Hi. In this video, I'm going to be talking about Public Writing with some examples from the humanities and, more specifically, from music and ethnomusicology. The first thing I think I'd like to say is just that the very idea of public writing presumes that there's some kind of contrast with private writing. I think almost all writing is really public. It's meant to be shared with some exceptions like sketches or very intimate journals, but in general it's a little like talking about visual images, it's sort of redundant. Writing is public whether it's academic or otherwise. I think what we're talking about when we think of public writing in academic circles is in contrast with very specialized knowledge. The public writing we can think of as writing for a general public rather than academic specialists or other types of specialists. So the first thing we can think of is just books. There are, of course, very specialized academic books. But there are also books that are intended for a more general audience. Here I have covers of three books by one of my role models in scholarship, Robert Farris Thompson, who is an art historian, but writes a lot about history, culture and music. Here are three of his books. The one on the left is a museum catalogue for an art exhibit, the one in the middle is just a classic, very accessible book about African and Afro-American art and philosophy and the one on the right is a recent book on tango, which is about dancing music. His writing is really accessible. I think it's suited to a general public although he's a very specialized academic author. Another type of public writing I think of consummately, quintessentially public writing is web logs, blogs. On the left is a screen capture from a blog by a colleague named Dwayne Marshall, his blog Wayne&Wax is really highly regarded, and I think really excellent and thought-provoking work. One of the things that distinguishes this type of public writing from others is that there's a type of dialogue going on with the general public. So people comment and post things onto websites that they wouldn't do if they buy a book or read an article. On the right is a review which is a very characteristic type of public writing in the arts and amenities. There is a screen capture from a web log called Dusted which is mostly music reviews and articles by a colleague named Dan who is a composer, musicologist. Of course, first thing we may think of with public writing is newspapers. Here on the left we have an op-ed or opinion, editorial piece from the New York Times about ethnomusicology but written by a quite famous piano player named Keith Jarrett. On the right we have an article, just a journalistic article, but written by an ethnomusicologist named Steven Cornelius. So, again, just newspapers being the first thing we tend to think of in terms of public writing, online, or in print. So a couple of other types of writing, or genres of writing. These are, on the left, we see an image of some liner notes from a compact disc. It's information, that's text information written on an album. It's sort of maybe a dying art form if you think of it a certain way with digital downloads and files being the preferred format for music nowadays. But this type of context and information for music can be really essential and is often written by scholars and specialists. On the right you see a press release, in this case from a public relations firm named Rock Paper Scissors that specializes in world music. Press releases are a sort of a commercial product meant to give orientation and context for primarily journalists. And oftentimes they'll be written by specialists including academics. We tend to think of magazines similarly to the way we think of newspapers, as a sort of quintessentially public forum for writing. Here are a couple of magazines that I look at a lot and often include articles for the general public but written by scholars and academics. The main difference, I think between what someone would write for a magazine or a newspaper and what they might write for a very specialist academic journal article is really, a lot of times, in the tone. In the amount of detail and specialization of the subject, but also something very fundamental, which is citations. Writing for the general public doesn't, typically, have citations, whereas academic writing in journals and books, does have citations. I think that's one of the sort of key signals to look for to distinguish between general and public specialized academic writing. And finally we have a couple of examples of multimedia publishing for the general public done by scholars. On the left, you see a cover from a CD project by an ethnomusicologist named Steven. And on the right a video that I've featured in other presentations here, over the course which I really still recommend you check out on YouTube by Hugo Zemp. These are a type of writing really, scripts are written, liner notes, the production. I think it's an interesting way to think about media and intellectual pursuits, is through multimedia. And finally, moving images. These are couple of examples from Apsara Media, which is run by the late Nazir ethnomusicologist at the University of California in Los Angeles who specialized in making documentary films and recordings. So I hope that was an interesting and thought provoking sort of little journey through different types of Public Writing. Thanks, see you in the next video.
