Asian American Female Composers and Digital Memory

Abstract

Wikipedia content is everywhere. When one uses Google—even just to check on the birth year of actress and rapper Awkwafina—a Google Knowledge Graph will likely appear and share core information from Wikipedia on the right side of the search results page. Wikipedia is integrated into our daily lives. From an article on composer Chen Yi to Korean KPop girl group Mamamoo, Wikipedia has a page for them all. But these contemporary popular Asian and Asian American musicians are, perhaps, likely Wikipedia entries. How can educators, researchers, scholars, and historians use this ubiquitous resource to teach and create digital memory for underrepresented groups? Working with the Music of Asian American Research Center (MAARC), I designed a Wikipedia assignment to introduce and expose graduate students at Westminster Choir College to musicological research on Wikipedia. In a class of graduatelevel preprofessional singers, musicians, conductors, and composers, I crafted an assignment that included not only an overview of print and online encyclopedias but also delved into aspects of scholarly research. At the same time, I highlighted problems related to marginalized composers and musical works. By incorporating a Wikipedia assignment focused on Asian American female composers into the course, I could demonstrate the musicological issues of