How Bob Dylan’s Analog Artifacts Have Powered the Digital Frontier

When a very young Bob Dylan laid down some of his earliest tracks at the Gaslight Cafe in 1962, a sound engineer named Richard Alderson made the historic recordings. Alderson would go on to record all kinds of music, including capturing traditional folk throughout Mexico. Before that, though, Alderson would tape Dylan again, in 1966, this time as he went from NYC scenester to global star on a world tour.

The rediscovery of of Alderson’s recurring involvement during Dylan’s ascent was made courtesy of a tool from Digital ReLab, called Starchive, which connects digital media using advanced metadata, the extra tags and notes computers make about every file (from the date produced to subject matter).

The interest in Dylan’s archive of creative output will only increase now that the legendary songwriter has joined the Nobel laureates. A big chunk of that archive has moved into an academic collection in Tulsa. In March, the George Kaiser Family Foundation announced the acquisition of some 6,000 items spanning decades of the artist’s career, in care of the University of Tulsa’s Helmerich Center for American Research.

“The notebooks,” Richard Averitt, CEO of Digital ReLab, told the Observer in a phone call, “are a big part of the stuff that the foundation acquired.” Averitt has had access to digitized versions of these notebooks, which have song drafts, sketches and notes.

“It’s just remarkable content,” he said.

Based in Charlottesville, Virginia, Digital ReLab specializes in ingesting digital and digitized media and helping to create new connections across archives.

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