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Since January 2009, MediaNOLA has been a collaboration of Tulane students, programmers, archivists, and staff working with archivists and nonprofit organizations around the city to tell the history of important sites of New Orleans cultural and mediated production from 1880 to present. It is an ongoing and collaborative project.

Used in conjunction with the Media Nola map [1], these pages offer a way of comparing cultural and mediated production sites, people, and objects through time and space and according to categories of production that frequently are separated in cultural histories.

Possible uses of MediaNOLA include the examination of:

• cultural production more holistically in specific neighborhoods through different historical eras;
• similarities between producers in different crafts and industries that frequently shared what Pierre Bourdieu called a “habitus,” or the dispositions that rise from shared social, political, and economic conditions;
• the geographic mobility of cultural objects and performances across the city;
• the impact of everyday people on cultural production;
• the multiple representations of the popular;
• how production in the city has cut across racial, gender, or class lines.

I hope that people using this site will use it as both a reference and a research tool for understanding some of the dynamics of production in relation to a culture that producers actively contribute to representing.

Your feedback is appreciated in helping us achieve these goals.

If you would like to submit a entry or suggest updated information click here.

If you are an educator or community organizer who would like to partner with MediaNOLA in order to create, preserve or distribute cultural histories, please email Vicki Mayer (vmayer(at)tulane.edu).

-- Dr. Vicki Mayer, Tulane Department of Communication