[00:00:05.38] LESLIE SHARP: Good morning, everyone. I'm Leslie Sharp, Dean of Libraries. So welcome to the Georgia Tech Library for both our people in person and our people online. It is truly a great day. Todd was so nice and acknowledging my support of today's events but as you know, it wasn't me who got this going. [00:00:36.22] There are a number of people in history and sociology, literature, media, and communication who worked very hard on this as well as my library colleagues. And it would be remiss of me if I didn't try to think them because they are working extremely hard today and have been for the past year on this event. [00:00:59.61] Archivist Wendy Hagenmaier, Quincy Thomas, Kirk Henderson, Kimberly Goler-Stubbs, Sharetha Dantes, Dr. Aisha Johnson, Gregory Oliver, Katie Gentilello, Jason Wright, Kim Sheldon, Donna Riley, and Catherine Manci, who you heard from earlier today. I'd also like to thank Jason Brewer who is our OIT colleague. [00:01:28.36] [APPLAUSE] [00:01:32.42] I am truly fortunate to have such a wonderful team. I also want to congratulate Todd Michney. He is chair of our library advisory board and he also just found out he was promoted. So congratulations, Todd. And he and the School of History and Sociology are great friends and partners with the library, and I am especially biased since I'm an alum of that school. [00:02:05.98] But I also wanted to celebrate the launch of the Mayor Ivan Allen digital archive and all the hard work that Todd and also Wendy have put into it and the others. And also want to congratulate the other people across campus who have worked and contributed expertise to get us to here today, including the students in the vertically integrated project that Todd also mentioned, we call it VIP, which was led by Dr. Brad Rittenhouse, and they partnered with archivists within the Georgia Tech Library. [00:02:45.31] For today's keynote we are going to take a deep look and how digital archives and collections can be made visible through artistic and technological processes. I am really excited to hear from our speaker, Brian Foo. His work is incredible. His website, brianfoo.com, is listed up here. I urge you to go to it and look at the variety of projects. [00:03:16.10] One of my favorite things about Brian's work is that he is constantly keeping in mind science, art, and joy, and his work reflects that. So please take a minute to go and look at that, or you might get lost in it like I did and it's more than a minute. It may become an hour. [00:03:40.56] Brian Foo is an artist and a computer scientist, working in libraries and museums were they focus on making cultural and scientific collections accessible, remixable, and available for the general public. [00:04:00.16] As a data artist at the American Museum of Natural History, he designed the museum's first permanent exhibit on climate change. At the New York Public Library, he designed the library's digital collections website and took part in an effort to release hundreds of thousands of items into the public domain. As the innovator in residence at the Library of Congress, he created Citizen DJ, a project that invites the public to make hip hop music using the free-to-use audio and video collections from the Library of Congress. His work is amazing. [00:04:44.52] What I also like about Brian's work and all the other speakers you will hear today and the premise behind the Mayor Ivan Allen digital archives is the fact that these efforts and Brian's work really underscore several of the Georgia Tech core values. Strive for excellence, thrive on diversity, celebrate collaboration, champion innovation, safeguard freedom of inquiry and expression, and being responsible stewards. [00:05:25.81] It is my honor to be here today and to introduce and welcome our speaker, Brian Foo to the Georgia Tech Library, the Georgia Tech campus, and to our partners at Ivan Allen College for Liberal Arts. So thank you and I'm going to turn it over to Brian. [00:05:45.23] BRIAN FOO: Thank you so much, Dean Sharp. So yeah, so thank you so much, everybody, for having me here. I'm actually calling in from Washington DC and really excited to talk about some of the projects that are very applicable, especially after hearing Dr. Michney's presentation, particularly around how to make the archive accessible to the public beyond digitization and thinking about the audience and thinking about how to represent and activate some of the communities that might not be represented in the underlying material. [00:06:26.78] So let me share my screen. So yeah, I was about to say that instead of slides today, my presentation will be mostly demos. This is really to underscore the fact that a lot of the work that I'll show you today is publicly accessible. And you can actually follow along. If you're on a computer right now, you can click through to pretty much everything that I'm talking about. Here's the URL to these links and I will begin. [00:07:04.49] So I'm just going to start this presentation at the New York Public Library. So this is where I began my career in cultural heritage and digital scholarship and around thinking about digital collections and access and things like that. I want to start with what was mentioned in the generous introduction by Dean Sharp around our effort to think about how to make our collections more available to the public. [00:07:43.40] So in I think it was 2015, we launched our digital collections website, where you can-- currently there's probably about a million items that you can browse and view and download online via the New York Public Library. [00:08:07.60] And then by the way, the New York Public Library is the second largest public library system in the country behind the Library of Congress, so there's 88 branch libraries as well as four research libraries. So there's a lot of amazing content that we try to make available to not only New York residents but the whole country or even the whole world. [00:08:32.42] So we did this really big effort to think about what happens after digitization. We put a lot of these things online, but how can we really think about how to activate these collections for people who might not otherwise have a relationship with the library or think about that they can go to the library to find something that's relevant to them. [00:08:57.71] So in