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Teaching with Music & Film ORCA Project

By Sandy Trand

“Ni chicha ni limoná” by Victor Jara, Boat People from director Ann Hui, and “London, London” by Caetano Veloso were some of the materials that served as subjects of research this summer when I worked alongside Interim Associate Dean and Chief Librarian Prof. Daisy Domínguez to help populate the fledgling Teach with Music & Film Database. The purpose of the database is to compile music and film from around the world that may be used pedagogically. Prof. Domínguez and I hope that the database will be of use to both faculty and students.

I am a senior minoring in History and majoring in Political Science and International Studies. I first met Prof. Domínguez in her Spring 2020 course, Gender and Sexuality in Caribbean and Latin American History, where she approached me about work alongside her as an ORCA (Opportunities in Research and Creative Arts) fellow. The project began as an extension of Domínguez’s 2014 article published in the journal Teaching History entitled “Using Music to Teach Latin American (and World) History.” There she argued for expanded usage of music as a teaching tool and the development of a music suggestion database with information on artists, genres, and contextualization of song references. This led to the creation of the Teach with Music & Film database.

Omeka, an open-source web-publishing platform that is primarily used in the display of digital collections and exhibitions, hosts the database. Created in 2008 by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, it’s a practical database platform since it has Boolean searches options, which present opportunities to narrow results through fields by collection or genre.

I began the process of conducting research to create entries for the database by acquiring context on specific eras or movements established early in the. Topics chosen included the Nueva Cancíon movement and anti-Apartheid songs. I carried out preliminary research by reading both popular and scholarly works. Scouting media for possible entries included research on many of CCNY Libraries existing resources such as databases, academic journals, and e-book collections. The scholarly resources used included academic journals such as Popular Music and The Midwest Quarterly and databases such as the Hispanic American Periodicals Index and Project MUSE. Information on popular sources was found on both foreign and domestic news publications, many of which were accessible through the LexisNexis database. From there, the information I gathered was placed into a catalog that was created on Google Sheets with columns categorizing the metadata. Each of the columns corresponded to fields on the Omeka platform. In conjunction with the categorization of metadata, the information gathered from the research was synthesized into brief descriptions that accompany each entry.  Finally, I input the material’s metadata into the Omeka platform. Included in each of the entries were links to public sites such as YouTube to either listen to the song or view the movie trailer.

Over the course of three months, I procured several skills. They included gaining experience working with metadata, expanding my research skills by investigating a broad range of topics, and additional writing and editing skills. My descriptive metadata duties included differentiating between versions of resources and creating descriptions for each of the references. Due to Omeka’s controlled vocabulary limitations, I was required to be judicious in the selection of tags to be concise but not overly specific. 

Read more about CCNY's Libraries' Digital Scholarship Services here.

Image 1: Teach with Music & Film user interface

Image 2: The Process of entering descriptive metadata.