CLASSIFICATION
Swallow ID:
10042
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 3 Digital Audio Tools: Sound Searching and Visualization Panel I, The Literary Audio Symposium, 4 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:
Patrick Feaster
Dates:
1971-
Name:
Steven High
Dates:
1968-
CONTRIBUTORS
MATERIAL DESCRIPTION
DIGITAL FILE DESCRIPTION
Sample Rate:
44.1 kHz
Duration:
01:50:34
Size:
265,375,868 bytes
Notes:
MP3 audio
Title:
LS102520
Content Type:
Sound Recording
Dates
Date:
2016-12-04
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:
PATRICK FEASTER (University of Indiana, Bloomington)
“Putting Existing Tools to Unanticipated Purposes in Audio Digitization”
As we go about surveying software applications that are available to us for cultivating our heritage of literary audio in various ways, it’s worth bearing in mind that—with a little creative thinking—we can sometimes put existing tools to uses that differ significantly from their intended ones.
I’ll first illustrate this point in connection with a couple pieces of software recently developed for Indiana University: MediaRIVERS /MediaSCORE, designed to quantify the value and “degralescence” risk of audiovisual collections, and a Physical Object Database designed to track media objects passing through our digital preservation workflow. We created these tools to answer some specific needs which existing software didn’t seem capable of satisfying, but in both cases we’ve ended up putting them to unanticipated uses as our circumstances have evolved—often successfully, but with limitations, as I’ll explain through a brief case study of Orson Welles broadcast recordings held by our Lilly Library.
I’ll then delve into some even more radical cases of repurposing. For the past nine years, I’ve participated in efforts to educe (i.e., “play” or “play back”) older representations of sound on paper, including phonautograms of dramatic oratory recorded by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in the 1850s and 1860s and paper prints made from gramophone discs of poetry recited by inventor Emile Berliner in the 1880s. This work has been carried out primarily with software designed for other spheres of application, such as ImageToSound and AudioPaint, both intended to support experimental sound art. I’ll describe the strategies and challenges involved in applying these programs meaningfully to historical inscriptions, as well as some striking results achieved to date by doing so. However, our need to rely on “repurposed” software in this work is now receding. By way of conclusion, I’ll introduce Picture Kymophone, a new program I’ve written specifically for playing phonautograms and other similar sources, and outline some remaining desiderata for the future.
Patrick Feaster received his doctorate in folklore and ethnomusicology in 2007 from Indiana University Bloomington, where he is now Media Preservation Specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative. A three-time Grammy nominee, co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative, and immediate past president of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, he has been actively involved in locating, making audible, and contextualizing many of the world’s oldest sound recordings.
STEVEN HIGH (Concordia U)
“Beyond the Juicy Quotes Syndrome: Building Digital Tools and Platforms in Partnership with Source Communities”
If the “archival turn” has taught us anything, it is that archives are not neutral sites of storage and preservation. Extractive approaches to data-collection and analysis risk ignoring the ways in which “the archive itself orders the material within its realm, and the possibilities of knowledge production” (Geiger et al, 2010). We must therefore go beyond what Mike Savage calls the “juicy quotes syndrome,” to engage with the project archive as an object of study and to re-imagine how we design and build them. Building on past work as part of Montreal Life Stories, which recorded the life stories of 500 Montrealers displaced by mass violence, we recently embarked on a new project that will result in the Living Archive of Rwandan Exiles and Genocide Survivors. This online archive will enable researchers and community members to follow threads, identify patterns, track changes, map, and listen in new ways to more than 90 hours of video recorded interviews. We intend to do this in partnership with survivors, forging a methodology around participatory database-building where the coding, access conditions and research infrastructure itself serve both university-based researchers and community needs. A toolkit of inter-operable and freely available open source tools is also being developed, and will likewise be developed in collaboration with the source community.
Steven High is the co-founder of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and has spent a number of years on the development of digital tools that will facilitate the analysis of recorded oral history interviews at varying scales. He is also examining the potential of collaboratively produced “living archives” where researchers work closely with ‘source communities.’ He was a member of the Spokenweb research team and contributed to the special issue of Amodern on oral literature.
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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