[{"id":"9267","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S1E1, Stories of SpokenWeb, 7 October 2019, McLeod and Gladu"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod","Cheryl Gladu"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod","Cheryl Gladu"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Cheryl Gladu\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/dafaa46d-8602-4296-8aa7-0a66ba8253f2/ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:46:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"44,524,400 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-10-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed. Charles Bernstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.\\n\\nCamlot, J., Swift, T. (eds) (2007) Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (Véhicule, 2007).\\n\\nFong, Deanna and Karis Shearer. Gender, “Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts,” No More Potlucks, online http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/gender-affective-labour-and-community-building-through-literary-audio-artifacts-deanna-fong-and-karis-shearer/\\n\\nMcKinnon, Donna. “A New Frontier of Literary Engagement: SpokenWeb’s network of digitized audio recordings brings new life to Canada’s literary heritage.” https://www.ualberta.ca/arts/faculty-news/2018/august/a-new-frontier-of-literary-engagement\\n\\nMorris, Adalaide, ed. Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.\\n\\nMurray, Annie and Jared Wiercinski. “Looking at Archival Sound: Enhancing the Listening Experience in a Spoken Word Archive.” First Monday 17 (2012). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3808/3197\\n\\nShearer, Karis. “Networks, Communities, Mentorships, Friendships: An SSI Reflection” http://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/07/09/networks-and-communities-an-ssi-reflection/\\n\\nToppings, Earle. “Gwendolyn MacEwen.” Accompanying Material by Earle Topping about Gwendolyn MacEwen. Earle Toppings Fonds. Victoria University Library (Toronto).\\n\\nUrbancic, Ann, editor. Literary Titans Revisited: Earle Toppings Interviews with CanLit Poets and Writers of the Sixties. Ed. Ann Urbancic. Toronto: Dundurn P, 2017.\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549348155393,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["SpokenWeb is a literary research network, dedicated to studying literature through sound. But how did this project begin? What kinds of literary recordings inspired it and where were they found? And what happened next in order for these recordings to be heard?\n\nFor this inaugural episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Katherine McLeod seeks to answer these questions by speaking with SpokenWeb researchers Jason Camlot, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, Roma Kail, Karis Shearer, and Deanna Fong. All of their stories involve a deep interest in literary audio recordings and all of their stories, or nearly all, start with a box of tapes…\n\n00:07\tTheme Music:\tCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to The SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada. I’m so excited to introduce our inaugural episode Stories of SpokenWeb, an introduction to this very podcast and the project it stems from. SpokenWeb is first and foremost a literary research network dedicated to studying literature through sound, but how did it all begin and how did these audio archives make their way from basements and car trunks to university libraries? In this episode SpokenWeb contributor Katherine McLeod takes us into the lives and archives of some of the founding spoken web members to uncover the origins and future of the project.\n01:30\tHannah McGregor:\tHere is “Stories of SpokenWeb”\n01:39\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n01:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat is SpokenWeb? SpokenWeb is a research program, a network of scholars, students and artists all studying literature through sound. But how did it all begin? What does the story of SpokenWeb sound like? My name is Katherine McLeod and I asked SpokenWeb collaborators at universities across Canada how they got involved in the project. Needless to say, each story is different and there are many more than are told here, but their stories do have a few things in common that tell us something about the project. All of their stories begin with an interest in audio well before SpokenWeb assumed its current form, and all of their stories, or nearly all, involve a box of tapes. In 2014 I joined SpokenWeb as a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in Montreal. I met Jason Camlot, the principal investigator or project lead of SpokenWeb. At that point SpokenWeb was based out of one university, but I remember him saying that there was an interest in widening the network. So how did SpokenWeb become what it is today? To answer this question, I spoke with a number of SpokenWeb scholars from across Canada. We’ll start the conversation with one story of how it all began.\n03:22\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot. I’m a professor in the Department of English at Concordia University. I am the author of several books about literature and sound recording and I’m the director of the partnership grant of SSHRC Social Science, Humanities Research Council of Canada, called SpokenWeb. I was going to say it began when I was a graduate student and became, in earnest, interested in the history of early sound recordings of literary performance. But I was an undergraduate at this institution at which I now teach, and the first time that I heard an early sound recording was in my Victorian literature class played to me by my professor, John Miller, who later became a colleague of mine for a spell. And he played to this class a barely audible recording of Tennyson reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” And that really piqued my interest and, well, really just what it was that we were listening to and what it meant and what its significance was. So I think the interest in sound recordings of literary works or of something that identified with literature really began when I was an undergraduate. When I went to grad school, I became interested in really thinking about this as a research project. It wasn’t my dissertation project, but it became my second project that you always have to be able to talk about when you go to job interviews and things like that. And at Stanford University they had a pretty good sound archive with a lot of historical recordings. So I was able to look into the longer history of spoken recordings and began to research that topic. I’ve always been interested in sound recording because I play music, and I’ve recorded myself writing songs and playing my own songs or playing in bands with friends since I was a teenager, and I’ve always been saving up for the latest recording device.\n05:41\tJason Camlot:\tWhen I came to Concordia – it’s almost like in this sort of fortuitous moment – I was asked to have a meeting with the department chair in the first week that I was installed in the department, just to go over very practical things. And sitting in his office I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a bunch of tape boxes – boxes that held reel to reel tapes. And I remember asking him what those boxes contained. And he said to me, “Oh, that’s just some poetry reading series that took place here in the 60s.” And I remembered that, although I didn’t do anything about it at the time. I went about my business of teaching and publishing and getting tenure here at Concordia. And then maybe a decade later I thought about those recordings again and I went back to him and asked, “Do you still have those recordings?”\n06:47\tJason Camlot:\tThe department had moved floors and I remember we threw out a lot of stuff during the move. So I kind of feared that maybe those reel to reel tapes didn’t make it during the move, but he told me that he had deposited them in the university archives that held the English department fonds, the records of the English department. So knowing that the tapes were still accessible, I started looking into them and found a bunch of boxes again that I couldn’t listen to. So it was a bit of a stumbling block, not being able to actually hear what was on them and I set about trying to rectify that problem, and to figure out whether this collection of tapes might be of interest from a literary point of view.\n07:38\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Jason Camlot, the principal investigator or project lead of SpokenWeb. As SpokenWeb grew, researchers began working across disciplines. In addition to working across disciplines in one university SpokenWeb has built collaborative connections across different universities. We’ll hear from researchers at a few of those universities in a moment, but we’ll start first with someone who has been part of the project since the beginning.\n08:07\tAnnie Murray:\tMy name is Annie Murray. I’m Associate University Librarian for archives and special collections. At the University of Calgary. What we were really interested in was how a lot of these poets, were going on reading tours. And so the Sir George Williams section was just one slice of literary life in a given year.\n08:32\tAudio Recording:\tWelcome to the fourth, third, week of the fourth series of our readings here at Sir George. And this one is a special one partly in that it was, it is being presented… [Overlapping audio recordings, exact words not audible]\n08:57\tAnnie Murray:\tAnd we were imagining these sort of traveling poets leaving behind a trail of recordings or not leaving behind. And wouldn’t it be great to understand where did all these readings end up and could we ever access them in all the places poets would have read to kind of sonically recreate those years of very active poetry reading performances?\n09:24\tAudio Recording:\tGets hard to read your own stuff after a while, you forget what it sounded like the last time.\n09:29\tAnnie Murray:\tCause we knew different archives across the country would have some audio record of these events. And we thought: this should all be brought together. This should be a massive aggregation of recordings so that you could listen to a poet across the country and kind of, just as bands tour, see how a poet toured and how they intersected with other poets. So I think we saw the meaning in the individual readings for sure for literary history and analysis. But that the sort of possibilities opened up by knowing what all readings were preserved and bringing those archives together. And I will say in most cases, these are hidden collections that hadn’t been digitized before. So with a partnership grant, it allows us to bring all of these collections out, focus on them in a different and concerted way and try to create that sort of national recording of all of these performances that had taken place.\n10:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe project continued to grow. Now it is in over 13 universities right across the country.\n10:44\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI think I’d be remiss if I didn’t say how incredibly grateful I am to be able to work with these materials and with the multidisciplinary scholars that are a part of this project. This is honestly, as I came to recognize during our days together in Vancouver this past summer, this is one of the great research and intellectual opportunities of my career and I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of this.\n11:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Michael O’Driscoll, professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.