Date: Sun, 28 Jan 1996 17:47:07 -0800 (PST)
From: Diane W Middlebroo, dwm@leland.stanford.edu
cc: img-mail@lists.Stanford.EDU
Subject: Middlebrook Presentation 8 February
Dear John and all:
At the IMG session on Thursday, February , 5-6:30pm I will present a CD-ROM titled "Finding the Girlfriends: The Biographer as Investigative Journalist / A Multimedia Showcase."
The CD-ROM was designed by a computer consultant at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, to accompany my presentation at a conference, "Literary Journalism & Literary Scholarship," held at Warwick 3-5 November 1995. "Finding the Girlfriends" was a behind-the-scenes report on the process of writing the biography of Billy Tipton (1914-1989), a female jazz musician who spent fifty years masquerading as a man. The CD-ROM contains samples of photographs, newspapers clippings, official documents, music, a video clip from the film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?", and audio interviews with people who knew Billy Tipton, accompanied by transcripts of these interviews. It closes with a sample of Billy Tipton's voice.
The following is the last paragraph of the talk, which states a thesis about the usefulness of multimedia to the genre of biography. This will be my jumping-off point at the seminar on 8 February:
[Coda]
I decided to adopt multimedia showcase for my talk in order to make a further point about the relationship between scholarship and journalism today. Just as my work on this biography has required learning methods of discovery that were new to me as an academic researcher, methods greatly enabled by sophisticated forms of information retrieval, so do the new technologies make possible an evolution of biography as a genre. A coherent narrative will always be essential to the genre, and the construction of a transparent, story-telling narrator will always be the test of the biographer's powers as an artist. But the straw from which this gold is spun is valuable, too--though never before has there been a medium of "publication" capacious enough and condensed enough to permit its full exposure.
I believe that the possibility of retrieving the discovery phase of the biographer's work from the finished narrative will sharpen awareness of the ethical issues inherent in the genre of biography as well. Hypermedia make available a re-enactment of the biographer's primary encounter with the materials of the finished narrative. They restore to the process of citation fundamental to scholarship an acknowledgment of the ambiguity of what we like to think of as "information." For a last word on that subject, let me return to the horse's mouth. Here is Billy Tipton, explaining to one of his fathers-in-law how easy it is to make a tape recording say anything you want it to say.
BT: This is a test, made from Idaho Falls, August the twenty-sixth, made from radio and tv station KID. Testing: one two three four, testing, one two. One two. Testing: one two three four. Testing: one two three four. Say something there.
"Dad": I can't say anything, I don't know what to say. [...]
BT: [giggles] Dad says can you clean it up.
"Dad": Yeah, clean the, uh,
BT: Yeah, Clean the tape. [inaudible]
"Dad": Well I'm not ready yet. As I say, wait till we get ready to say something.
BT: We'll scrape off all the dirty words you say.
"Dad": You can scrape that all off, and rebroadcast on it, eh?
BT: Sure you can. ###