For something like this, which falls at the intersection of multiple disciplines, what techniques are you - and anyone else on here - using to find relevant work?
I find spelunking Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) a great way to trawl up work from disciplines I hadn’t considered (or in some cases even heard of). Key things I like about Google Scholar:
- Seems to index very broadly across disciplines.
- Includes non-academic books and articles that have been cited by academic ones.
- Cited By link for each article. Sometimes this takes you from a good find to a great one.
- “Search within citing articles” on the Cited By page. Enable this to zero in on stuff that both cites that highly relevant work and contains some of your key search terms.
- Related Articles and “All n Versions” link for each article. Best to look at both of these too on any really promising results, since they can reveal additional things to Cited By.
- Sort by Relevance or Date published. Both can be good if there are a lot of results.
- If you star results you find relevant and return to the homepage or My Library “the algorithm” will often make high quality recommendations.
Sorry if all this is old hat, but I often meet researchers who overlook some of these features of Scholar. I’ve tried Papers, Zotero, EndNote, Mendeley etc because it would be great to have the machine do some of the work for me - filtering out duplicates etc. But so far I’ve not found the lock-in on any of them worth it. No one seems to match Google for breadth of material or quality of recommendations.
For the problem at hand, searching on “tape loop” performance color brings up over 1000 results (gulp). But just on the first page there’s a paper on auditory-visual interference induced by tape loops, two accounts of performances involving tape loops, a link to the full text of a book about Brian Eno and “the vertical color of sound” (that must have the term “tape loop” in it at least once) and a link to a paper in a journal called The Drama Review titled “The Art of the Loop: Analogy, Aurality, History, Performance”.
Cited By on “The Art of the Loop” seems to head a bit too far out to sea (although “the cyber-guitar system” does sound intriguing). But Related Articles has some interesting stuff - there was a feature about this on BBC Radio 4 in 2014. And it has a link to the full text of “The Art of the Loop”… which opens with Basinski’s account of the incident that led him to create The Disintegration Loops. The paper is 23 pages long and Basinski is mentioned thoughout, but mostly at the beginning. Other artists and a lot of theories are mentioned and there are 2 pages of references.
Happy spelunking and as everyone else has asked, please do circle back to tell us what you find. Or even better, post a bibliography or survey and/or your finished dissertation online so that it can show up in and influence future scholarly search results.