\n11:18\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI’ve been here for the last 22 years and my work ranges across into the areas of critical and cultural theory. Various kinds of media studies. I’m interested in American literature, poetry and poetics. And I spend a lot of my time thinking a lot about archives and thinking about digital media as well too. You know, the lessons of the world’s great archives theorists – I’m thinking about Arjun Appadurai, I’m thinking about Jacques Derrida – is that archives are oriented not towards the past, but towards the future. Archives are how we build community, archives are aspirational. We only put things in boxes and save them because we imagine a future for them. And the true focus of an archive is its own futurity, not the history that it records.\n12:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tMichael shared with us some background as to how the recordings were made.\n12:13\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tWhen personal recording became available, when somebody could pick up a portable or reasonably portable reel to reel recorder and show up at a reading with it, folks just simply started recording everything that moved. There was so much enthusiasm about the new technology. Many, many of the readings that happened in the late sixties and through the 70s and the eighties, eighties, were recorded on reel-to-reel and then subsequently on cassette tape. But one of the realities of that enthusiasm as well as while there’s lots of enthusiasm for the recording, more often than not, those recordings were put in boxes, stored away and never listened to again. And they have as a result, sat inert for the last 50 years or so at this incredible cultural and scholarly resource, untapped.\n13:03\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn fact, many of the people we spoke with for today’s episode shared with us a story that, at some point mentioned a box of tapes. Just like that story that Jason described earlier of finding a box of tapes and eventually listening to them.\n13:21\tAnnie Murray:\tI think that’s an origin story in a lot of people’s involvement with SpokenWeb; “Hey! What are those tapes?”\n13:28\tDeanna Fong:\tGoing to SFU, Simon Fraser University, and just by happenstance came across this box of tapes as we all do.\n13:35\tRoma Kail:\tOur research assistant was so excited about the project that she went to our chief librarian with the archivist and they found us unprocessed box.\n13:45\tKaris Shearer:\tHe went to get a cardboard box at one point and brought it back to her and said, “You know, I want to give this to you and someday you’re going to know what to do with it.” And she said to me, “I think, I think this is it. I think this is what I’m supposed to do with this box.”\n14:04\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’ll introduce you to each of those voices in a moment. But for now, let’s go back to Michael who shared with us the process of working with this kind of material.\n14:14\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tSo the process that we are working by is, first of all, the materials are digitized and we create the digital records of them. Then we produce the metadata that will be associated with those records. At the same time, once those materials have been digitized, they will be made available to the library for formal accession\n14:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhile that seems easy enough, there are in fact many challenges in working with these found recordings, which are often made with older technology such as reel to reel or cassette tapes. The challenges aren’t just technical, they are also legal. Let’s go back to our conversation with Annie Murray.\n14:56\tAnnie Murray:\tIt can be expensive to do digitization. It’s very time consuming. If you don’t have ready equipment or infrastructure in your organization, you need to contract out an expert to make the recordings. With archival audio recordings, you don’t always know what’s on tapes that an author gives you with their archive. So you could be investing resources in something that might not even be a performance. It could be somebody’s voice answering machine tape, which is also interesting. But, if a collection is kind of under-processed, because it’s an audio item it does take resources to get the content out and usable. The other thing is that copyright can be a barrier. So if people don’t know who made the recording or what the status is of the audio work, it can be an impediment to digitizing it because the library or archive might not know how widely it can be shared. So those are some of the things that libraries and archives grapple with. But I also think we’ve just got to work through those problems to make sure that this content gets preserved.\n16:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tPart of the reason it can be challenging to sort out the rights around these recordings is that they were not always straight-forward recitations or performances. Sometimes recordings include informal conversations, off the record interviews and discussions around a presentation of a work.\n16:29\tRoma Kail:\tSo my name is Roma Kail. I’m a librarian at Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto. I have done some work with the Earle Toppings fonds here at our special collections at Vic Library.\n16:45\tKatherine McLeod:\tEarle Toppings was an editor at Ryerson Press and worked for CBC Radio. He interviewed many Canadian writers such as poets, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Dorothy Livesay, Earle Birney, and Al Purdy. The archival collection for Toppings includes correspondence with writers along with audio recordings of readings and interviews and background notes compiled by Toppings himself.\n17:10\tRoma Kail:\tSo here he is talking about – he wrote this in his notes, he wrote about his recording of Gwendolyn MacEwen – he writes that a standard microphone was used. It was a standard RCA Victor 44 – he called it the radio workhorse – and it recorded her voice softly and beautifully. Gwen was a gentle caressing reader, a sort of Billie Holiday reciting poems as she did at creative hangouts of the 1960s, such as, the creative hangouts of the 1960s, such as the Bohemian Embassy. There was a musical feeling in all her work and she almost, saying her poems, which had their own melodies. So it’s just an extra, as my research assistant pointed out, all of that accompanying material brings in an extra bit of narrative, or a different narrative to the actual sound recordings. And it was the sound recordings which really correlate with the initial goal of SpokenWeb as it was presented to us.\n18:20\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s Karis Shearer, the director of the UBC Okanagan AMP Lab and Associate Professor of English in the faculty of Creative and Critical Studies who has been working with the SoundBox collection, sharing another example of the rich but curious sounds found in these archives.\n18:39\tKaris Shearer:\tSo we recently acquired a new set of tapes, a gift from George Bowering and Jean Baird, which include 19 tapes that George Bowering made, going back to the 1960s. One of them that I particularly like is a tape that was made in July of 1969 and it’s labeled ‘Warren, Roy, Moon, etcetera.’ And so I was just too curious not to give this a listen before we started digitizing it, and it is on the occasion of the moon landing…\n19:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Beep] Now selection [Beep]\n19:18\tKaris Shearer:\t…in 1969, and what you hear on this tape is George Bowering, Angela Bowering, Roy Kiyooka and Warren Tallman. All of whom were in Montreal at the time, Warren was passing through, Roy Kiyooka was teaching at Sir George Williams, now Concordia, and George Bowering was teaching there as well. And they’re all just hanging out in their living room, at George and Angela’s living room on Grosvenor Avenue in Montreal, and they’re listening to the broadcast of the moon landing.\n19:50\tAudio Recording:\tWell, we had a picture with the earth right in the centre of the screen, over.\n19:53\tKaris Shearer:\tSo again, it’s a very messy, interesting tape because there’s lots of, people talking over each other. There’s a broadcast going on in the background. But what’s interesting to me is they’re not recording just the broadcast. Right? It’s not like, “Shh, everybody, we’re gonna record the broadcast of this historical moment.” What the recording is, this kind of very social dynamic moment of them talking about poetics, talking about poetry. Fred was on his way back from Albuquerque to Canada. Did you know, they’re talking about writing, they’re also at various moments, you know, looking at the astronauts on TV and in some cases, you know, making some great jokes. And so it’s a moment of recording their interaction with this historical moment, their interaction with each. So it’s a wonderful tape and I’m excited for people to be able to listen to it.\n20:52\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s one of Karis’ collaborators across the SpokenWeb network explaining why this sort of recording can be so interesting to study.\n21:00\tDeanna Fong:\tSo my name is Deanna Fong. I’m a postdoctoral fellow working with SpokenWeb. My work with Karis has been so indispensable for my thinking. We’ve worked together on numerous occasions, but thinking about that question of what it is we’re listening to when we listen to this certain kind of artifact, or I suppose what, what are we listening for? And I think one of the things that we’ve found ourselves listening for is that, in any sort of informal or speech-y accounts that we have, we get a sense of the labour that goes on behind the scenes in the production of literature. And a lot of that labour is unevenly divided along gendered lines. So, you know, thinking about women’s contributions to building communities and to maintaining community spaces, acting as public historians, maintaining community archives, taking care of community members when they’re ill or when they need help, providing feedback, being auditors for work in progress, all these sorts of things that you hear, that don’t necessarily make it to the page. So I think that’s been a really crucial concept for the work that she and I have been doing. I don’t know if this is some continuation of my past or something, but I remember when I was a kid and going to hall shows and stuff like that, oftentimes I was way more interested in just sitting outside and talking to people about the bands, like, just as interested in that as I was in actually listening to the bands. So I think there’s a great interest, for me, in listening around rather than listening to, and I find conversations about literature vastly more interesting than a lot of literature itself.\n22:55\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI’ve learned along the way to appreciate the virtues of close listening in the sense that one can learn a lot about the cultural moment of the reading by paying close attention, not just to the words that come from the speaker, but to everything else that is happening in the room. So I think, for example, about Margaret Atwood reading in 1970 and a now defunct gallery of a hub mall on the University of Alberta campus. [Audio, from the 1970 recording: Please come in and sit down, there’s lots of room at the front.] And you can hear during the recording, [Audio: He will be very unhappy if you stand up during all this. So please sit down.] Her coming in and trying to wend her way through the audience and get herself settled down in a hubbub of things, and an introduction starts, and then stops, and then there’s a moment where people have to direct people into the room to find space ’cause it’s so crowed. [Audio: The people standing up at the back can, you not sit down?] And you just get this incredible sense of the energy of that moment and what it meant to have this really fantastic young emerging writer [Audio: There’s lots of room, does everybody, everybody just shuffle forward] show up to do her thing. And the kind of excitement that that could generate along the way [Audio: That’s more like it.]