Cedars, September 20, 2007

https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cedars/1604/thumbnail.jp

Jazz and Recording in the Digital Age: Technology, New Media, and Performance in New York and Online

This dissertation is a study of the uses of recording technologies and new media by jazz musicians in New York. It privileges the perspectives of professional musicians, gleaned through interviews and observation of their discourses and practices in live and recorded performances and in online new media spaces. Contrary to scholarly and critical approaches to jazz that privilege live performance, this dissertation argues that mediatization, through use of recording technologies, digital formats and platforms, and social media, is a vital mode of jazz performance in the digital age. Chapter 1 shows how formative encounters with jazz by musicians coming of age in the 1980s, ‘90s, and 2000s were often with recorded media, instilling in them positive attitudes towards the creative and professional opportunities presented by recording technologies. Chapter 2 presents the professional and artistic reasons why musicians make recordings, how they choose music to record, and how they fund their recording projects amid a traditional recording industry averse to developing jazz musicians. Chapter 3 describes the ways that musicians use the technologies of the recording studio, which increasingly challenge conventional distinctions between stages of recording, aligning instead with integrated practices of “production” central to studio-based genres like hip-hop, electronic music, and pop. Chapter 4 examines how musicians are using new media of distribution and promotion—often despite the exploitative practices of media companies—to release their recordings and cultivate social networks of fans and fellow musicians. Chapter 5 discusses some current trends in the style of recording-oriented jazz under the aesthetic frameworks of songs and beats and considers how these frameworks accommodate the improvised solo, a hallmark of jazz. Chapter 6 interrogates the ontology and phenomenology of jazz recording, using the framework of mediatized performance to argue against the common notion that recording necessarily impoverishes improvised music. In closing, Chapter 7 reveals how mediatized performances have enabled jazz musicians to participate in social movements that themselves are highly mediatized. This dissertation contributes to our knowledge of contemporary jazz, the ways musicians are adapting to and innovating with new technologies and media, and the relationship between recording and performance in the digital age

Anyone Anywhere: Narrating African Innovation In A Global Community Of Practice

The last eight years have seen rapid growth in the number of technology startups emerging in urban centers around Africa, from Lagos to Nairobi to Bamako. The growth of annual investments in African startups – rising from $12 million to$560 million between 2013 and 2017 (Kazeem, 2018) – is an indication that many, including investors abroad, believe the trend in African involvement in international technology innovation practices is just beginning. Yet while these changes are promising, this dissertation encourages critical reflection on them and asks: To what extent are Africans really able to fully participate in the production of the new technologies shaping their experiences of the modern information economy? To attempt to answer this, from 2013 to 2016 I conducted an ethnography of one of the centers of innovation in Africa that has received the most media attention, a “technology hub” based in Nairobi, Kenya called the iHub. I spent a year as a participant observer on the iHub’s communications team, conducted numerous focus groups, site visits to other tech hubs, participated in dozens of events and interviewed over 80 members of Nairobi’s tech community. With this data, I built an analytical lens that brings a critical communications perspective to communities of practice theory. By integrating narrative theory, this lens draws attention to the potential for conflict and hierarchies of legitimacy in transnational communities built around shared practices. In the pages that follow, I argue that the actors around the iHub are engaged in a Global Community of Technology Innovators in which their participation, and the community’s larger narratives are mutually constructed. One such narrative about how “Anyone Anywhere” in the world can become a successful technology entrepreneur helped attract Kenyan entrepreneurs, while others restricted their ability to be taken serious, often leading to their being pigeonholed as “social entrepreneurship”. By the end of 2016, the discrepancy between narratives and lived experiences led many to reject certain global practices – like the pressure on startups to scale globally – and focus instead on building a Kenyan community in which they had greater legitimacy and power to construct narratives and shape future practices

Video Game Art Reader

In computing, overclocking refers to the common practice of increasing the clock rate of a computer to exceed that certified by the manufacturer. The concept is seductive but overclocking may destroy your motherboard or system memory, even irreparably corrupt the hard drive. Volume 4 of the Video Game Art Reader (VGAR) proposes overclocking as a metaphor for how games are produced and experienced today, and the temporal compressions and expansions of the many historical lineages that have shaped game art and culture. Contributors reflect on the many ways in which overclocking can be read as a means of oppression but also a strategy to raise awareness of how inequities have shaped video games

Insiders\u27 Guide to the Student Academic Conference: 11th Annual SAC

Minnesota State University Moorhead Student Academic Conference abstract book

Columbia Chronicle (11/07/2005)

Student newspaper from November 7, 2005 entitled The Columbia Chronicle. This issue is 40 pages and is listed as Volume 40, Number 10. Cover story: Columbia proposes $90 million tower Editor-in-Chief: Jeffrey Dannahttps://digitalcommons.colum.edu/cadc_chronicle/1657/thumbnail.jp

Mustang Daily, February 22, 2008

Student newspaper of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA.https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/studentnewspaper/7718/thumbnail.jp

Columbia Chronicle (01/23/2006)

Student newspaper from January 23, 2006 entitled The Columbia Chronicle. This issue is 40 pages and is listed as Volume 40, Number 16. Cover story: Wacky raid at midnight Editor-in-Chief: Jeffrey Dannahttps://digitalcommons.colum.edu/cadc_chronicle/1660/thumbnail.jp

Sounding Statecraft: U.S. Cultural Diplomacy Programs in the Twenty-First Century

My dissertation examines the complex set of objectives, principles, and motivations that animate modern U.S. cultural diplomacy, with a focus on two performing arts initiatives: OneBeat (established 2012) and Next Level (established 2013). U.S. government–sponsored arts programs harbor an essential tension: they depend on collaboration and consensus among a diverse group of stakeholders but operate within an inescapably asymmetrical power structure. A key strategy for gaining consensus is to promote a sense of a shared agenda that depoliticizes diplomacy and embraces a universalist view of art and culture. I argue that the act of distancing cultural diplomacy from politics creates gaps between rhetoric and action, between how programs are theorized and described in promotional materials versus how they are carried out. State Department employees, program staff, and participating artists often deemphasize cultural diplomacy’s political underpinnings or describe cultural diplomacy as being separate from politics entirely. For instance, artists may be invested in separating cultural diplomacy from politics in order to justify their participation, focusing instead on personal and professional objectives and opportunities. State Department employees, meanwhile, may celebrate the supposedly transcendental qualities of music rather than focus on cultural diplomacy as a way to secure U.S. influence on the world stage or act as a precursor to hard diplomacy. Defining U.S. cultural diplomacy as a multi-directional practice rather than a strictly top-down pursuit, I draw upon insights from participating artists, U.S. State Department staff, and employees at the NGOs that administer these programs. Using an interdisciplinary framework that connects ethnomusicology, anthropology, and the study of diplomacy, I illuminate the social, technological, and musical networks through which diplomacy and international exchange take place. By highlighting the individual agency of participants and program administrators, the often-conflicting ideologies, subjectivities, and values brought to spaces of cross-cultural encounter take center stage. Building on scholarship that examines 20th-century cultural diplomacy programs, my study of 21st-century programming offers new perspectives on American exceptionalism, negotiations of power on the world stage, and how the players in today’s cultural diplomacy programs conceptualize value, labor, and what it means to represent one’s country as a cultural ambassador.Doctor of Philosoph