This project will develop a hypermedia, interactive data base that presents an audio/visual enthnography of world culture and provide the analytic tools for its analysis for classroom instruction in schools and colleges. This "Global Jukebox" will bring the world-view of anthropology to the classroom and will find wide use in teaching and research in human geography and other fields. The purpose of this data base is to make available non-print materials and related data that capture the nature of human beings and the*l*;r culture. For example, the 20th century brought a major advance for research in the performance arts, as song and dance were recorded on tape and film in every part of the wotld, making it possible for the first time to study the whole range of the rhythmic arts. The Columbia University Cross- Cultural Study of Expressive Behavior applied methods for the systematic descriptions of performance to large samples of audio/visual data from a stratified sample of cultures, where coded data on social relations was also available. Out of this comparative study came linked taxonomies of song, dance, orchestration and speech style, together with a body of social theory sufficient to explain the cross-cultural variations of style. This whole data-base, including its hundreds of illustrative selections of music, dance and speech, can now be made available in an interactive media format. The GLOBAL JUKEBOX will allow laymen, students and specialists to explore the broad universe of human creativity and culture in a systematic fashion, with audio/visual illustrations. This interactive learning facility realizes, indeed challenges, the potentials of present-day computing systems, stretching their capacities for storage, retrieval, analysis, and multi-tasking, in handling and presenting this multi-scalar, multi-modal audio/visual database. For lay users, it will offer an enlightening vision of cultural variety and integrity. For students and specialists it will provide a platform for the study of expressive behavior in it total cultural context. The materials will be evaluated in schools, colleges and public libraries.