\n24:15\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tLet me give you one other one, and that has to do with when Phyllis Webb is performing at the student union building art gallery in 1972. It’s March 9th, 1972 and she comes into the room, the recording’s already going and she’s completely breathless. She’s breathing hard and she’s clearly rushed over to get to this moment and she’s there late and she says.[I have to catch my breath.] And you can hear her say that, and just that moment of that physical presence and embodiment of this poet, again, with all of that energy that gets pulled into that archival moment into that event of the archive, it’s a really exciting thing. These are real people doing real things and real situations and the audio is a rich medium for capturing that if you’ve only listened closely enough.\n25:24\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n25:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfter speaking with Deanna I thought about how important it was for her to be involved in the SpokenWeb project early on in her graduate education. After speaking with Roma and her work with student research assistant, Eva Lu, I thought even more about how student training through SpokenWeb is changing what it means to study literature. At UBC Okanagan [UBCO], Karis has taught and mentored many students who have gotten involved with the SpokenWeb project. I asked her more about student training and she had a terrific story.\n25:59\tKaris Shearer:\tFor me, pedagogy is central to what we do here at UBCO on the SpokenWeb team, and it always has been. So the example that you brought up of Lee Hannigan: first student to work on the project back when it was just in its very early stages. Lee came on as a work study student and we trained him in digitization, and so I reached out to a colleague, Stephen Foster, who very kindly invited us into the media centre that he was running at that time. Mike Berger, who’s a technician trained both me and Lee in the digitization process and gave us space in the lab to do that. So it’s always been a very collective process and SpokenWeb has always been such an interdisciplinary project that has required me to reach out to and do some of that community building with other experts in the area, in order to train students and bring them onto the project. That has stayed true all the way through to the current iteration of the team. We have students who are, again, central to the project and bringing their own expertise. And, at the same time, we are training them. We’re training them in the digitization process. We’re training them in design work. We’re training them in cataloguing and producing metadata. But their expertise as they’re learning that is, again, central, so in our team meetings we always come back to having the students talk about – do a bit of a round – and talk about what they’re learning and what they’re doing, and also what directions they see the project needing to go in or areas that need to be developed. And so the pedagogy is something that is student driven. It’s also, I guess for me, it’s also something that comes right out of our archive – it comes out of the cardboard box, which is at the pedagogy of the archive itself. The collection is very pedagogical. It records Warren Tallman in the classroom. It records Tallman inviting students to his living room to talk about poetry with his wife, Ellen Tallman; they bring up Robert Duncan and record Robert Duncan giving lectures and talking with students. So within the archive and the collection itself, students are central to that. And so, for me, the pedagogy we’re enacting now is very much in dialogue with, or taking a card from that, from the collection.\n28:47\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tFrom a cultural and scholarly point of view, well, audio is, almost and surprisingly so, a kind of unknown frontier. One of the ways I like to think about it is texts are never stable entities: they sit on the page surely, but as they go through various forms of socialization and cultural mediation, they change and shift over time. We deal with versions, we deal with variants, we deal with different contexts of reading and circulation and so forth – so they’re certainly not inert. But I would say if you take a poem by a particular mid century Canadian author that has sat on that same page for the last 50 years, and then you add to that archive, you add to that corpus 6 or 8 or 10 recordings of that author reading the poem, performing the poem, describing it to audiences, responding to audience questions, to hearing the audience itself respond to that poem.\n29:44\tAudio Recording:\tFairly recent poem, which isn’t a political poem. I told them, but a human poem and one that I wrote as a result of watching on television, the debates in the United Nations on the Middle East crisis. And one of the horrible things I felt as I watched it was how completely dehumanized it all was, that the real human issues had been lost sight of and sort of round in an ocean of resolutions and memos from embassies and all this sort of thing.\n30:33\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tWell then that thing suddenly leaps off to the page to an nth dimension of variability and versioning, And suddenly the scholarly opportunities to work with those poems as cultural objects, as objects subject to scholarly comparison and critical analysis becomes all the more richer, all the more lively, all the more vibrant. And that’s a really exciting thing from my perspective.\n30:59\tJason Camlot:\tThere’s still a lot of work to be done before the field recognizes archives of sound as really significant or relevant, even still to the study of literature. Part of the, I wouldn’t call it resistance, but just sort lack of a sense of how to go about engaging with these materials is a result of changes in the way literature had been taught over the course of the 20th century. I think that recitation or oral interpretation was a very important part of the way literature was taught. The way interpretation was understood so that, when we thought of interpretation, it wasn’t critical analysis done silently in an essay about a poem on the printed page, but it was actually an oral performance in which one’s understanding of the poem was communicated through the intonations and vocal actions that one took in order to literally interpret, you know, deliver in sound their version of the poem. Students would be, in a sense, graded on their oral interpretations that would be part of the exam. Exams in the 19th century were called recitations and a lot of the performance of knowledge in the 19th century – Catherine Robson has written about this – was delivered orally, right? But I think during the course of the 20th century, Especially from the 30s on when methods, identified with what was called the New Criticism came into being, certain ideas of oral performance dropped out of the critical analysis of literature. And it became in a sense, silenced or replaced by more abstract concepts of the voice of the poem or in the poem, but not one that one expects to actually hear. But one voice that one expects to find, to give a sense of unity to the poem, and to describe, but the noisy classroom filled with recitation sort of became silenced. And students were asked to scan poems on the page and the sounds of voices were replaced by the sounds of pencils, scribbling paper on the printed poem. So I think that long tradition in pedagogy related to the teaching of literature has created a kind of barrier to our sense of even how to begin engaging with this kind of archive in relation to the development of sort of literary history, the analysis of a different kind of prosody that one can hear in performance, et cetera. So things were already being done in the late nineties, or some initial thinking was being done around this, but I think the archives themselves weren’t prepared, and still to a large extent haven’t been yet prepared for us to engage with this material in the same way, with the same facility, or with a facility that’s even close to that of the printed archive.\n34:26\tDeanna Fong:\tI will say, I’ll begin by saying that I wasn’t that interested in audio at the time. So I remember feeling a great deal of apprehension when I started working on the project in that I had no idea what these artifacts were or why they were, why they would be of interest to anybody or, you know, who would possibly want to listen to them. But when I dove into them and listened to, I found myself particularly drawn to the kind of extra-poetic speech, which is something that I’ve become very interested in, in my own research. But I was really interested in the liveness of these events. And so I remembered one of my first tasks as an RA on that project was to develop just a sort of lit survey around the research that had been done around audio poetry, like audio recordings of poetry. So I dove into Charles Bernstein’s close listening, and had this major revelation where I was like, “Whoa, a live reading of a poem is totally different than the reading of a poem on a page,” which is something that had really never occurred to me before. Like, I just, that it was a simple recitation and I really got a sense of the difference between a performed poem versus a poem on the page. And that difference became immediately very interesting to me.\n35:49\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn many ways, Karis – and really everyone we’ve heard from today – are all asking us to consider: what can these archives teach us? And it seems that sometimes these lessons can come from unexpected places. For example, what can this cross-disciplinary and deeply collaborative project teach us about academic collaboration more generally?\n36:14\tJason Camlot:\tI’ve been very interested this past year, throughout the past year, in having intensive conversations with Yuliya Kondratenko, the Project Manager of SpokenWeb on project management methods. And which ones are best suited to a research program of this kind. And really to begin to map out what project management for humanities-based research might look like. So I think what we’ve been doing to a large extent has been listening and watching to see how activities have unfolded, what approaches have worked, which ones haven’t been picked up as successfully as a way to then reflect upon and describe, and then ultimately, I wouldn’t say codified, but, you know, abstract in a way so that we could perhaps learn from our methods that are initially just sort of iterative experiments. So that’s another thing that I’m really interested in from that sort of more distant perspective. And it’s been great having Yuliya as a kind of sounding board so that we can actually begin writing this up a little bit and sort of maybe map out a whole new project management approach based on the disciplinary messiness of our project.\n37:40\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Jason Camlot, who we met at the top of the show. So what pulls all of these stories together? Well, at the heart of this project is an ethos of sharing. And as we’ve heard, it often starts with a box of tapes that a community member shares with a member of the team. But that is not all.\n38:06\tKaris Shearer:\tOne of the things that we see in the archive, vis-à-vis copies, is the circulation and gifting of recordings and tapes within members of the poetry community. Our current SpokenWeb project at UBCO is very much founded on gifting and sharing. And so when I look around the AMP Lab, which is where our collection is housed, so much of what we do is made possible through gifts, and so I’m thinking particularly of Stephen Foster, who is my colleague in visual arts. Our hardware, and even the early, the very first time that we digitized the reels, again, made possible by Stephen’s inviting us into his own lab and sharing his resources with us. And that’s been true all the way through for us, that that idea of the work on the SoundBox project is made possible through the sharing of things, the donation of tapes, and the gifting of hardware. So we really appreciate that.