The Use of Audiovisual Resources for Scholarly Research: A Jazz Archive as a Multidiscipline Resource

• Main Authors: Marie P. Griffin, Marie Griffin
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Billboard; The Billboard
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.580.173

SINCETHE DAWN OF TIME the human species has recorded its history both visually and aurally. It is probable that the earliest form of communica-tion was the dance-the language of the body. Ritualistic dances marked the milestones in human life (birth, puberty, marriage, and death) and the elements of nature (sun, rain, earth, the starry heavens, the seasons) that made family, and later communal, life possible. Early man recorded these primitive origins ofcivilization by carving in stone; these visual petroglyphs have been studied by scholars for centuries. The sounds that accompanied the rituals and the movements are pre-served for us through the medium of the oral tradition and by relatively recent recordings of societies in which such rituals remain essential to the fabric of the community. The word, the symbol, existed eons before written language on the continuum of time. Technological developments in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have made it possible for the scholar to have access to these primary sources. Photographs and slides of man’s artistic creativity from 3000 B.C. to yesterday enable the scholar to study prehistoric Greek vases or the most avant-garde sculptures. Recordings bring us the voices of the past as well as the present, and in the Arctic or the jungle one can listen to the “top ” tunes on the Billboard charts. The consummate marriage of these media- television-brings the four corners of the