Southern Mosaic: Using Audio Data to Visualize a Nation

Seventy-nine years ago, on March 31 1939: Two folk musicologists, husband and wife, John and Ruby Lomax, left their vacation home in Port Aransas, Texas to document musical traditions of the folk peoples of the Southern United States.

In this meetup, (and in line with Independence month!) our speaker Aditya Jain takes us back in time through “Southern Mosaic”, a visual essay about a 1939 trip undertaken by two folk ethnomusicologists to collect folk songs for the Library of Congress.

Working in collaboration with the American Folklife Center, Aditya used audio, photographs and interactive visualizations to paint a diverse portrait of a nation reeling from the effects of the Great Depression, and documents conditions of incarcerated African-Americans in Southern prison farms, as well as Mexican-American culture near the Texas border.

More about the project: https://adityajain15.github.io/lomax/

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Aditya Jain is a creative researcher who uses data visualization to build innovative ways to explore data in the world around us. He was most recently an Innovation Intern at the Library of Congress where he worked on reimagining the digital collections of the Library.

Aditya will deliver a talk about the project itself, shed light on the process behind the project and how one may go about creating their own essays using the Library's enormous digital collections

SCHEDULE
6:30- 7:00 Food, Drinks, Networking
7:00 - 8:00 Talk: Southern Mosaic
8:00 - 8:30 Q&A
8:30 - Data drinks