Richard Cullen Rath

am retired faculty in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, where I was also founding director of the Digital Arts and Humanities Initiative from 2012 to 2018. I wrote a book, How Early America Sounded. I have a couple more in store, at least; it is just that writing them takes so long! Here are some essays I have written in the not-too-distant past:

Richard Cullen Rath, “EthnoDigital Sonics and the Historical Imagination,” in Digital Sound Studies, ed by. Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, and Whitney Anne Trettien (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 29–46.It is accompanied by a pretty cool VUE map you can zone out on if you click it. Go ahead, you know you want to!
Richard Cullen Rath, “Silence and Noise,” in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, ed by. Michael Bull (London & New York: Routledge, 2018).
"Hearing Wampum: The Senses, Mediation, and the Limits of Analogy," in Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas, ed. Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 290–321.
“Sensory Media: Communication and the Enlightenment in the Atlantic World,” in A Cultural history of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment, 1650-1800, ed by. Anne C. Vila (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).
"How to Read Hypertext: Media Literacy and Open Access in Higher Education," in Making the University Matter, ed. Barbie Zelizer (Routledge, 2011);.
"Hearing American History" The Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (September 2008): 417–31.
headsounds: the work of vinyl in the age of digital reproduction, a conversation about vinyl and digital media with Njoroge Njoroge, Rich Rath, and Ted Sammons.

I also play music, varying from punk to ambient to alternative. I take care of Way.Net when I have the time.

Here are a few older articles. With the help of students, I have created a digital edition of W.E.B. Du Bois's classic, The Souls of Black Folk. It includes the music at the head of each chapter along with an analysis of it, a key to understanding the book. I wrote an article on DuBois's philosophy of history (pdf) that he used in Souls of Black Folk. A lot of people come to way.net to read my article on the creolization of African music in South Carolina in the eighteenth century, "Drums and Power." Or maybe you would like to read another article, this one on African music in seventeenth century Jamaica (pdf). There is a less technical explanation of the music here.

Here are a couple of really old programs that might or might not work for you: I built a hypertext guide to pidgin and creole studies in 1993 that I might come back to and update at some point. I made it on an old hypertext program called Maxthink before the WWW really existed...at least the html part of it. I then converted it using a program called SNR that is pretty cool once you figure it out. Back then it was beyond me to run perl in windows 9X. Beware, the hypertext is sort of confusing in a first year graduate student obfuscating kind of way. If you are interested in such things, you can download the DOS version of an explanation of Noam Chomsky's minimalist program from about the same time that was too complex to translate into html. To run the system, unpack the files in a new directory, open a dos (run "cmd" in windoze xp) box in the directory and type HYGEN from the directory that the files are in. Then type L to begin, use arrow keys to navigate. If you do not happen to have a computer with DOS (!) on it, install the DOSBox app and point it to the directory you unpacked gramglos into.