I keep returning to the notion of access, which, as an ethos, guides nearly every aspect of this project—from Jim Anderson’s creation and donation of the Croc Collection (as a way for music fans to access materials related to a specific part of Seattle’s history) to questions of design relating to the exhibit itself. For example, accessibility has dominated my questions about the design of the interface: how will users—whose primary reasons for visiting the exhibit may be to access either the exhibit’s media or narrative content (or both)—interact with the site? How will their options for navigation affect their experience of the exhibit? And conversely, how do you make an exhibit narrative meaningful for the media-centric user?

This again begs the question of audience, but it also involves a discursive relationality between design and use; in order to contextualize the significance of the collection, it is important that media and narrative point to each other. In other words, the media, both of the site itself and what the site points to, is less meaningful without the context provided by the narrative. Conversely, the narrative is illustrated in a meaningful way by the various ways in which the user can interact (or access) the media as they read through the site. To this end, I’ve started looking at public sites with similar media content, such as allmusic.com (which has narrative, visual media, and short audio clips), in an attempt to better understand how the interplay between media informs the user’s experience.

I also think that do-it-yourself (DIY) culture—the overarching topic covered by “A Voice in the Culture,” the exhibit’s subtitle—can be integrated into the process of the site’s design, too. DIY is a major theme in my master’s thesis work (specifically how DIY, as a political concept, is historically contingent), so I spend a lot of time thinking about it. That said, in the interest of keeping my blog posts short, I’ll take up this thread of thought in my next entry. Toodles!

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the CrocCafe project, with the exhibits tag. Featured images for this post care of the Crocodile Cafe Exhibit, built using Scalar.

DIY is an artistic ethos with strong roots in the Seattle/Tacoma area. Since the 80s, local musicians have taken it upon themselves to build a strong, vibrant community, one that traditionally eschews major-label representation and instead functions via grassroots promotion and tireless organizing. Hand-pulled gig posters, lo-fi bedroom recordings, and tape-sharing are a few examples of the ways in which DIY has come to thrive as an enduring movement. The Croc recordings represent a unique chapter in the local DIY story: Jim made them as both a document of the scene and also as an inexpensive option for the artists to release their own live performances (he never recorded without permission of the bands, and never profited from them). Nearly every local artist of note in the 2000s is represented in the collection.

This exhibit will tell the story of the Croc’s place in the history of DIY. To this end, local DIY is treated here as a culturally significant historical movement. The recordings therefore can be viewed as historical artifacts. The exhibit’s various narratives seek to intertwine these artifacts with the underlying philosophies of DIY and how they manifested themselves in the late nineties / early aughts Pacific Northwest music story.

I recently travelled to Seattle with Jentery to speak with Jim, John Vallier (the media librarian at UW), and Laurel Sercombe, lead archivist at UW’s Ethnomusicology Sound Archive. We discussed the potential for using media to illustrate the exhibit’s narratives, as well as ways that we might better tell the story of the Croc’s role in DIY culture. We learned that Jim donated the recordings with the stipulation that they only be fully accessible at the UW library itself. Thus, part of the exhibit will point people to the physical collection via the presentation of fair-use audio and video clips taken (with permission) from the collection. These clips will represent many of the artists who were integral to the vital DIY culture in the Pacific Northwest. We also discovered that Jim—an obvious archivist at heart—also has an extensive collection of various related media, such as weekly club schedules, set lists, and gig posters. Perhaps these artifacts will also be represented in the exhibit as well.

To construct the exhibit, I’m working with Scalar, a multimodal publishing platform currently in development by a team based at USC. Scalar allows the user to explore media and text in a highly interactive way—one can navigate easily through the exhibit while accessing media, and even change the settings to let the media tell the story. Having returned from Seattle with a clearer understanding of what we will be able to do with this exhibit, I’m looking forward to working through the narratives and finding the best way to integrate the wealth of media we have at our disposal.

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the CrocCafe project, with the exhibits tag. Featured images for this post care of the Crocodile Cafe Exhibit.

In collaboration with University of Washington Libraries, the MLab prototyped an online exhibit to interpret the Crocodile Cafe Collection and the do-it-yourself (DIY) contexts and cultures in which it is embedded. The MLab used the Scalar platform to construct the exhibit (not public), which consists not only of audio and video clips but also interviews with musicians and narratives that stitch together content in the Collection. The project began in 2011, when Jentery Sayers was teaching media studies courses at the University of Washington-Bothell. There, with significant support from University of Washington librarian, John Vallier, Sayers taught a new media production and community-based research course about building scholarly online exhibits. In conversation with Jim Anderson, Vallier, and various musicians in the Pacific Northwest and beyond, Sayers and the UW students constructed the first draft of the exhibit, with the ultimate intent of pointing people to the Crocodile Cafe Collection and giving that Collection an even richer sense of history (particularly where DIY cultures are concerned).

Screengrab of the Crocodile Cafe Exhibit, which features audio of an interview with Ian MacKaye. Interview conducted by Jentery Sayers at the Dischord House.

Research Leads, Contributors, Support, and Partnerships

The research leads for the the Crocodile Cafe Exhibit were Shaun Macpherson and Jentery Sayers. Initial development of the exhibit (2012-13) was supported by the University of Victoria’s Office of Research Services and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, based on a grant proposal Jentery Sayers wrote in 2012. To prototype the exhibit, the MLab collaborated with University of Washington Libraries (including John Vallier and Laurel Sercombe), Jim Anderson (the collection’s donor and creator), and the Scalar development team at the University of Southern California. Locally, Shaun Macpherson and Jentery Sayers were the primary authors of the exhibit. Contributors to the exhibit include over thirty University of Washington students and more than twenty musicians who somehow played a role in the Croc Cafe scene between 2002 and 2007.

Project Status

While active development of this exhibit is on hiatus, the MLab is considering ways to expand it beyond the Seattle scene, interview more people, and gather more materials. This expansion will enrich the Scalar prototype Sayers, Macpherson, and the MLab team built between 2012 and 2014. During that period, Sayers also gave several talks on the project, including a talk at the 2012 MLA Convention in Seattle.

Post by Jentery Sayers and Shaun Macpherson, attached to the CrocCafe project, with the projects and exhibits tags. Featured image for this post by Shaun Macpherson, from the Crocodile Cafe Exhibit (built using Scalar). (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)