my mind, I think researchers and historians and scholars are always important, but I'm always thinking about audiences who might not think of themselves as somebody who would go into especially like a research library, even though all this stuff is available to really anybody. [00:09:21.22] So we did this really big effort to really try to identify the materials that are available in the public domain from a rights point of view. So a lot of this was not technical work. This was a lot of due diligence mostly by our general counsel. I think for people who are familiar with digital collections, websites, you would typically see a rights statement being like, no known copyright or something like that, where it's vague, where it's saying that you could probably use this but you have to kind of do your own due diligence to make sure that you could use it however you want. [00:10:03.55] We went collection by collection with our legal counsel to basically say that actually, these items are in the public domain, and we could say for sure to the general public that you can use this without permission, without any restrictions. At the time, it was about 180,000 items that were available in the public domain. That number has been growing in the past half a decade or so. [00:10:35.30] So I just want to show you a couple of things that we did after we made these available to the public. So the first thing I wanted to do was to think about, OK, what does 180,000 objects mean or what does it look like? As an artist or a creator, I just want to know what is in here, maybe visually or just basic idea of what kind of content is in there. [00:11:10.79] So I created this visualization that allows you to really quickly browse through the hundreds and thousands of items that we put into the public domain. So here it is, laid out based on the date that it was created. So you could see a lot of it was created in the 18th and 19th century obviously. So you could see by the imagery here, there's what looks like a lot of maps here, floor plans. We have a lot of stereoscopic images. We have a lot of old menus. [00:11:52.75] So this really quickly gives you a sense of what is in here, which is kind of hard to literally visualize in your head if the number 187,000 objects. You can also sort it in other ways. So you could look at it by genre. So the biggest genre is stereoscopic views. And then menus, a lot of menus. [00:12:22.90] And by the way, somebody was actually able to use these historic menus for a project around climate change through what type of seafood was available in different menus over time, which is very interesting. [00:12:44.98] Maps, prints, engravings, and then you could also look at it by the intellectual collections. And then we can adjust reports kind of other ways you might look at a collection, maybe through the lens of a designer where you're looking for colors. [00:13:08.86] So this was really a starting point for me, how to think about the intersection of technology, creativity, access, and it really surfaced a lot of amazing materials and collections for me, just browsing through these really quickly. [00:13:31.18] One collection that really stood out to myself as well as my colleagues-- so part of this release included the Green Book Collection from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, located in Harlem. Probably a lot of you are familiar with this collection. Eight years ago, as far as in my experience, this collection wasn't that well-known, especially before the movie came out. [00:14:06.23] But for those who are not familiar, the Green Book is a collection of travel guides published between the 1930s and 1960s. And it was basically published as a way to help Black travelers navigate the United States, telling them what types of businesses were friendly to Black people. And this wasn't an underground publication. This was very much a guide that was just published and put into gas stations. [00:14:49.27] The New York Public Library had the foresight to items collect these travel guides as they're being published, which is why they have the biggest collection of the Green Books, which has become more popular after the movie. [00:15:13.81] I think similar to the issues of the mayoral records in the Ivan Allen collection, after we digitized it, they're basically a lot of text. And not only text, but there's data underlying here. You could go through and see that it's listing specific addresses, specific places of businesses, specific types of businesses. [00:15:45.20] So we were thinking, OK, these things aren't really as useful as images. What can we do to activate this collection and perhaps make it not only more usable but more meaningful to people and really think about what types of experiences we can create when we think of new ways we can make these available? [00:16:12.43] So I won't get too much into the technical details. And as mentioned in the beginning, you could feel free to add Q&A into the chat. I could dive a little deeper into the tech a little later if there's time. But we did work to basically OCR, which is essentially extracting the text out of the images, and we made them available as PDFs. [00:16:41.89] And then we did work to geolocate or attempt to geolocate a lot of the business addresses. That was fairly challenging because these are historical locations. A lot of these addresses no longer exist. So luckily, the New York Public Library has been in the business of temporal mapping, so we did have a lot of historical addresses in our database. So we were able to more or less attempt to geolocate and extract the business locations as well as the types of businesses. [00:17:29.16] So with that data available, I was able to make these basic visualizations as well as these basic experiences. So we tried this with one of the publications, a 1947 publication. So here's just a basic map just showing you the places of business. I'll just show it in a heat map. This will give you a sense of in 1947, these were where the businesses were listed. So heavily represented in the Northeast here, in Georgia, Louisiana, and the Midwest. [00:18:20.43] And you could actually go in to specific places of business and you could actually click through to see where in the Green Book this particular establishment was listed. So this quickly just gives you-- it