Here is Katlyn’s entry for Task 8: Golden Record Curation:

Katlyn Paslawski – Golden Record Curation

And here is my entry:

Task 8: Golden Record Curation

Task 8, which consisted of curating the Golden Record down to 10 tracks, generated a wide variety of different methodologies. Some people, such as myself, went the route of choosing songs that they personally enjoyed as pieces of music, with little to no other aspects taken into account. Of course, that wasn’t the entirety of my process, because I enjoyed (in a personal musical taste sense) very few of the songs (3 to be exact), and so the rest had to be chosen in a different way. My methodology for the rest ended up being a token effort at geographic and racial diversity.

Contrast this with Katlyn’s methodology, which was from the start a very detailed and procedural process meant to identify “songs that reflect humans values and diversity, incorporating voices from both men and women and from places around the world … a balance of tracks that feature human voices and musical instruments.” Where I listened to the songs once, and not always even completely through each song, and simply decided if I liked each one or not, Katlyn listened to each multiple times to analyze the specific audio makeup of each track. I didn’t even consider the gender of the singers, Katlyn made that one of her core principles. After my initial three songs, we did share somewhat similar goals, but Katlyn was much more specific and analytic in her process. This is probably because this was her initial goal, whereas it was an afterthought for me. Katlyn even went to the effort of mapping the origin of each song, whereas I did it completely in my head in a much less serious fashion.

The detail Katlyn put into the analysis of each song is represented by the justifications she provided for each track. I did not provide any individual analysis of the songs, simply listing them. Despite these differences in process, we identified a similar issue with the original Golden Record curation; namely, an American bias (understandable as it was an American project). I also highlighted a classical bias, and Katlyn highlighted the male bias as noted above.

It is interesting how curation is such a subjective, and value dependent, process. I was much more concerned about a lack of modern music, and the emphasis put on classical European ‘mathematically perfect’ music, whereas Katlyn focus on gender and balancing instrumental and vocal music. These differences both in process and the results of the process highlight how curation is a type of textual technology – it communicates meanings and values in a very concrete way. It also highlights how the possession of different literacies will influence and change the process and result. Someone who is musically trained, for example, is going to analyze the tracks in a different way than someone who does not possess that type of literacy.