Our DH Live! event on mapping sparked some fruitful discourse and brought together folks from History, Ethnomusicology, East Asian Languages & Literatures, Visual Studies, Computer Science, and Performing Arts, as well as professionals from UCI libraries and the School of Humanities. David Fedman’s work on www.japanairraids.org and Scott Stone’s https://recentmusicperformancedb.com offered multiple approaches to the topic of digital historical mapping and overlapped in generative ways.
Both projects engaged some of the challenges of rendering historically relevant information into a visual/geographical format. Fedman emphasized the political stakes of what gets remembered (and forgotten about) in post-war periods, such as the firebombing of 66 cities that preceded the atomic bombings of Japan. US Army maps only tell an incomplete story, and Fedman’s work has sought transpacific collaboration with researchers in Japan as, in part, an intervention into the politics of memory. Some successes for the project include three occasions in which Japanese national television has drawn on the site for sources for news segments. Currently the project is looking to reorganize the website in order to best serve the many unique viewers who have already accessed its archive and who will use it in the future.
Stone’s database of contemporary music performance produces some numerical figures for which composers of contemporary music are performed, how often, and where. The database sheds some light on the extent to which some composers enjoy interest over many regions, and some are more regional in their appeal. By collecting more and more data and mapping where performances of different composers take place, the project helps research librarians such as Stone in the selection process for what to include in academic archives. A recent emphasis in the field on regional archiving may help to diversify the holdings across libraries and give all collections their own character rather than all collections tending toward a homogenized set of objects. The project offers easy download of its data to anyone interested.
Considering the two projects together, there is a shared interest in the question of how to make accessible disparate bits of information that, in aggregate, reveal larger pictures. To render such information visually is to make it more immediate in some sense and, simultaneously, to open up new questions of political stake: who gets to record and share memory, what is the threshold for noteworthy accomplishment, and what regional divisions make for reasonable distinctions?