\n39:16\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn many ways, the web of SpokenWeb is not only the collaborative network of researchers, but it is also this web of archival recordings held together by a desire to make these available to more listeners. And this plays into what we’re trying to do here with this podcast. Provide a platform not only for researchers to share with the wider public the outcomes of their work, but a place where people might access the recordings, reflections, and sounds that have inspired so many of us and that continue to inspire us as the SpokenWeb partnership moves into its next year.\n39:57\tJason Camlot:\tOne thing I’m looking forward to in the coming year is beginning to see our metadata ingest system, which we call SWALLOW, which is sort of swallowing up or capturing all of the metadata that’s being typed in to that system, to see it build up and then to see what kinds of questions we can start asking as a result of having all of this metadata built up about the collections.\n40:26\tRoma Kail:\tOnce we have our records in and other institutions have theirs in, it will be interesting to see how they overlap or how they compliment each other. So we certainly have material that would maybe fill gaps in other institutions collections or vice versa. So I’m very excited to see when we are able to search it, for example, who has what and how that how that represents sort of all the institutions across Canada in terms of a collection.\n41:04\tKaris Shearer:\tSo we are, at UBCO with our SpokenWeb team, we’re actively building a website, so there’ll be a landing page very soon, and there’ll be a selection of tapes from a much larger collection that will feature – once we’ve cleared permissions and created some contextualisation for them – a number of recordings that’ll be featured on that site for people to listen in while we’re actively processing the rest of the collection. And so we can stay tuned for that, in fall 2019.\n41:35\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tSo one of the things I’m also really excited about is having some conversations with some of the individuals who were involved with these moments of recording in their day. And learning a little bit more, not only about the events and the authors and the atmosphere of that moment, but also learning a little bit more about their motivations for recording; what they were doing and how they understood, they were producing an archive and for whom and for what kind of future. I’d like to learn a little bit more about the history of the collection that we have. But I’d also like to learn a little bit more about the heart of the collection that we have.\n42:14\tJason Camlot:\tPart of the reason that this past year has been so successful has been just because of the people who are involved. That they’re very open minded, courteous and interested, and also extremely hard working, and so we have a bunch of people who share the desire to make things happen, but also a shared desire to have a great time while doing it. You know, I think that’s been a winning combination for our project and has really allowed us to get a lot done, and has allowed for that kind of flexibility and reflectiveness without panicking about whether we’re getting to where we want to go even before we might know where we want to go. And the other thing has been that I didn’t mention yet but that I think is very important in the development of this project has been the role of graduate students and even undergraduates. I mentioned that they were at the beginning of the project in terms of describing that first collection, but I think the network was in great part built because of students who moved from here to go on to study at other universities. Simon Fraser and Alberta and UBCO in particular come to mind where those students came from here, where they’d been working with sound collections and then arrived there and said, “Where are your sound collections? I want to work with them.” And that required those universities to sort of think about, “Oh yeah, we do have huge holdings in this area that we haven’t really looked at or listened to or touched in years.” And it’s really through the students in great part that a lot of the connections with some of these great people I’ve been describing are made possible. I think there’s a lot to learn. And this became very clear from our first institute, from the students and their approaches and the methods that they’re experimenting with in making sense of these kinds of materials. I think the highlight for everyone were the two and a half hours where we heard short talks from all the students across the network on what they had been doing and what they had learned over the past year. And I think that’s a sound that I think we’re going to be amplifying really over the next year or two.\n45:01\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n45:07\tHannah McGregor:\tThanks so much for listening to the first episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Cheryl Gladu and our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Jason Camlot, Deanna Fong, Roma Kail, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, and Karis Shearer for their candid interviews and continued contributions to SpokenWeb. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb podcast. Stories about how literature sounds."],"score":2.6319342},{"id":"9268","cataloger_name":["Jason,Camlot"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E1, Stories of SpokenWeb, 7 October 2019, McLeod and Gladu"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_notes":["Check the Rights and License Category"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/dafaa46d-8602-4296-8aa7-0a66ba8253f2/ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"46:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"44,524,400 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-10-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed. Charles Bernstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.\\n\\nCamlot, J., Swift, T. (eds) (2007) Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (Véhicule, 2007).\\n\\nFong, Deanna and Karis Shearer. Gender, “Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts,” No More Potlucks, online http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/gender-affective-labour-and-community-building-through-literary-audio-artifacts-deanna-fong-and-karis-shearer/\\n\\nMcKinnon, Donna. “A New Frontier of Literary Engagement: SpokenWeb’s network of digitized audio recordings brings new life to Canada’s literary heritage.” https://www.ualberta.ca/arts/faculty-news/2018/august/a-new-frontier-of-literary-engagement\\n\\nMorris, Adalaide, ed. Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.\\n\\nMurray, Annie and Jared Wiercinski. “Looking at Archival Sound: Enhancing the Listening Experience in a Spoken Word Archive.” First Monday 17 (2012). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3808/3197\\n\\nShearer, Karis. “Networks, Communities, Mentorships, Friendships: An SSI Reflection” http://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/07/09/networks-and-communities-an-ssi-reflection/\\n\\nToppings, Earle. “Gwendolyn MacEwen.” Accompanying Material by Earle Topping about Gwendolyn MacEwen. Earle Toppings Fonds. Victoria University Library (Toronto).\\n\\nUrbancic, Ann, editor. Literary Titans Revisited: Earle Toppings Interviews with CanLit Poets and Writers of the Sixties. Ed. Ann Urbancic. Toronto: Dundurn P, 2017.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549450915840,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["SpokenWeb is a literary research network, dedicated to studying literature through sound. But how did this project begin? What kinds of literary recordings inspired it and where were they found? And what happened next in order for these recordings to be heard?\n\nFor this inaugural episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Katherine McLeod seeks to answer these questions by speaking with SpokenWeb researchers Jason Camlot, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, Roma Kail, Karis Shearer, and Deanna Fong. All of their stories involve a deep interest in literary audio recordings and all of their stories, or nearly all, start with a box of tapes…\n\n00:07\tTheme Music:\tCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to The SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada. I’m so excited to introduce our inaugural episode Stories of SpokenWeb, an introduction to this very podcast and the project it stems from. SpokenWeb is first and foremost a literary research network dedicated to studying literature through sound, but how did it all begin and how did these audio archives make their way from basements and car trunks to university libraries? In this episode SpokenWeb contributor Katherine McLeod takes us into the lives and archives of some of the founding spoken web members to uncover the origins and future of the project.\n01:30\tHannah McGregor:\tHere is “Stories of SpokenWeb”\n01:39\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n01:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat is SpokenWeb? SpokenWeb is a research program, a network of scholars, students and artists all studying literature through sound. But how did it all begin? What does the story of SpokenWeb sound like? My name is Katherine McLeod and I asked SpokenWeb collaborators at universities across Canada how they got involved in the project. Needless to say, each story is different and there are many more than are told here, but their stories do have a few things in common that tell us something about the project. All of their stories begin with an interest in audio well before SpokenWeb assumed its current form, and all of their stories, or nearly all, involve a box of tapes. In 2014 I joined SpokenWeb as a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in Montreal. I met Jason Camlot, the principal investigator or project lead of SpokenWeb. At that point SpokenWeb was based out of one university, but I remember him saying that there was an interest in widening the network. So how did SpokenWeb become what it is today? To answer this question, I spoke with a number of SpokenWeb scholars from across Canada. We’ll start the conversation with one story of how it all began.\n03:22\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot. I’m a professor in the Department of English at Concordia University. I am the author of several books about literature and sound recording and I’m the director of the partnership grant of SSHRC Social Science, Humanities Research Council of Canada, called SpokenWeb. I was going to say it began when I was a graduate student and became, in earnest, interested in the history of early sound recordings of literary performance. But I was an undergraduate at this institution at which I now teach, and the first time that I heard an early sound recording was in my Victorian literature class played to me by my professor, John Miller, who later became a colleague of mine for a spell. And he played to this class a barely audible recording of Tennyson reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” And that really piqued my interest and, well, really just what it was that we were listening to and what it meant and what its significance was. So I think the interest in sound recordings of literary works or of something that identified with literature really began when I was an undergraduate. When I went to grad school, I became interested in really thinking about this as a research project. It wasn’t my dissertation project, but it became my second project that you always have to be able to talk about when you go to job interviews and things like that. And at Stanford University they had a pretty good sound archive with a lot of historical recordings. So I was able to look into the longer history of spoken recordings and began to research that topic. I’ve always been interested in sound recording because I play music, and I’ve recorded myself writing songs and playing my own songs or playing in bands with friends since I was a teenager, and I’ve always been saving up for the latest recording device.