Ethnomusicology and Digital Humanities

Organized by Zoe Sherinian and Jennifer Fraser 

In this roundtable we discuss harnessing the power of digital tools and platforms as methods of collaboration, interpretation, community building, and archiving to help reimagine ways ethnomusicologists can construct and share knowledge. We intend to create a space to dialogue strategies, best practices, and potential tools that allow us to imagine, visualize, and realize digital projects in ethnomusicology. We bring together scholars at different stages of engagement with digital humanities, from those who are building projects, to those who have completed them and/or teach through/ with them. The questions we engage include the following: What are the capacities and creative possibilities that are unleashed when we think beyond the limits of print or “writing as a privileged mode of expression of academic ethnographic practices” (Hsu 2013), and how do we begin such processes? What is distinct or particular about an ethnomusicologicalapproach to digital humanities? How can digital tools help bring us closer to a sensorial, phenomenological experience of people, sounds, and places as well as greater flexibility in modeling vernacular epistemologies of the worlds in which we work (Fraser et al. 2021)? How can we engage with communities more directly to share horizontal knowledge production processes and sustainability through the digital humanities? How might DH projects be evaluated and celebrated both within academic processes of tenure and promotion and within relevant scholarly societies? What can SEM as a society do to support DH work?  This roundtable consists of ethnomusicologists and their collaborators, those engaged with film, archiving, mapping, VR/AR, publishing, and DH pedagogy.