Follow the Fellows: Why Archive with Pop Up Archive

Every Thursday, this year’s SoundCloud Fellows have an opportunity to share a guest blog post on their projects. Today, welcome Anne Wootton and Bailey Smith of Pop Up Archive.

Pop Up Archive from Mario Furloni on Vimeo.

As soon as we found out that SoundCloud was planning a second year for its Community Fellowship program, we knew we wanted to be involved. But we weren’t sure how we could best provide value to the SoundCloud community and, in particular, how we could provide value to the community using sound.

Let us explain: we are not musicians or producers. We don’t normally make sound. We started our project, Pop Up Archive, because we recognize that public media is moving onto the web and that new content is created with greater ease by more people than ever before. So, what we do is hunt media down, wrangle it, and keep it tame and orderly so that people like you — podcasters, radiophiles, musicians and producers — can find it, reuse it, and keep it vital.

But back to our initial question: how do we create audio about data wrangling that people actually want to hear? The potential audience for a 20-minute talk on metadata standards is admittedly slim, and we really want to make something that gets people involved and puts the value of archiving in perspective. So, here’s what we propose:

Pop Up Archive will compile and organize as much raw audio content as the other 14 SoundCloud Fellows are willing to part with, culled from their ongoing creative work for the period of their fellowships. We’ll create a few brief audio pieces showcasing the oft-hidden value of archival audio — and the headaches that ensue when that audio is unfindable — to entice you to explore our audio archive labyrinth.

We’ll invite you to search the archive, listen to the fellows’ audio, and remix and make your own creations using their raw material. Our favorite pieces will be featured on the SoundCloud blog.

Our hope is that this content will get you excited, inspire you to create, and — even better — make you reconsider your own creations. Perhaps you’ll take that folder of cryptically named files off your external hard drive that doubles as a coaster, and consider doing a little media wrangling yourself.

Follow Pop Up Archive on SoundCloud, Twitter and http://popuparchive.org.