\n05:41\tJason Camlot:\tWhen I came to Concordia – it’s almost like in this sort of fortuitous moment – I was asked to have a meeting with the department chair in the first week that I was installed in the department, just to go over very practical things. And sitting in his office I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a bunch of tape boxes – boxes that held reel to reel tapes. And I remember asking him what those boxes contained. And he said to me, “Oh, that’s just some poetry reading series that took place here in the 60s.” And I remembered that, although I didn’t do anything about it at the time. I went about my business of teaching and publishing and getting tenure here at Concordia. And then maybe a decade later I thought about those recordings again and I went back to him and asked, “Do you still have those recordings?”\n06:47\tJason Camlot:\tThe department had moved floors and I remember we threw out a lot of stuff during the move. So I kind of feared that maybe those reel to reel tapes didn’t make it during the move, but he told me that he had deposited them in the university archives that held the English department fonds, the records of the English department. So knowing that the tapes were still accessible, I started looking into them and found a bunch of boxes again that I couldn’t listen to. So it was a bit of a stumbling block, not being able to actually hear what was on them and I set about trying to rectify that problem, and to figure out whether this collection of tapes might be of interest from a literary point of view.\n07:38\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Jason Camlot, the principal investigator or project lead of SpokenWeb. As SpokenWeb grew, researchers began working across disciplines. In addition to working across disciplines in one university SpokenWeb has built collaborative connections across different universities. We’ll hear from researchers at a few of those universities in a moment, but we’ll start first with someone who has been part of the project since the beginning.\n08:07\tAnnie Murray:\tMy name is Annie Murray. I’m Associate University Librarian for archives and special collections. At the University of Calgary. What we were really interested in was how a lot of these poets, were going on reading tours. And so the Sir George Williams section was just one slice of literary life in a given year.\n08:32\tAudio Recording:\tWelcome to the fourth, third, week of the fourth series of our readings here at Sir George. And this one is a special one partly in that it was, it is being presented… [Overlapping audio recordings, exact words not audible]\n08:57\tAnnie Murray:\tAnd we were imagining these sort of traveling poets leaving behind a trail of recordings or not leaving behind. And wouldn’t it be great to understand where did all these readings end up and could we ever access them in all the places poets would have read to kind of sonically recreate those years of very active poetry reading performances?\n09:24\tAudio Recording:\tGets hard to read your own stuff after a while, you forget what it sounded like the last time.\n09:29\tAnnie Murray:\tCause we knew different archives across the country would have some audio record of these events. And we thought: this should all be brought together. This should be a massive aggregation of recordings so that you could listen to a poet across the country and kind of, just as bands tour, see how a poet toured and how they intersected with other poets. So I think we saw the meaning in the individual readings for sure for literary history and analysis. But that the sort of possibilities opened up by knowing what all readings were preserved and bringing those archives together. And I will say in most cases, these are hidden collections that hadn’t been digitized before. So with a partnership grant, it allows us to bring all of these collections out, focus on them in a different and concerted way and try to create that sort of national recording of all of these performances that had taken place.\n10:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe project continued to grow. Now it is in over 13 universities right across the country.\n10:44\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI think I’d be remiss if I didn’t say how incredibly grateful I am to be able to work with these materials and with the multidisciplinary scholars that are a part of this project. This is honestly, as I came to recognize during our days together in Vancouver this past summer, this is one of the great research and intellectual opportunities of my career and I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of this.\n11:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Michael O’Driscoll, professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.\n11:18\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI’ve been here for the last 22 years and my work ranges across into the areas of critical and cultural theory. Various kinds of media studies. I’m interested in American literature, poetry and poetics. And I spend a lot of my time thinking a lot about archives and thinking about digital media as well too. You know, the lessons of the world’s great archives theorists – I’m thinking about Arjun Appadurai, I’m thinking about Jacques Derrida – is that archives are oriented not towards the past, but towards the future. Archives are how we build community, archives are aspirational. We only put things in boxes and save them because we imagine a future for them. And the true focus of an archive is its own futurity, not the history that it records.\n12:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tMichael shared with us some background as to how the recordings were made.\n12:13\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tWhen personal recording became available, when somebody could pick up a portable or reasonably portable reel to reel recorder and show up at a reading with it, folks just simply started recording everything that moved. There was so much enthusiasm about the new technology. Many, many of the readings that happened in the late sixties and through the 70s and the eighties, eighties, were recorded on reel-to-reel and then subsequently on cassette tape. But one of the realities of that enthusiasm as well as while there’s lots of enthusiasm for the recording, more often than not, those recordings were put in boxes, stored away and never listened to again. And they have as a result, sat inert for the last 50 years or so at this incredible cultural and scholarly resource, untapped.\n13:03\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn fact, many of the people we spoke with for today’s episode shared with us a story that, at some point mentioned a box of tapes. Just like that story that Jason described earlier of finding a box of tapes and eventually listening to them.\n13:21\tAnnie Murray:\tI think that’s an origin story in a lot of people’s involvement with SpokenWeb; “Hey! What are those tapes?”\n13:28\tDeanna Fong:\tGoing to SFU, Simon Fraser University, and just by happenstance came across this box of tapes as we all do.\n13:35\tRoma Kail:\tOur research assistant was so excited about the project that she went to our chief librarian with the archivist and they found us unprocessed box.\n13:45\tKaris Shearer:\tHe went to get a cardboard box at one point and brought it back to her and said, “You know, I want to give this to you and someday you’re going to know what to do with it.” And she said to me, “I think, I think this is it. I think this is what I’m supposed to do with this box.”\n14:04\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’ll introduce you to each of those voices in a moment. But for now, let’s go back to Michael who shared with us the process of working with this kind of material.\n14:14\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tSo the process that we are working by is, first of all, the materials are digitized and we create the digital records of them. Then we produce the metadata that will be associated with those records. At the same time, once those materials have been digitized, they will be made available to the library for formal accession\n14:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhile that seems easy enough, there are in fact many challenges in working with these found recordings, which are often made with older technology such as reel to reel or cassette tapes. The challenges aren’t just technical, they are also legal. Let’s go back to our conversation with Annie Murray.\n14:56\tAnnie Murray:\tIt can be expensive to do digitization. It’s very time consuming. If you don’t have ready equipment or infrastructure in your organization, you need to contract out an expert to make the recordings. With archival audio recordings, you don’t always know what’s on tapes that an author gives you with their archive. So you could be investing resources in something that might not even be a performance. It could be somebody’s voice answering machine tape, which is also interesting. But, if a collection is kind of under-processed, because it’s an audio item it does take resources to get the content out and usable. The other thing is that copyright can be a barrier. So if people don’t know who made the recording or what the status is of the audio work, it can be an impediment to digitizing it because the library or archive might not know how widely it can be shared. So those are some of the things that libraries and archives grapple with. But I also think we’ve just got to work through those problems to make sure that this content gets preserved.\n16:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tPart of the reason it can be challenging to sort out the rights around these recordings is that they were not always straight-forward recitations or performances. Sometimes recordings include informal conversations, off the record interviews and discussions around a presentation of a work.\n16:29\tRoma Kail:\tSo my name is Roma Kail. I’m a librarian at Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto. I have done some work with the Earle Toppings fonds here at our special collections at Vic Library.\n16:45\tKatherine McLeod:\tEarle Toppings was an editor at Ryerson Press and worked for CBC Radio. He interviewed many Canadian writers such as poets, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Dorothy Livesay, Earle Birney, and Al Purdy. The archival collection for Toppings includes correspondence with writers along with audio recordings of readings and interviews and background notes compiled by Toppings himself.\n17:10\tRoma Kail:\tSo here he is talking about – he wrote this in his notes, he wrote about his recording of Gwendolyn MacEwen – he writes that a standard microphone was used. It was a standard RCA Victor 44 – he called it the radio workhorse – and it recorded her voice softly and beautifully. Gwen was a gentle caressing reader, a sort of Billie Holiday reciting poems as she did at creative hangouts of the 1960s, such as, the creative hangouts of the 1960s, such as the Bohemian Embassy. There was a musical feeling in all her work and she almost, saying her poems, which had their own melodies. So it’s just an extra, as my research assistant pointed out, all of that accompanying material brings in an extra bit of narrative, or a different narrative to the actual sound recordings. And it was the sound recordings which really correlate with the initial goal of SpokenWeb as it was presented to us.