CLASSIFICATION
Swallow ID:
10036
Partner Institution:
Concordia University
Source Collection Title:
SpokenWeb AV
Source Collection ID:
ArchiveOfThePresent
Source Collection Description:
SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection
Source Collection Contributing Unit:
SpokenWeb
Source Collection URI:
Source Collection Image URL:
https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png
Series Title:
SpokenWeb Events
Sub Series Title:
SpokenWeb AV
ITEM DESCRIPTION
Title:
SpokenWeb Events AV, Day 1 The Uses of Spoken Audio Collections in Research and Creation: New Literary Methods Keynotes, The Literary Audio Symposium, 2 December 2016
Title Source:
https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium
Language:
English
Production Context:
Classroom recording
Identifiers:
[]
Rights
CREATORS
Name:
Jason Camlot
Dates:
1967-
Name:
Al Filreis
Dates:
1956-
Name:
Darren Wershler
Dates:
1966-
Name:
Bill Kennedy
CONTRIBUTORS
MATERIAL DESCRIPTION
DIGITAL FILE DESCRIPTION
Sample Rate:
48 kHz
Duration:
01:53:29
Size:
1,961,128,960 bytes
Notes:
MP3 audio
Title:
day1_session1
Content Type:
Sound Recording
Dates
Date:
2016-12-02
Type:
Production Date
LOCATION
Address:
1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8
Venue:
Concordia University McConnell Building
Latitude:
45.4968036
Longitude:
-73.57792785757887
CONTENT
Contents:
AL FILREIS (U Pennsylvania)
“The Digital Curation of Audiotexts for Literary Research”
This talk will draw upon the case of PennSound and its approach to collecting, curating and augmenting content in order to establish a compelling digital environment for the study and appreciation of literary audiotexts. Using PennSound as a starting point, the main aim of this talk will be to frame fundamental questions about methodological approaches to the critical study of literary sound recordings, and will outline some strategies that digital spoken word archives may take to enhance research with these audible materials.
Al Filreis is Kelly Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Publisher of Jacket2, and most importantly for the purposes of The Literary Audio Symposium, he is Co-Director of PennSound—all at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Secretaries of the Moon, Wallace Stevens & the Actual World, Modernism from Left to Right, and Counter-Revolution of the Word.
DARREN WERSHLER (Concordia U)
“A Political Economy of Audio Collections, or, The Politics of Audiotextual Inheritance”
This talk will both explore the kinds of questions scholars and students might ask of literary audio collections, and work towards theorizing the ideological contexts that inform the formulation of such questions in the first place. Why have literary audio collections emerged as important materials for research and study? How are decisions about which collections will be digitized and preserved made? What are the generational politics that have arisen as a result of the ubiquity of poet’s archives? How do questions about humanities audio collections challenge some of the most basic methodologies that have informed literary studies for over a century? These are some of the questions that will be considered in this presentation with the aim of helping to frame discussion for the day’s work on spoken word collections and methodological approaches.
Darren Wershler is the Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature (Tier 2) and a co-editor of Amodern. He conducts most of his research through AMPLab: between media & literature, and with the Technoculture, Art and Games group (TAG), an interdisciplinary centre that focuses on game studies, design, digital culture and interactive art. Darren is the author or co-author of 12 books, most recently, Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (U of Toronto Press), and Update (Snare), with Bill Kennedy. With Jason Camlot he co-organized the “Approaching the Poetry Series” conference in 2013 and co-authored “Theses on Discerning The Reading Series”, published in Amodern 4 (2015) and has been a Co-Applicant through Camlot’s development of the spokenweb project. His expertise in Contemporary Poetics, Media history and Theory, Digital Humanities, and in questions of digital economy, positions him as an ideal interlocutor with Al Filreis on core questions surrounding the use of humanities audio collections for research.
BILL KENNEDY (Intelligent Machines)
“New Contexts for Old Voices: Rethinking the Literary Archive”
Bill Kennedy is the author of two books of poetry (with Darren Wershler and a team of trusty web robots), Apostrophe (ECW, 2006) and Update (Snare, 2010). A longtime literary organizer, Bill ran the Café May Reading Series in Toronto (with Michael Holmes) in the early 90s, and the Lexiconjury Reading Series (with Angela Rawlings) a decade later. He was also a ten-year Artistic Director of The Scream, an alternative literary festival in Toronto that ended its run in 2011. He has edited and designed several award-winning books poetry through Coach House Books. He currently curates the official bpNichol archive (bpnichol.ca, with Gregory Betts).
In real life, he is the Development Director of Intelligent Machines, a digital consultancy and development agency that works mainly in the arts, education and publishing sectors. He specializes in the theoretical, bureaucratic, technical and design issues that come with building online arts archives. He was the director of the first Artmob team, a York University research project focusing on intellectual property issues in arts archivism. He is currently working on several projects with the University of Berkeley in partnership with the Agile Humanities Agency. He is unreasonably giddy at the possibility of working on an archive of twenty years of Gilles Deleuze’s lectures, newly transcribed from extant audio tapes and translated into English, pending the vicissitudes of funding and the caprice of an uncaring universe.
The Literary Audio Symposium
Digitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.
The Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings. Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.
This symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners. The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about
1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;
2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;
3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and
4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.
These objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History. Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.
From a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general. Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways.
NOTES
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