North Carolina Jukebox

North Carolina Jukebox

Victoria Szabo, Trudi Abel

2015

This project transforms an inaccessible audio archive of historic North Carolina folk music into a vital, publicly accessible digital archive and museum exhibition. As a digital cultural heritage project, NC Jukebox provokes critical questions around authority, appropriation and control of cultural artifacts preserved in wax and glass. At the same time, it opens up possibilities for academic and community collaboration around a living set of traditions and practices.

In 2015-16 we taught a course focused on the collection, as well as continued to develop the archive as research collection and public humanities resource. In Summer 2016 we will be part of an exhibition at the Rubenstein Library, and in 2016-17 we will continue to develop our project as a physical and virtual exhibit in Western North Carolina with the help of our collaborators at the Orchards at Alta Pass. In January 2016 we received the good news that the whole FCB collection of wax cylinders and aluminum disks will be digitized, so we anticipate expanding our project to include those recordings in years to come.

See http://ncjukebox.org for our work in progress.

This project has been supported by Bass Connections, the Franklin Humanities Institute, and Humanities Writ Large. See the Bass Connections site for information on the project in 2016-17. 

See the story in Duke Today for more information on Archives Alive.