doesn't really tell you a lot. I mean, it really just gives you a sense of, OK, how many businesses, approximately where there were. I think it just allows you to ask certain questions. [00:18:56.02] So I wanted to take this a little further and think about how can the average user connect to this material. So I created this other interface. So this is really just drawing on this idea of mapping a trip. So I'm just going to pull up Google Maps, just to give you a sense of what I'm referencing here. [00:19:29.14] So let's just go to Atlanta. So since I'm in DC, I'm just going to create a trip from Washington, DC to Atlanta. So this is a pretty straightforward route. It makes sense. It goes through Richmond, Charlotte. So the idea is taking this concept of putting in a place of origin and a place of destination. [00:20:07.84] How can we use that idea and use the Green Book to map that trip to make you think about what it would have been like at a different time or if you aren't a Black person, what it might be like traveling with a different skin tone. So as you can see here, trying to go from Washington, DC to Atlanta in this case, in this particular publication, you have to go around Virginia, around North Carolina because in this particular publication, there wasn't any listings there. [00:20:51.56] So what I did was I made this very simple algorithm where you have to eat every now and then and you have to sleep at least once a day. So I tried to map a trip where you find a restaurant at least every 250 miles and then find lodging at least every 750. So this particular trip, so probably lunch or breakfast and dinner. And then eventually ending up in Atlanta. [00:21:30.45] I just want to show maybe like one other example, because when you use the Green Book, it makes some of these sometimes absurd routes just because of how difficult you know it is to find a particular establishment from A to B. So let's go from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Again, pretty straightforward. Using Google Maps, let's just see what it looks like here. [00:22:10.33] So as you can see, we're going West to East , so we're having some issues when we get to Texas. I guess we have to go around it. And there isn't a lot of places to eat, so we actually have to go all the way to Kansas to eat and then double back to Colorado to find somewhere to sleep and then continue the journey. [00:22:35.55] So these create very absurd routes, but again, it maps to these very real dilemmas for Black travelers at this time. And unfortunately, a lot of these issues are still relevant. But we were really just trying to think about how we can create these experiences that not only give access to the underlying material, where you could click through and you know actually look at the original source material, but really create experiences that generate critical thinking, empathy, and just interrogation of history and in really, an interrogation of current issues. [00:23:31.02] So this was created a while ago. So I'm actually going to jump to a more recent project, which thinks about reuse in different way. So in 2020, I had the privilege of being an innovator in residence at the Library of Congress. And I created this project called Citizen DJ, where it invited the general public to make hip hop music using free-to-use audio and video materials from the library. [00:24:12.73] So I just wanted to set this up a little bit and give a little of context. So you see in the name, Citizen DJ, I'm directly referencing the DJ or more generally hip hop, hip hop culture, hip hop history. [00:24:31.93] In particular, I was reaching back for this project. Ever since I started to listen to music, I was drawn to hip hop I think initially as artistic endeavor. I was very interested in just the idea of sampling, taking something old, taking something from a different era, from a different culture, from a different place and mixing it with something else and making it your own was really cool to me. [00:25:07.90] And I wanted to be a DJ, but the equipment was a little too expensive. So I ended up doing B-boying, or breakdancing, for much of my life. I was a semi-professional break dancer in my late teens and early 20s. [00:25:32.50] Just as a quick break, instead of showing me breakdancing in my prime, I actually found this clip from-- this must be the late '80s or early '90s. I found this clip of me. I don't really remember this, but I think this is of me doing a break dance routine, which is pretty amazing. I'll just quickly show it to you. [00:26:04.57] [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [00:26:04.97] [HIP HOP MUSIC] [00:26:10.51] So these are Fly Girls, I guess. So back in the day, this was a thing. Unfortunately, hip hop is a little more masculine and still is. That's me right there, my routine . I'll skip ahead to the actual routine. OK. So this is me and my partner, Amari. And here's some footwork, some toprock. That's my move. [00:27:01.95] [END PLAYBACK] [00:27:02.45] All right. So anyway, back to Citizen DJ. Yeah, so anyway, I was very drawn to this idea of in this case breakdancing, taking from other cultures, from other parts of history, from other geographies. [00:27:28.00] B-boying is a combination of pretty much everything you could think of. There's gymnastics, there's kung fu, there's capoeira, there's African dance, there's jazz. Pretty much you can draw through lines to a lot of different types of dance as it relates to what you see in breakdancing. [00:27:54.52] And I think what's also special about breakdancing it is this idea of you're referencing, you're taking, but you're also flipping it. You're transforming it and making it your own. And it is really about self-expression and it really is about transformation. But it is also a celebration of all these references. [00:28:17.92] And the same goes for the other elements of hip hop, the other elements being DJing, MCing, and graffiti. In DJing, there's this idea of crate digging-- this is especially popular in the late '80s and early '90s, which is generally considered the first golden age of hip hop-- where DJs would be in the basements of record stores and thrift shops, literally digging for records to add to their growing collection of material. [00:29:01.15] And usually the more obscure, the better. And it's really finding