Song in the Sumatran Highlands is a large-scale Digital Humanities project. It is an interactive, interpretative multimedia ethnography and archive that documents and celebrates saluang, a prominent Minangkabau vocal genre from the highlands of West Sumatra, Indonesia.
- Ethnographic: it draws on more than twenty years of ethnographic research in West Sumatra involving still photography, audio, and audiovisual recordings.
- Archive: it is a repository for these audio-visual media–images, audio and video–collected over twenty years, supplemented by archival material and research reports. It involves over 40 hours of audio recordings represented in over 400 individualized examples, over 300 images, and 30 video clips.
- Interpretative: it is not just a static repository with metadata of audiovisual materials but those materials are interpreted by placing them into context and presenting tools to users that reveal connections between data.
- Interactive: it provides a series of digital tools that enable user-designed experiences exploring the data.
“This is a fascinating and pioneering approach to re-presenting ethnographic fieldwork in music to general audiences and scholars alike by taking advantage of the recent developments in digital humanities.” Anonymous Reviewer
Contributions
The project makes two main contributions.
Content: it is the first large-scale scholarly project in any language on the genre of saluang, arguably the most important vocal genre of the Minangkabau people. It provides what I hope will become a useful archival source for saluang performers and devotees.
Medium: I built the medium through which the knowledge is constructed and shared. Unlike a book project into which arguments are fitted into a fairly conventional structure, this project required designing the very medium through which the arguments would be presented. While I used the pre-existent digital platform, Scalar, the design, interface, and implementation of digital tools was mine.
Use and Citation
Free and Open-Access: You are free to use any part of the project in your scholarship, with appropriate citation, or your classes. There are a series of modules specifically designed for use in classes, such as Music and Gender, Music and Place, Analysis, Oral Literature. These modules can stand alone or be combined with other sections of the website.
Jennifer Fraser, with Saiful Hadi, Gabriela Linares, Megan Mitchell, et. al. 2021. Song in the Sumatran Highlands. https://songinthesumatranhighlands.com/song-in-the-sumatran-highlands/index.
Contact and Social Media Links
Available for talks & consultation: I would be excited to visit your class or campus to talk about the philosophy and methodology of the Digital Humanities, using Scalar, or any aspect of the project.
You can send comments to songinthesumatranhighlands (at) gmail.com
Follow us on Social Media:
I will be sending out regular posts about features and tools of the site, along with pages on particular artists, songs, analyses, and modules.
Facebook at Song in the Sumatran Highlands