\n18:20\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s Karis Shearer, the director of the UBC Okanagan AMP Lab and Associate Professor of English in the faculty of Creative and Critical Studies who has been working with the SoundBox collection, sharing another example of the rich but curious sounds found in these archives.\n18:39\tKaris Shearer:\tSo we recently acquired a new set of tapes, a gift from George Bowering and Jean Baird, which include 19 tapes that George Bowering made, going back to the 1960s. One of them that I particularly like is a tape that was made in July of 1969 and it’s labeled ‘Warren, Roy, Moon, etcetera.’ And so I was just too curious not to give this a listen before we started digitizing it, and it is on the occasion of the moon landing…\n19:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Beep] Now selection [Beep]\n19:18\tKaris Shearer:\t…in 1969, and what you hear on this tape is George Bowering, Angela Bowering, Roy Kiyooka and Warren Tallman. All of whom were in Montreal at the time, Warren was passing through, Roy Kiyooka was teaching at Sir George Williams, now Concordia, and George Bowering was teaching there as well. And they’re all just hanging out in their living room, at George and Angela’s living room on Grosvenor Avenue in Montreal, and they’re listening to the broadcast of the moon landing.\n19:50\tAudio Recording:\tWell, we had a picture with the earth right in the centre of the screen, over.\n19:53\tKaris Shearer:\tSo again, it’s a very messy, interesting tape because there’s lots of, people talking over each other. There’s a broadcast going on in the background. But what’s interesting to me is they’re not recording just the broadcast. Right? It’s not like, “Shh, everybody, we’re gonna record the broadcast of this historical moment.” What the recording is, this kind of very social dynamic moment of them talking about poetics, talking about poetry. Fred was on his way back from Albuquerque to Canada. Did you know, they’re talking about writing, they’re also at various moments, you know, looking at the astronauts on TV and in some cases, you know, making some great jokes. And so it’s a moment of recording their interaction with this historical moment, their interaction with each. So it’s a wonderful tape and I’m excited for people to be able to listen to it.\n20:52\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s one of Karis’ collaborators across the SpokenWeb network explaining why this sort of recording can be so interesting to study.\n21:00\tDeanna Fong:\tSo my name is Deanna Fong. I’m a postdoctoral fellow working with SpokenWeb. My work with Karis has been so indispensable for my thinking. We’ve worked together on numerous occasions, but thinking about that question of what it is we’re listening to when we listen to this certain kind of artifact, or I suppose what, what are we listening for? And I think one of the things that we’ve found ourselves listening for is that, in any sort of informal or speech-y accounts that we have, we get a sense of the labour that goes on behind the scenes in the production of literature. And a lot of that labour is unevenly divided along gendered lines. So, you know, thinking about women’s contributions to building communities and to maintaining community spaces, acting as public historians, maintaining community archives, taking care of community members when they’re ill or when they need help, providing feedback, being auditors for work in progress, all these sorts of things that you hear, that don’t necessarily make it to the page. So I think that’s been a really crucial concept for the work that she and I have been doing. I don’t know if this is some continuation of my past or something, but I remember when I was a kid and going to hall shows and stuff like that, oftentimes I was way more interested in just sitting outside and talking to people about the bands, like, just as interested in that as I was in actually listening to the bands. So I think there’s a great interest, for me, in listening around rather than listening to, and I find conversations about literature vastly more interesting than a lot of literature itself.\n22:55\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI’ve learned along the way to appreciate the virtues of close listening in the sense that one can learn a lot about the cultural moment of the reading by paying close attention, not just to the words that come from the speaker, but to everything else that is happening in the room. So I think, for example, about Margaret Atwood reading in 1970 and a now defunct gallery of a hub mall on the University of Alberta campus. [Audio, from the 1970 recording: Please come in and sit down, there’s lots of room at the front.] And you can hear during the recording, [Audio: He will be very unhappy if you stand up during all this. So please sit down.] Her coming in and trying to wend her way through the audience and get herself settled down in a hubbub of things, and an introduction starts, and then stops, and then there’s a moment where people have to direct people into the room to find space ’cause it’s so crowed. [Audio: The people standing up at the back can, you not sit down?] And you just get this incredible sense of the energy of that moment and what it meant to have this really fantastic young emerging writer [Audio: There’s lots of room, does everybody, everybody just shuffle forward] show up to do her thing. And the kind of excitement that that could generate along the way [Audio: That’s more like it.]\n24:15\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tLet me give you one other one, and that has to do with when Phyllis Webb is performing at the student union building art gallery in 1972. It’s March 9th, 1972 and she comes into the room, the recording’s already going and she’s completely breathless. She’s breathing hard and she’s clearly rushed over to get to this moment and she’s there late and she says.[I have to catch my breath.] And you can hear her say that, and just that moment of that physical presence and embodiment of this poet, again, with all of that energy that gets pulled into that archival moment into that event of the archive, it’s a really exciting thing. These are real people doing real things and real situations and the audio is a rich medium for capturing that if you’ve only listened closely enough.\n25:24\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n25:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfter speaking with Deanna I thought about how important it was for her to be involved in the SpokenWeb project early on in her graduate education. After speaking with Roma and her work with student research assistant, Eva Lu, I thought even more about how student training through SpokenWeb is changing what it means to study literature. At UBC Okanagan [UBCO], Karis has taught and mentored many students who have gotten involved with the SpokenWeb project. I asked her more about student training and she had a terrific story.\n25:59\tKaris Shearer:\tFor me, pedagogy is central to what we do here at UBCO on the SpokenWeb team, and it always has been. So the example that you brought up of Lee Hannigan: first student to work on the project back when it was just in its very early stages. Lee came on as a work study student and we trained him in digitization, and so I reached out to a colleague, Stephen Foster, who very kindly invited us into the media centre that he was running at that time. Mike Berger, who’s a technician trained both me and Lee in the digitization process and gave us space in the lab to do that. So it’s always been a very collective process and SpokenWeb has always been such an interdisciplinary project that has required me to reach out to and do some of that community building with other experts in the area, in order to train students and bring them onto the project. That has stayed true all the way through to the current iteration of the team. We have students who are, again, central to the project and bringing their own expertise. And, at the same time, we are training them. We’re training them in the digitization process. We’re training them in design work. We’re training them in cataloguing and producing metadata. But their expertise as they’re learning that is, again, central, so in our team meetings we always come back to having the students talk about – do a bit of a round – and talk about what they’re learning and what they’re doing, and also what directions they see the project needing to go in or areas that need to be developed. And so the pedagogy is something that is student driven. It’s also, I guess for me, it’s also something that comes right out of our archive – it comes out of the cardboard box, which is at the pedagogy of the archive itself. The collection is very pedagogical. It records Warren Tallman in the classroom. It records Tallman inviting students to his living room to talk about poetry with his wife, Ellen Tallman; they bring up Robert Duncan and record Robert Duncan giving lectures and talking with students. So within the archive and the collection itself, students are central to that. And so, for me, the pedagogy we’re enacting now is very much in dialogue with, or taking a card from that, from the collection.\n28:47\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tFrom a cultural and scholarly point of view, well, audio is, almost and surprisingly so, a kind of unknown frontier. One of the ways I like to think about it is texts are never stable entities: they sit on the page surely, but as they go through various forms of socialization and cultural mediation, they change and shift over time. We deal with versions, we deal with variants, we deal with different contexts of reading and circulation and so forth – so they’re certainly not inert. But I would say if you take a poem by a particular mid century Canadian author that has sat on that same page for the last 50 years, and then you add to that archive, you add to that corpus 6 or 8 or 10 recordings of that author reading the poem, performing the poem, describing it to audiences, responding to audience questions, to hearing the audience itself respond to that poem.\n29:44\tAudio Recording:\tFairly recent poem, which isn’t a political poem. I told them, but a human poem and one that I wrote as a result of watching on television, the debates in the United Nations on the Middle East crisis. And one of the horrible things I felt as I watched it was how completely dehumanized it all was, that the real human issues had been lost sight of and sort of round in an ocean of resolutions and memos from embassies and all this sort of thing.\n30:33\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tWell then that thing suddenly leaps off to the page to an nth dimension of variability and versioning, And suddenly the scholarly opportunities to work with those poems as cultural objects, as objects subject to scholarly comparison and critical analysis becomes all the more richer, all the more lively, all the more vibrant. And that’s a really exciting thing from my perspective.