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Jesse Johnston
Librarian and archivist, teacher, administrator, and music scholar with extensive experience in the public sector, academic research, and teaching.
The Cimbál (Cimbalom) in Moravia
This page summarizes my 2008 dissertation, which which explored the folk culture and history of the cimbalom, a large hammered zither instrument, in Moravia.
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Public Writing
A list of essays and posts that I have published on public websites, including for the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Research Statement
This page describes my research interests and methods.
Posts
Playlist: The Tiny Digger as Library Meme
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The freighter stuck in the Suez Canal inspires a series of memes on Library Twitter.
Wrangling Humanities Data: Using Regex to Clean a CSV
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Have you heard of regular expressions before and wondered how to make use of them? This post is for someone who has asked this question. It assumes a basic understanding of “regex” and shows how to use a full-featured text editor to cleanup plain-text data.
Research Grants 101 for Arts
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Have you been looking for grants, fellowships, or awards that can be used to support artistic and expressive projects? This post presents a webinar from December 2020 with specific tips!
When Should You Reach out to a Funder?
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Speaking with a funder can be an effective way to see how your work best fits with current opportunities and priorities. This post offers pointers for how to initiate a conversation.
Wrangling Humanities Data: Exploratory Maps of NEH Awards by State
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This post continues the “Wrangling NEH Data” topic and demonstrates how to map the geographic distribution of NEH funds across different states using grant data from the 1960s.
Wrangling Humanities Data: Cleaning and Transforming Data
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This post continues the “Wrangling NEH Data” series. This installment cleans and transforms the original data to create a geospatial dataset.
Building Jekyll Site Pages with Python
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After moving this site to jekyll, I developed a new python script to automatically generate individual pages for my teaching experiences. This post provides the code developed in a Jupyter notebook.
Wrangling Humanities Data: Finding and Describing Data
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This post begins a series that will walk through basic steps in a data preservation and analysis workflow. This step walks through the process of creating essential preservation metadata to transform a group of files into an archivable package. This is the first post in the “Wrangling NEH Data” series.
Arts & Humanities Grants: Beyond Fellowships
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Researchers in the arts and humanities often seek support for their work through fellowships and other awards that support single investigators. But don’t forget to look beyond those programs when seeking funding!
Strategies for Arts & Humanities Federal Grants
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Ever wondered how to apply for a federal grant for your arts project? This post summarizes some of the current grant and fellowship programs for artists and humanists.
Career Diversity in Ethnomusicology
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What paths might a career in ethnomusicology take? While teaching and research in academia are the most common, there are many varieties. This talk explored my own path and considers various ways that we might encourage greater “career diversity” in ethnomusicology.
Play/back: The Challenge to Select in Audio Archives
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A condensed version of my introductory remarks at a panel of audio archives projects at the National Endowment for the Humanities “Play/back” symposium on audiovisual preservation, on September 30, 2016.
Teaching
Introduction to World Music
Undergraduate course, University of Michigan-Dearborn, 2009
This course surveyed selected traditional and popular music cultures from around the globe, while also teaching basic listening and writing skills.
Music of World Cultures
Undergraduate course, Bowling Green State University, 2009
This course surveyed selected traditional and popular music cultures from around the globe, while also teaching basic listening and writing skills.
Music of World Cultures
Undergraduate course, Bowling Green State University, 2010
This course surveyed selected traditional and popular music cultures from around the globe, while also teaching basic listening and writing skills.
Music Bibliography (MHM 503)
Graduate course, University of Michigan, 2012
This syllabus outlines a graduate course for music performers and researchers to understand the major reference resources and concepts for designing and carrying out music-focused research. The 2012 syllabus is available here.
Digital Preservation (LBSC 784)
Graduate course, University of Maryland, 2015
This graduate course taught the fundamentals of digital preservation for Master's students in the library and archvies tracks at the Maryland iSchool. The 2015 syllabus is available here.
Administration of Archives and Manuscripts (History 690)
Graduate course, George Mason University, 2016
This graduate course introduced the principles and concepts necessary for managing and understanding archival collections, with a focus on translating the skills of public historians to work in archives. The 2016 syllabus is available here.
Implementing Digital Curation (INST 742)
Graduate course, University of Maryland, 2018
This graduate course explored advanced techniques for managing digital projects for students training to become archivists and librarians. The 2018 syllabus is available here.
Implementing Digital Curation (INST 742)
Graduate course, University of Maryland, 2019
This graduate course explored advanced techniques for managing digital projects for students training to become archivists and librarians. The 2019 syllabus is available here.
Library Carpentry
Professional workshops, Library of Congress (and other locations), 2020
Library Carpentry, a mode of instruction designed on the principles of participation and live coding developed by The Carpentries, presents an active curriculum for librarians to expand their digital skills. I first got involved with this professional workshop approach at the Library of Congress in 2018, and I have since taught workshops in-person and online, for learners at the Smithsonian, American University, Clemson University, and the U.S. Geological Survey.
Here are the workshop programs and topics:
Toolkits
American Council of Learned Societies
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The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is nonprofit federation of 75 scholarly organizations formed in 1919. Acting on behalf of its members and various other funders, the ACLS reviews, awards, and distributes hundreds of fellowships in many areas of the humanities and social sciences. This toolkit offers an overview of ACLS.
National Endowment for the Humanities
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The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is the largest federal funder of humanities-focused programs and grants in the US. In 2021, NEH will award nearly $140 million to projects across the country. This toolkit offers an overview of the agency and its current major programs.