that unique sound that they can take and transform and make it their own. And DJs, they're really these researchers and scholars who have a ton of knowledge of music history and can know at any given moment, say in a performance or a battle, the right sound to take to mix with another one to make something new or to make something compelling for a new mix. [00:29:38.65] So this is really the analogy that I started out with with Citizen DJ. It is the idea of crate digging, but this is also a reference to another part of hip hop history. I won't get too much into it because I could have a whole talk about this, but the history of hip hop and copyright, which is very fraught. As I mentioned in the late '80s, and early '90s, that being widely considered the first golden era of hip hop. [00:30:16.40] And this is particularly because of this intersection of technology and this idea of crate digging. So this is when samplers started to become popular. So this is where some of the most acclaimed hip hop albums of all time were created, where It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold us Back, Public Enemy, Paul's Boutique, Three Feet High and Rising. [00:30:53.36] These are albums that are essentially collage artwork. These are albums that are made of hundreds of individual samples. And they are made in a way in which completely transforms the original material. You could think about that sound in a lot of Public Enemy albums. When I first heard it, I sounds almost like a siren or an alarm or something like that, but it's actually a saxophone squeal. [00:31:32.86] But it really just changed the sonic landscape of their work, but also just like love of music at the time. But in the mid-'90s, there was a lot of litigation around sampling, which basically stopped that practice from happening in the way in which it happened in those albums, where there's hundreds of samples. [00:32:07.78] So typically nowadays, you would see sampling, but you would be essentially one sample per song, and that would be pretty expensive. And therefore, you would typically only see Kanye or Drake sampling in this way because they're the only ones that can afford it. [00:32:33.40] And it reduces this idea of transformation. Because you're paying so much for the sample, you don't want to hide it. You don't want to transform it into something else. You want to make sure you get your money's worth. So that's why you kind of hear the sample more prominently in a lot of today's work. [00:32:49.63] So anyway, that's setting the general context for the motivation of Citizen DJ. So I mentioned the idea of DJ. The other part of the name is "Citizen." So it really is about the democratization of sonic culture for the use of making new music, essentially. So Citizen DJ, just like citizen science. [00:33:19.18] So I wanted to think about what is in our collective crate of sonic history that really anybody should be able to access and anybody should be able to make their own. Again, I had the privilege to work with the Library of Congress, in particular, the Library of Congress labs, who created the innovator in residence program. [00:33:50.38] They gave me access to not only all of the collections specialists who can tell me what types of sounds that they have that are compelling for music making, that are historically and culturally significant, but I think most importantly gave me access to the general counsel, who was extremely helpful in this project to basically in a lot of cases, help guide certain collections towards this idea of being very deliberate with saying that, yes, you can use these materials for any type of use without permission-- and this is especially important-- even for commercial use. [00:34:41.39] I think for anybody in the music production world, especially those who are into sampling, this is huge. This is not really heard of, this idea of rights-free sounds for commercial use specifically. And especially for the Library of Congress to say that, so just a little more structural context. [00:35:07.76] The Library of Congress contains the Copyright Office, which is-- I think it's not a typical thing internationally, but the Copyright Office is within the Library of Congress, so when the Library of Congress says something that you can use these materials for free without restriction, that means a lot more than if it was just me doing that due diligence and saying that I did my research and you could use these for free. [00:35:38.42] Having the Library of Congress say that is a much higher bar because they're essentially the authority. So we did a ton of work. And I just wanted to kind of hit on that point a bit that I think that was the biggest part of this project, is really being able to say that, specifically. [00:36:01.55] And I could get into this a little later, but a lot of the feedback that we got was really just people confused, like people going, wait, I can actually use this material for free for commercial use? So yes. And there also can be, the Library of Congress is saying this. [00:36:21.56] So anyway, let me get into the demo and then we dive into some of those other topics though later. So yeah, as I said, a lot of this work was really trying to identify different collections of audio and video that would be compelling from a music-making perspective as well as permissive from a rights perspective as well as compelling from a cultural and historical perspective. [00:36:51.17] So I also wanted to go for a variety of different types of sounds. So I didn't want to just have, say, like spoken word, which is easier to get into this tool because music is much more difficult from a rights perspective. [00:37:11.92] So we have things like spoken word, we have things from different eras, we have things from over a century ago, we have more contemporary music, we have radio broadcasts, we have government film, oral history, oral histories is famous speeches, and more recently old acoustical recordings in the National Jukebox. And I could talk about that a little later, of how that got in there. [00:37:43.53] So let me just dive into the demo. And I just want to give a quick audio warning. Sometimes the audio can be a little overwhelming, so I think people who get overwhelmed with loud sound might want to turn their volume down briefly just to get their audio levels