Ethnic Studies

"The Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative represents one of the most ambitious and comprehensive efforts to date to deliver educational content on the Civil Rights Movement via the Web. ... The initiative promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement through its three principal components: 1) a digital video archive of historical news film allowing learners to be nearly eyewitnesses to key events of the Civil Rights Movement, 2) a civil rights portal providing a seamless virtual library on the Movement by connecting related digital collections on a national scale, and 3) a learning objects component delivering secondary Web-based resources - such as contextual stories, encyclopedia articles, lesson plans, and activities--to facilitate the use of the video content in the learning process. The CRDL advances cross-disciplinary approaches, promoting a seamless infrastructure for learning, emphasizing context and structure for digital information, and recruiting and educating new leaders for a learning society. The Civil Rights Digital Library initiative achieves its desired outcomes through a partnership among digital library and information technology professionals, archivists, humanities scholars, educators, university graduate and undergraduate researchers, academic publishers, and public broadcasters." The initiative receives support from a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

"The corpus contains more than 450 million words of text and is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts. It includes 20 million words each year from 1990-2012 and the corpus is also updated regularly (the most recent texts are from Summer 2012). Because of its design, it is perhaps the only corpus of English that is suitable for looking at current, ongoing changes in the language." ~ from the site

"The EVIA Digital Archive Project is a joint effort of Indiana University and the University of Michigan to establish a digital archive of ethnographic video for use by scholars and instructors. Media in the EVIA Project consists of video collections that have been selected for inclusion by an editorial committee, and annotations have gone through a scholarly review process. The content of the Archive represents the culmination of preservation, annotation, and editorial work. The Archive is designed to be a long-term preservation repository for unedited ethnographic video recordings as well as a unique kind of peer-reviewed scholarly publication. In each collection, scholars have worked extensively with their own recordings to describe and analyze what they have documented. The growth of the content is ongoing, with collections in various stages of completion. To learn more about collections that are part of the EVIA Digital Archive Project, visit the Collections area."

"The Global Music Archive is a multi-media reference archive and resource center for traditional and popular song, music, and dance of Africa and the Americas. The archive is housed within the Anne Potter Wilson Music Library in Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music. The GMA is a collaboration between the Blair School of Music and the University Libraries. [It's] primary mission is to provide access to sound recordings and images of indigenous music from communities in Africa and the Americas ... The Digital Collection of East African Recordings ... consists of over 1,600 discrete musical performances recorded by an East African ethnomusicologist, Centurio Balikoowa. A fine starting place for the ethnological and ethnomusicological study of specific (i.e. African and North and South American) traditional and popular musics. Both audio and video are featured.

"Everyone who speaks a language, speaks it with an accent. A particular accent essentially reflects a person's linguistic background. When people listen to someone speak with a different accent from their own, they notice the difference, and they may even make certain biased social judgments about the speaker. The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded.1 The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different English speakers. This website allows users to compare the demographic and linguistic backgrounds of the speakers in order to determine which variables are key predictors of each accent. The speech accent archive demonstrates that accents are systematic rather than merely mistaken speech." Useful for the speech curriculum, theater, and cultural geography.

"Umbra Search is a digital library that aggregates materials documenting African American history and cultural life from archives, libraries, museums, and other US repositories. Umbra Search features thumbnail images and descriptive information about photographs, manuscripts, documents, books, sound files, video files, and other freely available resources."

"The only resource of its kind, this encyclopedia provides the most complete picture of the history and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe from the beginnings of their settlement in the region to the present. This Web site makes accurate, reliable, scholarly information about East European Jewish life accessible to everyone."-web site.