S*P*A*R*K.fm #32: Documenting Pop Culture

Jez Collins calls himself an activist archivist and runs the Birmingham Music Archive. In this edition of S*P*A*R*K.fm we discuss how and why involving everyone in writing history and publishing cultural works and memories online can be an act of political activism. We talk about music as a connecting part of all of our lives, and pop music as cultural heritage.

Questions arise on the technical aspects of documenting pop music heritage. Are the commonly used platforms Wikipedia or Facebook suitable at all for that purpose? How can pop culture archives be sustainable and who is in charge of preserving them?

This leads on to another example - Graffiti photo sharing. Carsten Janke is part of the Graffiti Archive team at Archiv der Jugendkulturen (archive of youth cultures) in Berlin. He talks about why the former international online platform Streetfiles.org, that held hundreds of thousands of graffiti photographs and comment threads, closed down, as well as explains his work at the graffiti archive. (in German)

Some links to people and sites quoted in the interviews:

http://birminghammusicarchive.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Samuel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People’s_history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn
http://bodegapop.blogspot.de/
http://streetfiles.org/

http://graffitiarchiv.wordpress.com/
 http://jugendkulturen.de/

In the studio: Andrea Goetzke
Music in between.