right. So I'm going to just make sure my audio is good. OK. [00:38:11.49] So let me just dive into one of the collections. So this collection is an early 20th century collection from the Edison Companies, and these are really old materials that are a mix of vaudeville, operatic material, and theatrical material. [00:38:41.73] So the first way we allow people to browse these sounds is first giving you this really big interface that visualizes over 4,000 clips that are embedded in this fairly large collection of audio. [00:39:08.36] This is addressing one of the issues that I mentioned before is in traditional interfaces, especially from like a creativity point of view, it's really difficult for me as, say, a musician or producer to understand what is in this collection sonically. I just want to know what types of sounds are here. Are there really old sounds? Are there newer sounds? Are there sounds of music? If it's music, is it string instruments? Is it vocals? [00:39:41.59] So this allows you to really quickly give you a sense of what is in this collection sonically. So I'm just going to quickly show you that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag my cursor along these clips, and it's going to play them as I do that. [00:39:56.84] [CACOPHONY OF AUDIO CLIPS] [00:40:14.29] So now you get a sense of what type of sounds are in here. And just to speak a little more about what you're seeing, so the way these clips are laid out in space as well as the color that you see, I used machine learning to try to group together sounds that are similar to each other. So in theory, things that are similar in space and color should sound similar. So if I run my cursor around here-- [00:40:50.40] [OPERATIC SINGING] [00:40:54.05] --it sounds mostly female, operatic sounds. If I move up here-- [00:40:59.62] [PIANO NOTES] [00:41:00.68] --it sounds like piano. [00:41:02.54] [CACOPHONY OF AUDIO CLIPS] [00:41:07.81] More low-quality sounds. [00:41:12.90] [OPERATIC SINGING] [00:41:17.35] Operatic sounds. So this allows you to really not only get a sense of what's in here, but the diversity of different types of material. Let me just quickly jump to a different collection just to show you how a different collection might sound. So I'm just going to jump to this other collection, the Joe Smith collection. [00:41:44.53] So the Joe Smith collection is a collection of really amazing interviews with legendary musicians, interviews with James Brown, Georgia Natives, Ray Charles, Little Richard, really anybody you could think of as like a legend in music. [00:42:08.06] There are interviews with these folks, but not only interviews, I think they're more like really frank conversations because they're made in a very informal way. So in a lot of cases, you get a lot of very personal anecdotes. So I encourage you to just really kind of dive into these. But I'm just going to show you what this sounds like when I scrub through. [00:42:31.84] [JUMBLE OF AUDIO CLIPS] [00:42:39.91] So you see it grouped together like the S sounds-- [00:42:42.00] [SIBILANT SOUNDS] [00:42:46.36] --which might actually sound interesting as like a percussive instrument. [00:42:49.27] [JUMBLE OF AUDIO CLIPS] [00:42:57.01] Laughing, maybe. [00:42:58.36] [JUMBLE OF AUDIO CLIPS] [00:43:04.69] And I'll just show you just one more just to-- so there's another collection, the Tony Schwartz collection. This is a much more eclectic collection, where it's created by this person, Tony Schwartz, who was really this pioneer in radio. [00:43:27.52] I would say he's the predecessor to contemporary podcasting because he had this very modern approach. He was active in maybe the '50s, '60s, maybe earlier than that. But he would just walk around with these really big equipment and talk to people on the street or just record various soundscapes in New York City. He would just record everything. So you kind of see visually that there's a lot of different areas of different color, and that's because there's a lot of different types of audio here. Let me quickly scrub through here. [00:44:09.76] [JUMBLE OF AUDIO CLIPS] [00:44:30.60] OK, so I'm going to go back to the Edison Collection. So I just want to get into in my mind the scenario that I'm thinking of. So I'm thinking of a producer or musician just trying to find the right sound to use in their mix or whatever track that they're creating. So they can scrub through here to find the right sound. [00:44:59.22] I also have these filters here that uses the library's subject headings, where you can filter by different subjects. So I can highlight everything that's marked as humorous songs and I could just listen to those. [00:45:15.06] [JUMBLE OF SINGING AUDIO] [00:45:20.73] So it sounds a lot these skits. I did some basic analysis on the approximate pitch of these sounds, so I can filter out, say, all the higher-pitched sounds and just listen to the ones that are lower pitched. So say if I wanted more of a audio with a lot more bass. [00:45:49.09] [OVERLAPPING MUSICAL NOTES PLAYING] [00:45:50.55] Oops. [00:45:52.49] [OVERLAPPING MUSICAL NOTES PLAYING] [00:45:58.81] I also approximated the musical notes, so if I'm trying to find all the sounds in the musical note of C-- [00:46:08.34] [OVERLAPPING MUSICAL NOTES IN C PLAYING] [00:46:10.64] --I can just take those. And once I find a sound-- let's just say this one-- It's called I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles, created in 1919. And also as you might have seen here, as I'm scrubbing through, you could see which underlying item that particular audio comes from. Let's go back to here. So I could play it in context. [00:46:43.58] [MUSIC - "I'M FOREVER BLOWING BUBBLES"] [00:46:55.37] (SINGING) I'm dreaming free. [00:46:58.72] I could also download that directly as a WAV file and just bring it into whatever my music-making workspace is or I could view it on the Library of Congress, where I can download the full audio as well as I could just stream it here. I could also find more information about this particular item. [00:47:21.53] And I think this was very important to us. We always wanted to really keep the context of the underlying material very visible and very accessible. I think this is obviously important from the library's point of view, because they want to increase the usage of the material. But also I think it was also