Connections in Sound

The latest news on Patrick’s research:

Patrick Egan is a scholar and musician from Ireland, who has just served as a Fellow in Digital Studies at the Kluge Center in the Library of Congress and is now on a Fulbright Tech Impact scholarship. He has recently submitted his PhD in digital humanities with ethnomusicology in at University College Cork. Patrick’s interests over the past number of years have focused on ways to creatively use descriptive data in order to re-imagine how research is conducted with archival collections.

Survey of irish Traditional Music in North America

Throughout 2019, I had a number of digital projects underway under the working title, Connections in Sound. I shared data about recordings of Irish traditional music collected and held by the American Folklife Center (AFC). My research aimed to understand more fully the role that archives and collections might play in the lives of performers, as a result of the digital turn. I created a number of prototypes for exploring the collections and some examples can be seen below. I agreed to share his research and these ongoing digital projects with the public as I created them and I sought  feedback from researchers and the Irish traditional music community.

Visualisations:

Pathways to the collections that contain Irish traditional music at the American Folklife Center: 

Irish born emigrants in the US (1850-1980) and locations of collections that were discovered during the “Connections in Sound” project:

Meanwhile, I conducted a survey of Irish traditional music in North America, with specific reference to the use of sound files on the internet and with the websites of archives. A visualisation of many of the results is shown below, with over 439 responses. This survey is online and was open between 2019 and 2020: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/B7F626T

These projects were work-in-progress. Comment and share your ideas in the comments below.

I share this work through the Open Science Framework, on my GitHub account, and through several publications in Archival Science, Digital Studies, and currently working on one for Ethnomusicology.

Event: Revealing and uniting hidden recordings of Irish traditional music 

During my time as a Kluge Fellow in Digital Studies and Fulbright Tech Impact scholar, my project entitled “Connections in Sound” had been focused on experimental ways to re-combine archived audio material in the digital age. On Thursday 29th August 2019 at 12pm in Library of Congress room LJ119, I was in conversation with staff from the American Folklife Center and digital experts about the audio collections that contain Irish traditional music. I presented digital visualizations and digital infrastructures that I used for linking music recordings, and finished with a performance of Irish traditional music with local DC musicians. More about this event here:
https://www.loc.gov/item/event-397418/revealing-and-uniting-hidden-recordings-of-irish-traditional-music/2019-08-29/

Check out this inspiring TED talk by Jaron Lanier on “how we need to remake the internet”.