2P networks. Yet for all the power contained in the listening experience and shared by ten of millions of music lovers, we have not yet made full use of spoken word resources nor shared them widely. What we are missing is a culture that recognizes the superiority of the spoken word in contrast to its next-of-kin: the transcript. Examples will be drawn from public repositories of spoken word materials such as "The OYEZ Project" and "History and Politics Out Loud"

About the Speaker: Jerry Goldman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. He is the creator and director of The OYEZ Project, a massive web-based multimedia collection of materials on and about the United States Supreme Court. Goldman and his projects have been the recipients of numerous awards and praise, including the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award for New Media. In August 2003, a Washington Post editorial singled out The OYEZ Project for special distinction in preserving and sharing Supreme Court audio with a wide audience. He is also the creator -- with Paul Manna -- of OYEZ Baseball and Presidential Baseball. These projects rely on baseball as a metaphor to understand the public contributions of justices and presidents. Goldman's work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.