Ghana Music and Dance Initiative

Contents: About The Ghana Music and Dance Initiative | About the Agoo-Bi Nii Cultural Arts Center | Tech

About The Ghana Music and Dance Initiative

The Ghana Music and Dance initiative was started as a cooperative effort from ethnomusicologists, digital librarians, and Ghanian music specialists to actively document and preserve the sounds, dances, and traditions of Ghanian music. Liam Marchant, Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning 2021 Undergraduate Fellow, and Professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Idaho, Barry Bilderback, connected with Habib Iddrisu from the Univeristy of Oregon to create an engaging, accessable, and easy-to-update platform for video, photography, and audio recordings collected by the Agoo-Bi Nii Center and other various repositories of Ghanian dance and music.

The team plans to travel to Ghana to supplement this digital collection with more recordings, video, photographs, and vital information to help ensure the elevation of individual artists, composers, and dancers. The goal of the Ghana Music and Dance Initiative is to highlight the ensembles, traditions, and individuals partaking in them. For the continued effectiveness of the collection, it is essential that the Ghana Music and Dance Initiative works on the same goals as the Agoo-Bi Nii Cultural Arts Center in looking to identify specific musicians and give credit where credit is due.

About The Agoo-Bi Nii Cultural Arts Center

ANCA (NGO), based in Ghana and dedicated to preserving,promoting, developing, and passing on the authentic cultural performing arts of Ghana. They provide quality journalism and information about the state of music and dance culture from around the country. The Agoo-Bi Nii Cultural Arts Center is comitted to cultivating the next generation of Ghanaian musicians by sharing the wisdom and expertise of the previous generations.

Ethnomusicology and Digital Humanities

Central to the history of ethnomusicology is a deep-seated praxis that analyzes music through a colonial lens. As the practice works to objectively understand music and cultural practices, a global call for decolonization resounds in ethnomusicological and anthropological circles. Museums are ostensibly an institution that champions this old spirit of colonialism while continuing to tote the virtues of diversity and inclusion. Museum and library collections across the world are legally and financially tangled with relinquishing their collections to their original homes. However, an easy step that can empower and enable scholarly research around the world is to digitally archive documents and artifacts for institutions and individuals around the world. As Kofi Agawu states in his book, Representing African Music, he points out the unfortunate truth that the majority of what we know about indigenous African music is archived outside the continent. Bridging this divide with robust digital archival work is a small step to decolonizing the field of ethnomusicology.

About CollectionBuilder

This demo collection features items from the University of Idaho Library’s Digital Collections, and is build using CollectionBuilder-CSV.

CollectionBuilder-CSV is a “Stand Alone” template for creating digital collection and exhibit websites using Jekyll, given:

• a CSV of collection metadata
• a folder of images, PDFs, audio, or video files

Driven by your collection metadata, the template generates engaging visualizations to browse and explore your objects. The resulting static site can be hosted on any basic web server.

CollectionBuilder is an set of open source tools for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that are driven by metadata and powered by modern static web technology. See CB Docs for detailed information.