important for the curators and collections managers to always really deliver the context around this material. [00:47:52.93] I think this is especially important with historical material because for a variety of reasons, it could be maybe the material might be more sensitive. It might be important to talk about how it was collected. It might be important to talk about how it was created. It might be important to just give credit to the original creators. [00:48:20.11] So for all these reasons, for all the things that you find on Citizen DJ, it has a direct link to the permanent item URL where that particular sample comes from. [00:48:35.18] So getting to the fun part, once I find something that I want to turn to music, I could remix it. So I'm just going to go into this other interface. So it immediately puts this particular sample into this musical sequence. So this sample-- [00:48:58.93] [OLD FASHIONED MUSIC AND VOCALS] [00:49:02.77] And it also adds drums to it, but I'm just going to mute the drums for now just so you could listen to the sample and it's going to loop. [00:49:10.78] [OLD FASHIONED MUSIC AND VOCALS LOOPING] [00:49:16.94] I can speed it up a little bit. And then they'll slowly bring in the drums. [00:49:29.21] [OLD FASHIONED MUSIC AND VOCALS LOOPING WITH DRUMS] [00:49:35.21] And I can edit the sequence. Let's see. And I could also edit the underlying sample where it's coming from. And I could just shuffle it to a completely different item. [00:50:24.10] [MAN SINGING WITH VOCALS LOOPING AND DRUMS] [00:50:32.57] And this gets into the idea of discovery and serendipity. And I could change up the drums, so I could kind of turn this into an electronic beat, so I just do 808. Speed it up. [00:50:49.73] [MAN SINGING WITH VOCALS LOOPING AND DRUMS PLAYING FASTER] [00:50:57.74] And then for everything that you create, you can download it directly, what you created. You could also just record a particular session and then just download the WAV file that you created. And, again, for all, of the particular items that you hear, so this one-- you can scroll down and just could see all the context here. So you can see where this particular sample came from. You can go to the original item, and you can get information on how you can give attribution, things like that. [00:51:38.55] I also want to quickly just talk about a couple other resources that we have. So again, thinking about how real life music producers and DJs work is that in addition to using this tool, this online tool that you use for free on the internet, we also make all of the underlying material available as what we're calling sample packs, which are essentially these folders of little snippets of sound that you could import into popular music-making software. [00:52:20.10] And again, thinking of how actual music producers work, is that we wanted to make this as compatible and usable as possible in as many different configurations. So we try to think about all the different ways that people wanted to make music. And we did a lot of testing and we got a lot of feedback for how to make this happen. So you could actually download all of the 4,000 samples plus these excerpts as zipped MP 3s or WAV files. [00:52:59.46] And then lastly, I just want to highlight in addition to this access of this material, we also created guides around how to navigate sampling from a copyright point of view, which is an extremely tricky thing. So this is really just showing you how you could use the Library of Congress material, but also beyond the Library of Congress, how you can try to navigate the complicated aspects of copyright for sampling. [00:53:35.70] And then we also get into the ethics of sampling, which is, again, a whole other talk, but was very important, I think, for a lot of the library practitioners, especially those dealing with historical cultural material, making sure that we think about a lot of the historical and cultural contexts of things like acknowledging certain cultures or people, especially if they come from historically marginalized groups. [00:54:11.83] Talk about permission, talking about using potentially offensive and sensitive material, and thinking about all these different challenges and complicated issues when it comes to sampling. [00:54:34.33] So I want to leave time for questions and answers. Before I do that, I just want to quickly thank Dean Sharp, Katherine, Wendy, Georgia Tech Library, as well as Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts for having me here. I'm really excited to be here and to share this work but also see what might be activated when this new archive becomes available. And I also want to hear what you all think and happy to answer questions. [00:55:16.72] LESLIE SHARP: Thank you so much Brian. This is Leslie. I don't know if you can see me or not. [00:55:22.26] BRIAN FOO: Yes, I can see you. [00:55:23.25] LESLIE SHARP: OK great. So the first question is, do you think that crate digging is mostly dead with the wild spike in the price of vinyl and the monetization of the formerly obscure? For example, English-Italian library music that formed the backbone of early hip hop. If not, what do you think the future of it looks like? Complicated question. [00:55:47.70] BRIAN FOO: Yeah, there's a lot of ways I could talk about this. I mean, crate digging as it existed in the late '80s and early '90s certainly is much more difficult to do nowadays with a lot of the traditional places closing or these technologies not really being as popular anymore, although vinyl has increased in popularity recently. [00:56:20.14] But I think how I would generally speak to this is it's similar to just the trajectory of hip hop in general. Hip hop is very much technology-centric and it does embrace the evolution of technology, and it does embrace reusing and rethinking how technology is used, starting with the turntable. [00:56:44.05] That was the original transformation, where it used to be this single turntable where you just like listen to it to kind dual tool table situation where you're actually touching the vinyl, scratching it, which was unheard of before that. [00:56:58.69] I think similarly, digging has changed and especially with the invention of the internet and other ways people find material. And again, this is what I'm hoping to contribute to with Citizen DJ, is this