Hi, this is David Font-Navarrete, your disciplinary consultant for the humanities. Today, I'm going to be talking about the use of visual images in academic writing, and the example is coming, more specifically, from music and the musicology scholarship. That's my own specialty, and I'll be using for the most part, examples from my own work. I thought we'd just jump right in. A map is, I think, the first and sometimes the most fundamental tool we can use visually, literally orienting a reader to your subject. Here's a map I made of a portion of West Africa, Senegambia, including parts of Senegal and the Gambia and pointing out specific towns and geographical features that I mention in parts of my study. And here is a archival map that I found in the collection of a colleague. This map is about 50 years old, and it showed some of the same places where I was doing my own research and showed a couple of towns specifically that didn't appear in any other map. So this also an archival example of using maps and visual images. And here we have another couple of examples of archival images that I've used. On the left, you see a picture taken by and of a scholar, the guy on the right with the sunglasses. Jay David's up here, who's been very helpful with my own research, and here he's recording some musicians in Senegal in the 1960s. In the middle, you see some drawings, which are another type of very useful visual image. These are simple drawings of musical instruments in the same part of Senegal where Sapir and I both did our research. And on the right, you have sort of a traditional portrait. This is one of my teachers in the Gambia, Modutamba. So all of these things I think we tend to sort of take for granted how visual images are used. On the left you're seeing a recording take place; there's an implication there that music is happening, and singing. In the middle, we have the diagrams which are a very different thing but also implies music. And on the right, you just have a picture of a master musician, so that we see him, sort of, up close and personal. These are all really different. They all perform different functions within a text, and within a study. Here are a couple of other uses of images from my own study. Again, using David Sapir's photos from the 1960s, in combination with my own. In both of these juxtapositions, so both pairs of pictures, what I'm getting at is a type of historical continuity that I think the picture says very clearly to the reader. The cliche is “A picture is worth a thousand words.” So these pairs of pictures I think are worth a lot of text showing that some things have really stayed the same, and other things have really changed. Moving this initiation garb on the right into a museum is sort of maintaining the thing and making it new in a different way. Here's a very different type of visual image: This is a common type of charting in anthropology. This is charting kinship. It's a type of family tree map. It's a very particular type of diagram. It's very common to cultural anthropologists and not much of anybody else, but it can be quite useful in trying to map out family relationships of different sorts. And when we think of visual images in music, a lot of what we tend to think of is what we are seeing here on the left, a transcription of a musical score of sorts. Here, again this is some drumming music that that I transcribed in one of my studies. You see that it's moving from left to right and top to bottom. Different sections of notes are marked with different kind of codes talking about different sections. The time markers along the left side also might be useful. It's referring to a recording. On the right, you see a very different type of image associated with recorded sound. This is a spectrogram recording. What you're seeing is from top to bottom, a set of frequencies, and from left to right, time elapsing, sort of the same way as the image on the left, but this is literally highlighting different frequencies. In this case, it's a male voice saying “19th century.” And because it's a male voice, you see that the brightest colors are on the lower end of the spectrum indicating that it's a lower tone of voice. Here's yet another type of visualization that I've used in my own work. This is looking at simple rhythmic transcription on the right, and on the left I'm looking at the rhythmic relationships in sort of structural terms, so I'm equating a musical transcription and another type of visual representation, different ways of getting at the same thing. Usually, you try to avoid redundence in writing and in presenting visual data, in this case. In my mind, this is a little bit more about giving two different perspectives on the same thing. And, we'll see now a couple of more technical diagrams reminiscent of the social sciences and natural sciences, types of uses of visual images that you've seen in the other videos. On the left, it's a mapping of different ways that drummers in this particular tradition, which is Bugarabu Drumming, arrange their sets of drums. So you see on the left the way the different sizes of drums are arranged. On the right, a picture of a drummer using them that way. And on the right, you see a type of coding for my form of transcription for this drumming music. This is all very specialized. not that different from maybe looking at what a biologist would do with different types of charts and diagrams, I suppose. And here are some other ways of transcribing and visualizing musical data. On the left, this color coded set of blocks is looking at themes and variations in a performance. In the middle and the right, I'm looking at a very small data little micro-rhythmic phenomena in a recording. And these again are just different ways of representing musical information. And finally, looking at some big data, looking at tempo changes over an almost hour long performance. Here, I'm mapping how much the music speeds up or slow down over a longer time. And the last thing is, of course, moving images. We tend to think of using visual images as a process of using still photography, still diagrams, but I think we are growing ever more accustomed to visual images and can use them in visual images that move. That is moving images, videos, film, in ways that do a lot of interesting and difficult work for us as writers and as researchers. Here are two stills from YouTube videos, and you have the links; both are really excellent, and I recommend them highly. The one on the left is excerpts from documentary work by an Ethnomusicologist named Hugo Zemp, and if you click through to that video, which I highly recommend, I would give it about a minute before you give up on it. If you wait a minute, it's worth the wait. And the one on the right is from a series of videos of different orchestral music. And I don't want to give away the surprise on that. But if you know this music, this Beethoven symphony and different works from that era, I think you'll really get a new type of insight into that music by clicking through that video and some of the related ones. So thanks very much for your time and see you in the next video. Bye.
