Archiving the Interdisciplinary

Liz Kotz
Art History
UC Riverside

In order to foster research on the cross-disciplinary nexus of experimental music, poetry and art of the 1950s and 1960s, “Archiving the Interdisciplinary” worked with UCSD Special Collections prioritize and digitize collections materials, and develop platforms for sharing materials among scholars. Research in digital humanities has used computational methods to aggregate large qualities of relatively like materials, allowing us to see otherwise imperceptible relationships and patterns among texts, images and documents. Interdisciplinary research on mid-twentieth century avant-gardes, however, requires a different model, one that allows us to address both the singularity of idiosyncratic documents and the vast multiplicity of technical formats, from reel-to-reel audiotape to musical scores and stacks of cards. In addition, to support the use of archival materials by developing scholars, we explored the viability of short-term on-site residencies and collection-based case studies.