thinking of new ways of digging. But it really is about trying to find material that speaks to you, finding things that probably hasn't been heard in a long time. And as you can see in the interface, it's overwhelming. [00:57:39.79] And when I do these demos, I every single song that I create is unique. And I haven't had a situation where I heard the same thing because we're talking about thousands of hours of material. [00:58:01.87] So yeah, I would say that hip hop is all about this idea of taking whatever the current day's technology and then figuring out how to make the most use out of it. And it is, a lot of times, working within or against some of the restrictions and barriers that's placed on it. [00:58:29.44] LESLIE SHARP: Thank you. We have some follow-up questions to that. Does this eliminate the practice of record digging that is integral to the hip hop aesthetic, which I think you've just answered. Are any producers sampling from your collection? Also to what degree do you include the cultural and historical context that make these archives and aesthetics possible? And then as an aside question, speak more about the English-Italian music as backbone of hip hop if you can. [00:59:02.94] BRIAN FOO: So I mean, I can't speak too much to the whole vinyl thing because I'm not as active in that community, but what I could say is as somebody who's been part of the B-boy community, this stuff doesn't die, the idea of DJs using vinyl. Hip hop in general, the hip hop community as you see in the mainstream, it goes in waves. [00:59:39.99] You could see like a burst in like these break dancers in the mainstream, with So You Think You Can Dance and things like that. But whether or not it's visible to the general public, there's always going to be a B-boy, B-girl community. There's always going to be a DJ community. It just goes underground. [01:00:00.78] So from what I can see in my very limited view, it's still very active and the hip hop community is always in those traditional forms are still very active. I know turntablists who are still doing their thing and are still digging. They just have to look harder in some cases. [01:00:28.40] So yeah, in terms of people who have used Citizen DJ, so I could speak to a lot of different things. We've had various record labels reach out to us, including Def Jam. We've had Timbaland and his Beat Lab reach out to us to incorporate samples from Citizen DJ into their software. [01:00:58.51] But I guess generally what I would say is that I think instead of-- because when I started this project, I was really excited about, ooh, I hope all these really cool famous producers use Citizen DJ. [01:01:11.95] But I think as we got more feedback and as we've seen actual use of this material, I think what has been more rewarding is the people who didn't otherwise have access to sampling who now can do that. And that's mostly amateur musicians, students, people just starting out. [01:01:36.94] And I think that has been the most rewarding feedback that we've gotten, and that's been the most rewarding new work that we've seen, with people just sharing stuff on SoundCloud and then just like and just letting us know that they're able to kind of make this thing. [01:01:57.88] So yeah, what was the last part of that question? Sorry. [01:02:02.20] LESLIE SHARP: It was about the English-Italian music as a backbone, if you know anything about that. And if not, we can go on to another question that relates to what you were just talking about. [01:02:17.96] BRIAN FOO: I'm not a hip hop historian. I'm definitely a student, a student and a consumer. I don't think I could speak to that in any intellectual way. [01:02:27.50] LESLIE SHARP: OK. That's perfectly fine. So this relates to what you are talking about, more of the amateur user. So how do you go about finding out how members of the public are using your projects? How do you think archives and libraries can tell the impact of these stories and how their collections are used and reused, especially when the use is by folks beyond traditional academic researchers? [01:02:54.04] BRIAN FOO: Yeah, I mean, this is a big question for us. And I think it's a tricky thing. As an institution, as a library who cares about not tracking privacy things like that. So it's like how can we track usage of things but do it in a way in which we're not tracking the things that we're sharing? Because if we're sharing these WAV files, there's no way to know exactly how it goes around and makes this one work that might be remixed into something else that might be remixed into something else. [01:03:33.28] I mean, I think it's the same issue with a lot of primary source material. But I think a couple of things that we've done-- during my residency, we partnered with a couple of different non-profit organizations that work directly with a mixture of students and aspiring music makers in different parts of the country that we tried to make this tool available for those different communities. [01:04:06.93] And this was almost a trial run to think about how we can incorporate this tool into the core services of the library through potentially the education or engagement parts of the library. We can include this into curriculum guides or include this into a maker space or something, where we can build those relationships with communities or other organizations that can give us feedback of how it's being made or share it with us. [01:04:47.21] Largely, for everything else, we have been relying on social media. We tried to say, tag the Library of Congress if you make something new or Citizen DJ. Obviously, we don't know what we don't know. I mean, we know that people have shared things with us, but we don't know how many have been made and not shared with us. [01:05:10.73] Yeah, it is one of those evergreen challenges of trying to track actual usage, especially when we're talking about things beyond research and scholarly work, where you could track references. We try to ask people to include attribution, but because these are free to use without restriction, they're not required to include attribution. So yeah, there's a lot more work that can be done in that area for sure. [01:05:44.97] LESLIE SHARP: Have you engaged in user research or testing to inform any of your projects? [01:05:51.96] BRIAN FOO: Yes. For this project in particular, one