IASA 2017 Annual Conference

Mission Music Africa represents the culmination of a decade-long effort, preparing a large ethno-musicological audiovisual collection for publication through an internationally recognized archive. Gathered throughout East Africa 1963-1969 and subsequently digitized 1998-2007, the collection exemplifies a fascinating documentary of both an assimilation and rejection process of Western values amidst radical political and cultural changes.

Mission Music Africa also illustrates a perfect chronicle of the changing digital formats and workflows, accompanying the project migrating from various analog media formats towards contemporary digital media archival content and emerging mandate of an online dissemination platform created at Acadia University, Canada.

As the intrinsic value of the collection lies not only in the presence of unique original resources, but also effective integration of both quantity and quality of data correlations, this project demonstrates how inherent cultural authenticity can be effectively enhanced through specific data correlation enhancing workflow mechanisms.

First, by enhancing previously obtained same-category media data through a three-step “Memory Mining Feedback Cycle” sequence, involving the collector associating individual media files within all files of same-category, “two-dimensional” relationships. This is then significantly expanded towards “three-dimensional” correlations involving all remaining audiovisual media categories, obtaining over 10,000 additional comments and data entries.

Finally, these enriched media-specific data sets then form the foundation of a basic online presentational platform driven by propriety software, simultaneously displaying data-match priority criteria lists of separately listed audiovisual resource files, clustered around a central user-driven and fully searchable media playback screen, thus significantly enhancing relational density and depth of cultural perception (http://africaproject.acadiau.ca/mediaPlayer.jsp). System is user updatable and fully backwards compatible to original resources.