Power of the Popular: Digital Arts and Humanities in a crowdsourced archive of popular music
The Power of the Popular examines the practices of Manchester Digital Music Archive (MDMA), a volunteer-run and user-generated community archive that aims to celebrate and preserve music from Greater Manchester, the large metropolitan area including and surrounding the city of Manchester, England. Data and network visualizations of crowdsourced contributions done in collaboration with the MDMA helped Kate explore different kinds of community contributions to popular music preservation in Manchester.
Kate's work draws on an IDAH-built digital-humanities tool (Net.Create) and several years of field research. More importantly, Power of the Popular is emblematic of the the IDAH focus on public humanities and represents an ethical humanities approach to data as generated by actual people.
