MUH 3633 — In-Class Archive Project

Over six sessions in Weeks 13–15, you will work directly with ten archival collections from the Library of Congress / American Folklife Center. We will listen to field recordings, read fieldnotes and correspondence, and examine photographs spanning more than eighty years of documentary practice around the United States. We'll look at WPA-funded work from the 1930s and '40s; urban diasporic music-making in the 1970s; and a community-collected oral history project from 2022. Our goal is to develop research methods and skills, such as handling primary sources, engaging scholarship, examining power dynamics in data collection and analysis, and developing scholarly arguments.