‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ : integration of multimedia into linguistic and anthropological publications

Oral literature and music are important elements of Aboriginal Australian cultures for contextualising linguistic and historical research. Neither music nor oral literature naturally lends itself to publication as a textual document. Yet the primary outputs of academic research in disciplines such as linguistics, anthropology, and history have generally been textual. Reducing performances to text, as with musical notation of a song or the description of a performance, involves a flattening of multidimensionality, a loss of information, and the privileging of the researcher’s experience of the performance over the performance itself. This also renders the research product less useful to the wider academic community, as they only receive access to those elements of the performance that seemed most relevant for the research interests of the author. Similarly, the reduction of tens or hundreds of hours of fieldwork recordings into carefully selected representative utterances, presented as glossed interlinear examples in a grammar or journal article, involves a loss of information that past technological limitations forced upon us. Such limitations no longer exist. In recent years the affordances of newer media have allowed researchers to experiment with integrating audio and visual materials into their text-based analysis. Luise Hercus, with the publications from her Aboriginal Song Cycles project (Hercus 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014; Beckett & Hercus 2009), has been one of the leaders in this kind of innovation. I was privileged to assist her with the production of The Emu History from Arabana-Wangkangurru Country in 2010, but at that time she had been producing CDs and accompanying printed books of song cycle material for several years already. These CDs take the form of interactive ‘books’ created in html form for display in a web browser. They retain a book-like chapter structure with a hypertext table of contents for navigation. The material itself consists of photographs, song texts, musical notation, audio files and interspersed text that situates and analyses the song stanzas. Unfortunately, these publications are also illustrative of many of the problems encountered when researchers produce research outputs other than traditional paper-based books and articles. It is difficult to find publishers willing to create, market, and disseminate such non-traditional outputs, and this, together with issues around the community’s desires and permissions, meant that Hercus had to arrange for their production and dissemination herself. This in turn means they are difficult to find in libraries or to purchase, and even references to them are not easily available. Because they do not count for the Australian Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) reporting metrics,1 they are not catalogued in the Australian National University’s research outputs database, from which publication lists on individual researcher webpages are populated. This makes the Song Cycle CDs almost invisible to a researcher who is not already aware of them. This is one very telling example among many of the barriers facing researchers who wish to experiment with newer technologies and their benefits for linguistic, anthropological and musicological research. In this paper I situate these examples in a broader context, surveying the ways in which researchers in Australia and beyond have begun to incorporate multimedia into their publications and what the future of electronic publishing might hold for our disciplines. In doing so, I elaborate on the aforementioned barriers that preclude more extensive uptake of innovative ways of conducting and disseminating research.