About Instrumentarium
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This site, inaugurated in March 2023, hosts or directs to the contents elaborated within the Instrumentarium project.
Instrumentarium is a digital humanities framework and weaving of memories, focused on research about musical instruments, especially traditional ones, and particularly Latin American ones.
The project is aimed at obtaining organological information through the analysis of documents from libraries, archives, museums, Internet and oral tradition repositories, from the perspective of the disciplines of knowledge and memory management (Library & Information Sciences, Archive Sciences, and Museology). In addition, it works with the sound artifacts themselves, considering them as "documents": elements capable of encoding, storing and transmitting information of all kinds (biological, geographical, social, economic, political...).
The results of these processes of research, compilation, analysis and synthesis are expressed in a series of products, both academic and popular. The former are concentrated in the publication of articles, while the latter include, but are not limited to, the following:
- A series of publications on musical instruments, written and illustrated by the author. They were originally published in digital format (in Spanish e English) under the independent label Wayrachaki Editora and, currently, they are edited under its successor El Zorro de Abajo Editora.
- A series of publications mainly devoted to musicians and music teachers, distributed under the title Open Class of Traditional Music. They include didactic materials, both written and audiovisual, on traditional Latin American sounds, and methods of construction and interpretation of instruments.
- The digital magazine Tierra de vientos, devoted to disseminating Latin American sound cultures.
- A series of audio and video podcasts, under the title Sounds and silences.
- A series of educational & artistic activities, encompassed under the name Sounds from a Land without Time, which includes exhibitions, didactic concerts, conferences, courses, seminars and workshops related to the construction and execution of instruments, and to the documents, histories and stories that give an account of them in libraries, archives, museums, etc.
- A series of action-research projects, especially on classification of musical instruments.
- A series of recordings, that (will) range from traditional to modern Latin American music.
- Activities of building of musical instruments, including reproduction of originals, creation of novelties, use of recycled materials and use of natural elements.
There is also a blog (see below) that periodically presents contents related to musical instruments, practices and expressions from all around the world.
Contents not related to music and (ethno)musicology (especially those concerning Library & Information Sciences) are presented in the author's personal website.
The site hosts a blog, A Musician's Log, on music and musical instruments.
I am a multifaceted professional with 25 years of experience, born in the Puerto de Santa María of Buenos Aires (1973). I became a librarian in 1999 and, in 2004, graduated in Library Science and Documentation from the National University of Córdoba (Argentina). There, I also studied Biology and History (Anthropology and Archaeology branch), although much earlier I had studied Marine Sciences at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). After a long and varied professional career (including a specialization in Epistemologies of the South and a master's degree in Historical Archiving and Memory), since 2024 I have been living between Panama (where I direct the library of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute) and Bogotá (Colombia), from where I work as a consultant on a wide variety of knowledge and memory management projects and content production.
I consider myself a weaver of memories. I use my rich experience in all traditional roles in information sciences and knowledge management, along with my research skills, to identify the threads with which human knowledge and memories are built. To this, I add specific approaches, such as critical and social library science positions and "rogue" archival science, decolonizing perspectives, views from the margins, activism, resistance, and dialogues between libraries, archives, and museums to build new knowledge and recover old stories, as well as my own findings on natural sciences, traditional knowledge, cultural heritage, memory, identity, and sounds and silences, which I develop as a teacher, researcher, and writer.
From this plural and interdisciplinary perspective, I use content production, translation, graphic design, and editorial correction to build narratives that give meaning to my work. And I add all the technologies at my disposal: from metadata, linked data, ontologies, semantic web, and knowledge classification to Digital Asset Management, digital preservation, data management and curation, programming, artificial intelligence, and IT solutions. Everything is useful for weaving memories. And in doing so, I place special emphasis on the intersection of libraries, archives, and museums as spaces for knowledge and memory management that should be one. Just as human cultural heritage is.
I understand and defend the library as a committed space, of socio-political activism and militancy, and of cultural, identity, and collective resistance.
My work in the Galápagos Islands (2018-2023) linked me to fields such as the history and memory of science, open science, e-research, biodiversity and environmental conservation, citizen science, biomimicry, sustainability and degrowth, as well as knowledge mobilization, communication, dissemination, and environmental education, and preservation, conservation, and digitization of heritage collections.
Since 2004, I have been part of several sections and groups of the IFLA, worked with the UDC Consortium (Universal Decimal Classification), participated in various editorial committees and digital research and debate spaces, taught classes and lectures, and wrote dissemination texts on topics of interest, which I publish through my independent proposals Wayrachaki Editora and El Zorro de Abajo Editora.
In addition to being a librarian, I am a musician: a multi-instrumentalist acceptable in everything and virtuous in nothing, interpreter of traditional Latin American and European music. The sounds and silences of the world interest me, as well as the many stories they tell, and I feel a special inclination towards the relationship of this sound heritage with memory and identity. I investigate and share the results through a wide range of digital dissemination publications, compose and interpret music, build instruments, explore other sound horizons, and create new personal research projects online.
Beyond libraries and music, I am a reviewer, translator, and editorial designer, as well as a former printing worker, an avid language learner, a frustrated fiction writer, a blogger with 20 years of experience behind me, a Wikipedian and Esperantist, a citizen scientist apprentice, a draftsman and photographer, and a puppet builder.
My contact email address is edgardocivallero (@) gmail (.) com.
I am present on several social networks, the shortcuts to which are displayed in the bar at the bottom of this page.
I also belong to a number of academic networks. In three of them I present and share most of my publications: Google Scholar, Research Gate and Academia.edu. All have been strongly debated for their ethical principles and action models; however, they present a number of useful utilities.
Finally, I participate in other academic-professional structures, such as Web of Science, Scopus, Mendeley and Zotero.