About this Project

Bio, Process, and Citations

PROCESS

Selection

To create the graphic above, I used a systematic process where I looked at transcripts from Congressional hearings and converted the transcript into numerical data. I started by narrowing down the massive amount of public records from these hearings. First, for each hearing I looked only at the testiony from the three most important witnesses according to Szatmary's book Rockin' in Time. Then, I selected the two Republicans and two Democrats in each hearing that made the most statements across all three testimonies. I repeated this process for the PMRC and Payola Hearings, but the HUAC hearing only had one witness and two representatives.

Coding

Then, I tagged every statement from each politician as either positive, flattering, neutral, negative, or antagonistic, excluding repetitions or purely administrative statements. Then, I calculated what percentage of total statements were either negative or antagonistic, which is the figure appearing on the graph's y-axis. This number was compared with each senator's ideological score from UCLA's Voteview.com. For more information about Vote View, click here. Finally, all this data was added into the interactive image software Genially.com, which produced the final display.

BIO

My name is Cam Mallett and I am a History Major at Berry College in Rome, Georgia. This website is my final project for HIS 460 - History of Rock and Roll.

WORKS CITED

For Historical Background:

Szatmary, David P. Rockin’ in Time. Boston: Pearson, 2014.

For Transcripts of Senate Hearings. Accessed through Proquest Congressional:

U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. Payola and Other Deceptive Practices in the Broadcasting Field. 1st sess., February 8, 1960.

U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Committee on Un-American Activities. Proceedings Against Peter Seeger. 84th Cong., 1st sess., July 25, 1956.

U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Contents of Music and the Lyrics of Records. 99th Cong., 1st sess., September 19, 1985.

For Politicians' Ideological Score:

Voteview. Accessed December 1, 2018. https://voteview.com/

For Politician's Headshots

All official portraits of U.S. Politician's fall under Public Domain. I accessed the pictures from Wikimedia Commons.

For Title Photo:

Capitol Rotunda. Architect of the Capitol. Public Domain, accessed through Wikimedia Commons.