This is a guest post by Folklife Specialist Ann Hoog, who coordinates AFC’s internship program. This is the second in a two-part series stemming from a conversation with one of our summer interns, Kirk Sullivan. Part I was about how he went from having an established career in software engineering to becoming a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology. Today, …
This is a guest post by Folklife Specialist Ann Hoog, who coordinates AFC’s internship program. This is the first in a two-part series stemming from a conversation with one of our summer interns, Kirk Sullivan. Part II is available at this link. This week I sat down to talk with one of our summer interns, Kirk Sullivan, …
Folklorist Trevor J. Blank is an assistant professor of communication at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Readers of Folklife Today might enjoy a series of posts on the Library of Congress’s digital preservation blog, The Signal. In a two-part Insights Interview series, folklorist Trevor J. Blank talks about digital culture on the …
This is a guest post by American Folklife Center Folklife Specialist Catherine H. Kerst, a subject cataloger who has led the project since it was established. The American Folklife Center is delighted to announce that the American Folklore Society Ethnographic Thesaurus (AFSET) has been released through the Library of Congress Linked Data Service at http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/ethnographicTerms.The thesaurus …
The following is a guest post from Todd Harvey, the curator of the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center archives, Library of Congress. The American Folklife Center is delighted to announce donation of the Bess Lomax Hawes Collection (AFC 2014/008) to the Center’s archive. The collection contains manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs, and moving …
The American Folklife Center has a small but respectable collection of 419 Scam emails. It even includes a parody scam letter from February 2003 claiming to be authored by none other than George W. Bush, who asks recipients to transfer 10 to 25 percent of their yearly incomes to aid in removing the Iraqi president from …
The latest collection of oral histories and related documentation acquired by the American Folklife Center explores the significance and impact of wild horses, which remain deeply connected to the culture, economy and mythology of the West. Two companion collections include more than 1,000 images and more than 70 recorded interviews with those whose lives are impacted by the horses. Also …
During a recent trip to the University of Iowa at the invitation of the Digital Studio for Public Arts and Humanities, I took the opportunity to show off some of our recently digitized recordings made by folklorist Harry Oster (1923-2001), who was on the English faculty at Iowa for 30 years. The American Folklife Center …
Helene Stratman-Thomas (1896–1973) emerges from this cavalcade of (Wisconsin folk music) scholarship as neither the first, nor the most persistent, nor the most prolific, nor the most expert collector of Wisconsin’s musical folklore, but she is, and perhaps always will be, the most significant. — James Leary, The Wisconsin Patchwork: A Companion to the Radio …
