In looking for what digital project to write about for this week’s reflection, I stumbled upon a very unique digital project called Sound and Documentary in Cardiff and Miller’s Pandemonium by Cecilia Wichmann. It can be found at http://scalar.usc.edu/works/pandemonium/index.
This project was created as a digital companion to a student’s master’s thesis, “Sound and Documentary in Cardiff and Miller’s Pandemonium”, and was completed in Spring 2015 in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. The student decided to create this Scalar project because she thought “sound art deserves a format suited to listening as well as looking and reading. My aim is to offer an accessible, informal, and flexible experience of my research.” Since this was meant as a companion to a Masters thesis, it is safe to assume that the audience is a scholarly group of people who share the same interest in art and sound. But this project can also be viewed by anyone who stumbles across it.
This project seems to be analyzing the intersection of sound art and documentary to better understand both fields of practice through the organized sound and silence of the composition Pandemonium. Overall, the site functions as a typical Scalar site. The front page is very clean and simple, directing the viewer where to go next. Although the project is written in conversational language, the very nature of the topic is sometimes hard to understand because the topic is very non-traditional.
Even though the topic itself is hard to grasp,, the author does a very good job of explaining it in her numerous About and Information pages. The Welcome page gives the viewer a brief and concise overview of the project. If the viewer would like to learn more, they can read a more in depth description on the Project page. From my browsing of the project I could see that the site was a Scalar site and most of the media was done within the Scalar platform (nothing embedded). The author uses various images, texts, audio, and video in her project. What I though was really nice about her project is that she had an All Media page where you could see every image, text, video, and audio in her project. If you clicked on the link to an image or other form of media, there was decent metadata if you explored further. In conclusion, everything was very well documented.
The author mostly just used Scalar as her main way of displaying her project. I assumed Scalar was chosen because it could move in the traditional way of a thesis paper (by chapter) while also allowing the use of image, audio, and video. On the Project page, the author really explained how she wanted her audience to be able to listen to the sound of Pandemonium. I believe that the audio inserted throughout the project is one of the main things that you wouldn’t be able to learn from a traditional research paper. Although the author does include images and video, you can easily add a flat image into your paper and you could have understood her project well enough without the video. The audio component of this project is what makes this thesis unique and gives the audience a better understanding of the project.
This is a huge project, and a great example of how a traditional thesis can be merged with a digital tool to create something new and interactive. It still meets most of the sorts of guidelines that we expect with a master’s level thesis work, but the multimedia elements add an additional level of understanding that just words wouldn’t convey.