\n30:59\tJason Camlot:\tThere’s still a lot of work to be done before the field recognizes archives of sound as really significant or relevant, even still to the study of literature. Part of the, I wouldn’t call it resistance, but just sort lack of a sense of how to go about engaging with these materials is a result of changes in the way literature had been taught over the course of the 20th century. I think that recitation or oral interpretation was a very important part of the way literature was taught. The way interpretation was understood so that, when we thought of interpretation, it wasn’t critical analysis done silently in an essay about a poem on the printed page, but it was actually an oral performance in which one’s understanding of the poem was communicated through the intonations and vocal actions that one took in order to literally interpret, you know, deliver in sound their version of the poem. Students would be, in a sense, graded on their oral interpretations that would be part of the exam. Exams in the 19th century were called recitations and a lot of the performance of knowledge in the 19th century – Catherine Robson has written about this – was delivered orally, right? But I think during the course of the 20th century, Especially from the 30s on when methods, identified with what was called the New Criticism came into being, certain ideas of oral performance dropped out of the critical analysis of literature. And it became in a sense, silenced or replaced by more abstract concepts of the voice of the poem or in the poem, but not one that one expects to actually hear. But one voice that one expects to find, to give a sense of unity to the poem, and to describe, but the noisy classroom filled with recitation sort of became silenced. And students were asked to scan poems on the page and the sounds of voices were replaced by the sounds of pencils, scribbling paper on the printed poem. So I think that long tradition in pedagogy related to the teaching of literature has created a kind of barrier to our sense of even how to begin engaging with this kind of archive in relation to the development of sort of literary history, the analysis of a different kind of prosody that one can hear in performance, et cetera. So things were already being done in the late nineties, or some initial thinking was being done around this, but I think the archives themselves weren’t prepared, and still to a large extent haven’t been yet prepared for us to engage with this material in the same way, with the same facility, or with a facility that’s even close to that of the printed archive.\n34:26\tDeanna Fong:\tI will say, I’ll begin by saying that I wasn’t that interested in audio at the time. So I remember feeling a great deal of apprehension when I started working on the project in that I had no idea what these artifacts were or why they were, why they would be of interest to anybody or, you know, who would possibly want to listen to them. But when I dove into them and listened to, I found myself particularly drawn to the kind of extra-poetic speech, which is something that I’ve become very interested in, in my own research. But I was really interested in the liveness of these events. And so I remembered one of my first tasks as an RA on that project was to develop just a sort of lit survey around the research that had been done around audio poetry, like audio recordings of poetry. So I dove into Charles Bernstein’s close listening, and had this major revelation where I was like, “Whoa, a live reading of a poem is totally different than the reading of a poem on a page,” which is something that had really never occurred to me before. Like, I just, that it was a simple recitation and I really got a sense of the difference between a performed poem versus a poem on the page. And that difference became immediately very interesting to me.\n35:49\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn many ways, Karis – and really everyone we’ve heard from today – are all asking us to consider: what can these archives teach us? And it seems that sometimes these lessons can come from unexpected places. For example, what can this cross-disciplinary and deeply collaborative project teach us about academic collaboration more generally?\n36:14\tJason Camlot:\tI’ve been very interested this past year, throughout the past year, in having intensive conversations with Yuliya Kondratenko, the Project Manager of SpokenWeb on project management methods. And which ones are best suited to a research program of this kind. And really to begin to map out what project management for humanities-based research might look like. So I think what we’ve been doing to a large extent has been listening and watching to see how activities have unfolded, what approaches have worked, which ones haven’t been picked up as successfully as a way to then reflect upon and describe, and then ultimately, I wouldn’t say codified, but, you know, abstract in a way so that we could perhaps learn from our methods that are initially just sort of iterative experiments. So that’s another thing that I’m really interested in from that sort of more distant perspective. And it’s been great having Yuliya as a kind of sounding board so that we can actually begin writing this up a little bit and sort of maybe map out a whole new project management approach based on the disciplinary messiness of our project.\n37:40\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Jason Camlot, who we met at the top of the show. So what pulls all of these stories together? Well, at the heart of this project is an ethos of sharing. And as we’ve heard, it often starts with a box of tapes that a community member shares with a member of the team. But that is not all.\n38:06\tKaris Shearer:\tOne of the things that we see in the archive, vis-à-vis copies, is the circulation and gifting of recordings and tapes within members of the poetry community. Our current SpokenWeb project at UBCO is very much founded on gifting and sharing. And so when I look around the AMP Lab, which is where our collection is housed, so much of what we do is made possible through gifts, and so I’m thinking particularly of Stephen Foster, who is my colleague in visual arts. Our hardware, and even the early, the very first time that we digitized the reels, again, made possible by Stephen’s inviting us into his own lab and sharing his resources with us. And that’s been true all the way through for us, that that idea of the work on the SoundBox project is made possible through the sharing of things, the donation of tapes, and the gifting of hardware. So we really appreciate that.\n39:16\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn many ways, the web of SpokenWeb is not only the collaborative network of researchers, but it is also this web of archival recordings held together by a desire to make these available to more listeners. And this plays into what we’re trying to do here with this podcast. Provide a platform not only for researchers to share with the wider public the outcomes of their work, but a place where people might access the recordings, reflections, and sounds that have inspired so many of us and that continue to inspire us as the SpokenWeb partnership moves into its next year.\n39:57\tJason Camlot:\tOne thing I’m looking forward to in the coming year is beginning to see our metadata ingest system, which we call SWALLOW, which is sort of swallowing up or capturing all of the metadata that’s being typed in to that system, to see it build up and then to see what kinds of questions we can start asking as a result of having all of this metadata built up about the collections.\n40:26\tRoma Kail:\tOnce we have our records in and other institutions have theirs in, it will be interesting to see how they overlap or how they compliment each other. So we certainly have material that would maybe fill gaps in other institutions collections or vice versa. So I’m very excited to see when we are able to search it, for example, who has what and how that how that represents sort of all the institutions across Canada in terms of a collection.\n41:04\tKaris Shearer:\tSo we are, at UBCO with our SpokenWeb team, we’re actively building a website, so there’ll be a landing page very soon, and there’ll be a selection of tapes from a much larger collection that will feature – once we’ve cleared permissions and created some contextualisation for them – a number of recordings that’ll be featured on that site for people to listen in while we’re actively processing the rest of the collection. And so we can stay tuned for that, in fall 2019.\n41:35\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tSo one of the things I’m also really excited about is having some conversations with some of the individuals who were involved with these moments of recording in their day. And learning a little bit more, not only about the events and the authors and the atmosphere of that moment, but also learning a little bit more about their motivations for recording; what they were doing and how they understood, they were producing an archive and for whom and for what kind of future. I’d like to learn a little bit more about the history of the collection that we have. But I’d also like to learn a little bit more about the heart of the collection that we have.\n42:14\tJason Camlot:\tPart of the reason that this past year has been so successful has been just because of the people who are involved. That they’re very open minded, courteous and interested, and also extremely hard working, and so we have a bunch of people who share the desire to make things happen, but also a shared desire to have a great time while doing it. You know, I think that’s been a winning combination for our project and has really allowed us to get a lot done, and has allowed for that kind of flexibility and reflectiveness without panicking about whether we’re getting to where we want to go even before we might know where we want to go. And the other thing has been that I didn’t mention yet but that I think is very important in the development of this project has been the role of graduate students and even undergraduates. I mentioned that they were at the beginning of the project in terms of describing that first collection, but I think the network was in great part built because of students who moved from here to go on to study at other universities. Simon Fraser and Alberta and UBCO in particular come to mind where those students came from here, where they’d been working with sound collections and then arrived there and said, “Where are your sound collections? I want to work with them.” And that required those universities to sort of think about, “Oh yeah, we do have huge holdings in this area that we haven’t really looked at or listened to or touched in years.” And it’s really through the students in great part that a lot of the connections with some of these great people I’ve been describing are made possible. I think there’s a lot to learn. And this became very clear from our first institute, from the students and their approaches and the methods that they’re experimenting with in making sense of these kinds of materials. I think the highlight for everyone were the two and a half hours where we heard short talks from all the students across the network on what they had been doing and what they had learned over the past year. And I think that’s a sound that I think we’re going to be amplifying really over the next year or two.\n45:01\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n45:07\tHannah McGregor:\tThanks so much for listening to the first episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Cheryl Gladu and our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Jason Camlot, Deanna Fong, Roma Kail, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, and Karis Shearer for their candid interviews and continued contributions to SpokenWeb. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb podcast. 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Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings. Stanford Universiy Press, 2019. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23893\\n\\n—. “Historicist Audio Forensics: The Archive of Voices as Repository of Material and Conceptual Artefacts.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 21 (2015). https://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/ntn.744/\\n\\nConnor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.\\n\\nErnst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Ed. Jussi Parikka. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.