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A Sonic Year in Review: Today’s News, Yesterday’s Sounds

At Pop Up Archive, we’re collecting old sounds and making them searchable. As we watched the headlines roll in last year, we couldn’t help but notice how often sounds from the past are echoed in today’s news. So, for your listening pleasure, here are some of our favorite archival complements to the year’s biggest stories:

Bayard Rustin with Cleveland Robinson, chair of the 1963 March on Washington Administrative Committee. World Telegram & Sun photo by O. Fernandez. (Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division)

  • It was a year of milestones for gay rights: The Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and overturned California’s Prop 8 banning gay marriage. From Pacifica Radio Archives, Jonathan Katz in 1977 on his book Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA.

Beyoncé performs at the Pavilhão Atlântico, Lisbon. Credit: José Goulão

  • Following Edward Snowden’s leak of classified documents, a federal judge upheld the National Security Agency’s right to collect U.S. phone data. Surveillance isn’t new: listen to a 1983 examination of technology for nationalistic purposes.

Stay tuned to the Idea Lab for blog posts from Pop Up Archive in the coming months about digital audio rights issues and advances in speech-to-text technology.

Anne has worked with independent producers The Kitchen Sisters and national grant agencies to identify preservation and access opportunities for independent radio. She holds a Master’s degree from the University of California Berkeley in Information Management and Systems, where she focused in digital archives and the sociology of technology. She contributed to the creation of The Discipline of Organizing, a textbook in use at I Schools nationwide that unites perspectives about organizing from engineering, library science, and other fields. She is a 2012 SoundCloud Community Fellow and winner of the 2012 Knight News Challenge: Data. Before arriving in California, Anne lived in France, and managed a historic newspaper digitization project at Brown University.

Anne Wootton :

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