In regards to the Vonnegut project, I’ve only managed to scan the pages. One thing that I’ve learned is that it apparently costs money to scan things.
It appears that the point of this project is to take a large number of things (too much to read in one go) and turn them into a searchable amount of things. I will compare this with the other project I’m doing.
At the moment, I’m in a bookbinding class. I’ve elected to compile and eventually bind all my favorite folk songs together in a volume. Every Sunday I’ve been in college my roommate, other friends, and I have all gathered around a piano and sung Irish, southern, occasionally Hebrew, music together. It is honestly one of my favorite memories. I have many of the songs memorized, but like I can’t read all of Vonnegut’s work, I can’t listen to every folk tune.
Looking back, all those folk songs would be memorized in the 19th century British isles. People would teach each other music and memorize these tunes…I imagine that there are some books that have been compiled them, but people have been illiterate for most of history. The oral tradition has made songs have alternate lyrics (it just depends on where you’re from). In any measure, these songs were stored in the head.
Later, as people became more literate, perhaps more songs would be written down. But everyone already had them memorized.
In the age of the internet, we now have access to every Irish song. We can listen to dozens of arrangements of any of them. This is how I learned most of my favorites. However, there are too many to listen to. I compiled only 40 or so folk songs (more than half Irish) and I don’t even have all of the words memorized. This is why I bless the internet for the convenient lyrics.
But someone had to put those words and lyrics and chords into the computer. They made the historical and the traditional shareable by making it digital.
So I guess we’re back to the first day of the semester. We have an entity that knows every folk song ever composed and we have a person with a college schedule and only two ears.
Digital Humanities bridges that gap. It finds solutions for people like me to enjoy all the music. It is in this way that the Irish music is passed down. Person to computer to person, just like how it was passed on in the old days. And I feel like I’m doing the same thing by digitizing Vonnegut in the class.