nuance is that this was developed during 2020 at the height of the first wave of the pandemic. So yeah, it was pretty challenging to think about how we can perform different types of user testing. So I have experience with of on-site, in-person user testing with on-site digital experiences. [01:06:30.07] But with this, is that we tried to do a couple of different things, so we did, as I mentioned, partner with different organizations to do almost workshop style things that are more hands-on, particularly with younger audiences to essentially ask them to create new things and then they would give us feedback of how that experience was and how it can be improved. [01:07:01.15] We also had more of an unsupervised testing strategy, where we did essentially this alpha or beta release, whatever you want want to call it, where we just shared a preview of the tool and then we had this survey that was embedded in the tool that allowed you to give free-form feedback as well as more structured feedback. [01:07:30.23] So that was actually really successful in that we thought-- we didn't have a whole lot of strategy around sharing this out. We just shared it with a couple of our outlets. But we were expecting maybe a couple hundred users but we end up with, I think, over 100,000 unique sessions. And that gave us just a whole lot of data. [01:08:01.18] And just to kind give a brief result of what that was, I think one of the things that struck me is in this structured survey, one of the things that I think was very successful was a question about, you think this tool-- or I think it first asked, does this tool help me in my whatever I do professionally? It was a fairly high percentage, but it wasn't like super high. [01:08:32.35] But when it came to the question, was this project made for me? That was a really, really high number. And in the unstructured feedback, we got a lot of things like I can't believe the government is making something that I actually care about. This makes me want to pay my taxes. It was that thing where it's like the shock of, what is the library doing, doing this like hip hop-centric thing. It was just a very strange juxtaposition. [01:09:07.21] But I think it got to the idea of the library being able to access an audience that they wouldn't otherwise have a relationship with and people realizing that the library is their library and they could actually use the library in a way in which speaks to them, which I think for a lot of reasons, they would previously think it's just for somebody writing a book or something like that. So I think that was a big takeaway. [01:09:45.03] LESLIE SHARP: Thank you. There are two archives in your collection that have integral historical context. That's the Green Book and your hip hop sound collection. How do you reconcile creating computational versions of these cultural artifacts with little consideration given to the social and political imperatives that created them? [01:10:07.54] BRIAN FOO: Yeah, that's a great question. I think we think about this a lot. And I think this is in particular why these tools, I think of them as an entryway or kind of gateway into these collections. It isn't just a standalone experience. I think typically when you try to find or explore these collections, you're kind of looking at this traditional interface, which is search-centric, so you're trying to-- you need to know what you're looking for in order to use it. [01:10:50.94] Here I'm starting with this idea of an experience, creativity, of music making or trip planning, something that is like immediately understandable by most people. But I'm using it as a way to enter these really important historical and culturally significant material. [01:11:16.39] And as I showed in the demo, for all these experiences, it links directly to the original material, where both the Library of Congress as well as the New York Public Library do a lot of work in doing that contextualization. And also if you browse the project websites, we link a lot to a lot of that contextualization. [01:11:43.77] So yeah, so I think it really is about just trying to keep that context very clear and that connection very direct, and do things like the guide that I briefly showed at the end, where we talk about, in the case of music making, what are some of the things you need to think about when you're doing something like sampling from cultural material, which can be very fraught. [01:12:13.19] And again, I could speak at length about this, but especially when you're dealing with material that needs context, I think you need to really think carefully how you make something new with it and perhaps keep that context as you create that new work. Yeah, I could speak much more to this, but hopefully that answers at least some of that question. [01:12:42.06] LESLIE SHARP: We have time for one very quick question. Do you have any dream collections that you'd like to work with that may or may not be accessible or usable for this type of project? [01:12:56.03] BRIAN FOO: Yeah, I mean as a Chinese-American who's-- my ancestors came here in the early 20th century, I'm always looking for-- in the case for Citizen DJ, I'm looking for just really old Chinese-American, like Cantonese operatic material that I could use for my own exploration, my own personal history. That's something that's from a personal point of view I'm always searching for. [01:13:27.66] And I think this gets to like this idea of a lot of this stuff is very limited. A lot of cultures represented are very limited in these collections, so yeah, it does kind of point to a kind of a big gap in these types of projects. [01:13:48.51] And this is something that was talked about with the collections managers, thinking about, what other material that can we either collect or make available that might speak to broader audiences who may not feel represented or feel like they have something that they can connect to. [01:14:07.27] LESLIE SHARP: Thank you so much, Brian. And again, if you want to see more of Brian's work, please go to brianfoo.com, and he does explore the concept of joy there. So please go visit. And join me right now in thanking Brian Foo for sharing his work with us. [01:14:24.13] [APPLAUSE] [01:14:27.62] Thank you, Brian. I look forward to meeting you. Todd, I'm going to turn it over to you for some housekeeping.