Follow the Fellows Embrace your “Data Maelstrom” with Pop Up Archive

This is a guest blog post by 2012 SoundCloud Community Fellows Pop Up Archive. Be introduced to the world of archiving!

A few week ago, to give you a glimpse of the hidden intrigue of archival audio, we put together a collection of questions from our archive. So as not to leave you hanging, this week we are proud to present answers from the archive. You’ll hear from London street food vendors, a Californian internment camp survivor, urban redevelopment workers from Philadelphia, and a Central Valley obesity prevention activist, to name a few.

We’d also like to remind you of our upcoming Archive 101 Training Workshop (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace My Complete Data Maelstrom). Here at Pop Up Archive, we’ve been devising a curriculum to introduce audio producers to the world of archiving and data standardization. You might be saying to yourself, “Really, Pop Up Archive? How are archiving and data standardization going to help me?”

Well, first of all, archiving makes it possible for you to easily find your own audio. You will never again need Spotlight to find a file:

Second, archiving makes it possible for others to find your audio. You’ve recorded a lot of amazing stuff. It doesn’t need to fester on a thumb drive — do something with it. There’s someone out there that wants to hear it, be moved by it, and reuse it.

Third, stop kvetching and find out for yourself. We’re looking for podcasters, journalists, oral historians, and content-creators. Our first training is Tuesday, October 9th, so if you want to get involved, let us know ASAP. You can register here, and/or email us at popuparchive@gmail.com. If you can’t make it on Tuesday, fear not: there’ll be more where that came from, including this handy survey to help us get acquainted with your (sometimes disparate) needs. And we’ll be making our free training materials and software plug-ins for Omeka available this fall.

Stay tuned — next week we’ll also launch our first archival audio mashup contest, using sonic building blocks from this year’s Community Fellows. If you’ve got something to say, or audio you’d like to contribute, in the spirit of SoundCloud, you can upload an audio submission to our SC Dropbox at http://soundcloud.com/popuparchive/dropbox. Yep, that’s right — you can be organized and creative at the same time. Let us help you.