Two years ago, when I walked into the classroom of Paris in the 1920s, I did not know that my last day of college will be spent like this – making maps, doing music history and writing a final blog post for the musical geography website. Out of curiosity I checked the number of blog posts that I have written over the past two years : 21, not that many, but is still quite a contribution – 8% of the total 256 published blog posts. Usually I am a person of humility and excessive self-criticism. I especially have this strong rejection to look at my old writings (and that’s why I don’t take diary personally) because I feel embarrassed about the immature old me. But this time, I am glad to have a self-reflective moment reviewing my old blog posts and projects, and I would not deny that I do feel proud of myself, though just a little bit.
Musical geography is an innovative field with few authorities or classics but abundant self-exploration and new scholarship. Every work that we have done, either a short blog post or a formal project, potentially shapes and defines this new field. This is probably the part that I am most proud of and exciting about, that we indeed have our impact to the scholarly field and we are doing outstanding works. We keep building up our research skills and professional knowledge throughout the progress. We understand the scholarly literature in both musicology and digital humanities; we have pragmatic experience creating our own maps and coping with technical difficulties.
It has just been two years so far, and it is exciting to anticipate how this project, and us, will grow in the next 2 years, 5 years, even 10 years. We continue to write blog posts, do research and make maps to share our discoveries; We go to more conferences, DH ones and musicology ones, to keep brandishing all the incomparable advantages of digital interactive maps; We may have another exhibition, or get an article published; At some point we may try to hire a specialist, even better if s/he is an Ole, to build a unique mapping platform designed just for musical geography…
It feels like I could keep doing this project forever. I have suffered from writing blog posts when I had little progress in research and making maps when ArcGIS did not like my cvs spreadsheet, but I will miss these moments in addition to those rewarding ones when I had a project done or an exhibition opened. I will keep visiting back from time to time, although my administrator account will expire and I will have to view as a guest. I am sure I will be as exciting as I have been, seeing all the great works published here.