Project

Again for reference my final digital project can be found here or below

http://musicandyoutube.wordpress.com/

Project Description:

For my project I chose to curate an exhibit of the evolving relationship between music & YouTube.  Everyone knows that each have been affected greatly by the other but I wanted to explore what exactly has changed to both over the years. 

“Music” is a very broad thing. So without getting all “John Cage” on you – this exhibit will focused a few core areas of music, and their subtopics, on how they’ve been affected by YouTube.  The exhibit covers how the following have been affected: live music, the music industry, the history of music, & the education of music.

In the end the projects purpose is to not just bring awareness but primarily to promote discussion.  Many of these topics I’ve held close kept opinions about but never formally realized until I started writing about them.  Hopefully this exhibit will be a nice platform for people to start to develop their thoughts and opinions.  Also I set out for this exhibit to help push visitors to other sites & resources to gain further information on the topics covered

The platform I used to host the exhibit was WordPress.com

Goals of the Project

First and foremost I wanted to enjoy doing this project.  The topic selection and types of projects we could do were very open which was very refreshing.  I knew I wanted to do a digital project so I could build some sort of skill and also cover a topic that was interest of me and probably wouldn’t cover in another class.

Spurring from the “Machine is Us/ing Us” video that I covered during the course my idea for covering music began to develop.  The video hinted about how we must rethink certain things that we know; one of them was copyright.  Having down research on the topic in the past I knew I wanted to reopen the topic and explore how it’s changed since them but also go deeper into the topic of music specifically.  A lot of the topics I cover I feel use examples that most people would be able to understand.  If I were to continue work on the project I would hope to cover more of the niche of music that I personally enjoy.

For the topic I wanted to also make sure that it was one that covered an emerging technology that I was interested but also had an element of history to it of course.  In many other courses the bulk of the content was on the past and current events were just given a small amount of attention.  So with my topics I wanted to make sure to cover news that was fairly recent as well.  Overall I tried to make the topics as broad as possible but used case studies to bring it into context.  Moving forward I would probably like to do more posts involving current events as they happen.

The platform I used was WordPress and my goal for that platform was just to gain a basic understanding of its use.  Building off the practicum that was held during class I wanted to simply recreate what we learned and possibly go a little more in detail with the site.  Using a free WordPress blog you sort of max out the options that you may apply or tweak with the site.  Fortunately I also obtained a WordPress.org paid website that let me go into WP even further that what I planned.  Through this I was able to understand the difference between the two better and see the pros/cons of both.  In then end I tried to cheat the system and present my WP.com blog as a WP.org web page and the end result I believe is okay.  Towards the end of the project I also tried to experiment with the format with some of the pages in the exhibit.  I didn’t want each piece to just be a wall of text and wanted to make the experience a little more interactive.

In the end, as I mentioned before, the main goal was to create something that would push people to think about the topics covered.  Hopefully they would gather my opinion, think about theirs, go out and read more on the topic, and continue to develop how they felt.  I wanted to set up the site to make sure that process was as friendly as possible to go through.  I tried to include not only links & other content to what I was directly talking about but to other sources that would help give further incite or overview on similar topics.

For my digital project, Music & YouTube, I researched and analyzed the effect that the video-sharing platform had on music.  My findings led to the creation of a blog that then turned into an exhibit highlighting the changes.  This exhibit became an outlet for one of my closeted interests in not only music & the music industry but also the impact that technology & social media has had.

Going into the project I had a peripheral sense of the affect that YouTube had on music but in no way did I ever know it was so dramatic and essential to how things are today.  Another finding that was intriguing was the discovery of the presence that music has in our lives and all the various roles that YouTube gets to play in them.

The content of my digital project was already of interest to me before I took this course.  But it was another interest that really spurred me into doing the project.  Knowing that I had the preference of completing a digital project I struggled for a little while about what platform I wanted to use in my research.  I ended up deciding to go with using WordPress.

Knowing the prevalence of WordPress online along with a large amount of resources & overall user friendly interface I felt that there would still be a learning curve but without the stress that usually comes with a new platform.  Another reason I went ahead with WordPress was because of the potential to use it for other projects in future courses and for my own personal use.  WordPress also proved to have opportunities beyond the requirements of the project if I wanted to explore further.

Doing the actually research on an emerging topic was another great experience.  The creativity allowed for our topic selection provided me the rare opportunity to focus on something outside of my major course work which is always nice.  It was also interesting to piece together a mix of purely entertaining articles written on the subject with new scholarly opinions that are just starting to develop.