\\n\\nFeaster, Patrick. “Framing the Mechanical Voice: Generic Conventions of Early Sound Recording.”\\nFolklore Forum 32 (2001): 57-102.\\n\\nGitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era.\\n\\nStanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999.\\n\\nNaremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.\\n\\nRubery, Matthew. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016.\\n\\nSterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC and London, UK: Duke\\nUP, 2003.\\n\\nUCSB Cylinder Audio Archive, http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549461401600,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In “Sound Recordings are Weird: Stories and thoughts about early spoken recordings”, SpokenWeb research Jason Camlot interviews collaborators in the SpokenWeb Network to uncover the stories behind the making of Early Literature Recordings. Drawing from his recent book “Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings”, Jason invites guests Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller and Matthew Rubery to question the cultural, technological and personal meaning of early sound recordings. Together they consider how and why we are interested in these early recordings and what motivates scholars to research them and collectors to collect them? What did these recordings mean when they first appeared in the world? And What do they mean now?\n\n00:00:02\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n00:00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. As we dive into episode two in the SpokenWeb series, I want you to picture the oldest recording technology you can think of. Oh, what are you picturing? Is it a cassette player? You can tell me if it’s a cassette player. Is it a phonograph and maybe a wax cylinder? In this episode spoken web researcher Jason Camlot, interviews collaborators in the SpokenWeb network to uncover the stories behind the making of early literature recordings. Drawn from his recent book Phonopoetics, Jason invites guests Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller and Matthew Rubery to question the cultural, technological, and personal meanings of early sound recordings. Together they consider how and why we’re interested in these early recordings and what motivates scholars to research them and collectors to collect them. What did these recordings mean when they first appeared in the world and what do they mean now? Here is Jason Camlot with episode two: Sound Recordings are Weird: stories and thoughts at the earliest spoken recordings.\n00:02:08\tMusic:\t[Instrumental]\n00:02:19\tJason Camlot:\tPart one. Old Sound Recordings are Weird.\n00:02:44\tJason Camlot:\tNo, there’s nothing wrong with your device. Do not adjust your radio dial so to speak. What you are listening to is an early sound recording.\n00:03:06\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot, a professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. A Victorian scholar, that’s someone who studies 19th century literature and culture, and a researcher who is interested in the relationships that exist between sound and literature.\n00:03:29\tJason Camlot:\tIf you listened to the first episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, you might recall that the sound you’ve just heard is what first got me interested in research about the history of sound recording and how people have read literature out loud since the 19th century. I was an undergraduate student taking a full year of Victorian literature class. We were studying the poetry of Lord Alfred Tennyson. And then one morning, my professor, John Miller,\n00:03:56\tJohn Miller:\tI’m John Miller, and I’ve retired from teaching Victorian literature at Concordia University in Montreal,\n00:04:02\tJason Camlot:\tWalked in with a boombox.\n00:04:04\tJohn Miller:\tThe classrooms weren’t equipped, so I had to get a boombox and trundle into the class and fiddle with the dials and so on.\n00:04:18\tJason Camlot:\tAnd played us that recording you just heard. I have to say the first time I heard the piece, I found it to be a bit off-putting and scary because of the way it sounded, but also kind of strange and wonderful, sort of magical.\n00:04:35\tJohn Miller:\tI think there was some fairly stunned silence because, of course, none of us ever expected anything like this.\n00:04:44\tJason Camlot:\tIt was exciting to know that this long dead poet we were studying was, all of a sudden, transported to us in our classroom through a boombox. Many years later, I asked John Miller if he remembered the first time that he had heard the recording.\n00:05:01\tJohn Miller:\tI first heard the recording when I was a graduate student in a full-year Tennyson and Browning course, and John Pettigrew who was teaching the course had a copy of it and wowed us one day.\n00:05:19\tJason Camlot:\tI asked him if he remembers what it sounded like to him when he first heard it.\n00:05:22\tJohn Miller:\tIncomprehensible.\n00:05:24\tJason Camlot:\tAfter a while, as you listen to an old recording repeatedly, you can get past the strangeness of the sound and begin to decipher the words and tune into the way the reader is delivering or performing the poem. You come to hear the reading as a form of interpretation, a manner of actually performing the meaning of the poem through the use of different kinds of intonation and other vocal techniques that shaped the sound of the text with and through the reader’s voice. There are lots of different interpretations of this same poem recorded by Victorian actors and elocutionists around the turn of the 19th century.\n00:06:05\tAudio Recording:\tHalf a league, half a league, / Half a league onward, / All in the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred. / “Forward, the Light Brigade! / Charge for the guns!” he said. / Into the valley of Death\n00:06:24\tJason Camlot:\tThe recording we have of Tennyson reading his own poem is the first such recorded oral interpretation of this poem. It gets us thinking about how Tennyson interpreted his own poetry with his voice.\n00:06:37\tJohn Miller:\tIt’s, I think the term that we came up with was elegiac rather than heroic. Tennyson recites the poem so slowly, that any heroism is evaporated. And, really, I think his performance reverses much of the conventional wisdom about the poem at the time.\n00:07:13\tAudio Recording:\t“Forward, the Light Brigade! / Charge for the guns!” He said. / Into the valley of Death”\n00:07:21\tJason Camlot:\tThe heroic sound of the poem that John Miller refers to is clearly audible in this torrential rendition of the poem by Victorian stage actor Lewis Waller known for what James Naremore has described as his ‘phallic performing skill.’ The interpretation that John Miller hears in Tennyson’s reading goes against that standard accepted idea about the meaning of the charge\n00:07:45\tJohn Miller:\tthat it was a kind of newspaper, a poet Laureate glorification of British foolhardy gallantry. Rather than a lament for the disaster that it was\n00:08:10\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:08:11\tJason Camlot:\tHalf a league, half a league, half a league onward. In the valley of Death rode the six hundred. Forward, the Light Brigade. Charge for the guns, he said. Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred. Ellipsis. Dot, dot dot. When can their glory fade? O, the wild charge they made. All the world wondered. Honour the charge they made. Honour the Light Brigade. Noble six hundred. This translation of an unintelligible old recording into clear or at least clearer words that I have just performed, represents an act of demystification, an unweirding of this old recording. Old sound recordings like the one we just heard are weird, not just because we can’t always decipher what the actual sounds are, but because, well, firstly the recording has preserved the voice of a famous person from another century whose voice we may have thought was lost for all time. So it’s weird to have an emanation from that body assumed eternally absent, resonate again, vibrate through the air for us to hear. It creates a kind of vocalic body, evoking the physical body that’s no longer there. That idea of the vocalic body comes from Steven Connor’s book about ventriloquism. Secondly, the recording itself doesn’t sound normal to us. This is because we are listening to a digitized version of a different material medium; a late-Victorian brown wax cylinder. The particular cylinder behind this recording wasn’t preserved according to best archival practices. It lost some of its shape over time, distorting the voice of the poet, making it kind of warped or erie or creepy sounding to our modern ears and adding other sounds that are derived from the material medium itselfT from the wax. Those sounds become even stranger as the sound is migrated from one media format to another. In the case of this early Tennyson wax cylinder recording, it went from brown wax cylinder to a small flat disc record that was sold to the public by the Tennyson society. John Miller purchased that record and then transferred that to a cassette tape and played it through a boombox. Hearing odd cylinder noises through a 1980s boombox estranges the original sound from its source. Same goes for when we turn it into an mp3 file and listen to it through a computer or iPhone. There are a lot of additional sounds beyond the voice that we cannot identify in this recording. For example, starting from about one minute and 33 seconds into the recording, we hear a loud banging sound.\n00:11:41\tJason Camlot:\tWe can’t know if this is a feature of the recording technology or if Tennyson himself was simply getting carried away with his recitation, banging a lectern or a table as he performed the poem. This is what John Miller assumed the banging sound to be.\n00:11:55\tJohn Miller:\tI think there are points at which he is pounding his cane on the floor, points which he runs out of breath, and that does give an extraordinary sense of the life, I think.\n00:12:08\tJason Camlot:\tAn extraordinary sense of Tennyson’s sonic presence, of his vocalic body. There’s also the issue of context. We can’t always hear context in a sound recording, although there are sometimes clues that can be heard. In this case, it’s hard for us to understand what was going on at the time. Why was he even making this recording? What would that have been like for him? Where was he exactly? What time was it? Was he reading or reciting his poem by heart? These old sound recordings are like escaped fugitives from their original media and historical contexts. And yet, despite all this strangeness, even with all this missing information, when we hear a historical voice recording, when we listen to Tennyson read The Charge of the Light Brigade again, over 100 years after he recited it into a phonograph, there’s something very real about it. This sense of the realness of recorded sound seems to have been felt by listeners even at the earliest exhibitions of the tinfoil phonograph.\n00:13:17\tLisa Gitelman:\tI think there is something to that, that this was an experience of temporal continuity, that there was a slice of time that was being inscribed onto these sheets of tinfoil, in a way that when you write down what somebody said, you’re not putting down – you’re putting down the words, but you’re not putting down a slice of time. My name is Lisa Gitelman. I’m a professor at New York University where I teach in the departments of English and the department of Media, Culture and Communication. There were several ways I guess we could say that these recordings and these exhibitions became experiences of temporality, right? The, the kind of preservative nature of the tinfoil but also the kind of the temporal duration of the recording itself.\n00:14:08\tJason Camlot:\tThe realtime quality of recorded sound, that it puts us into time that has already passed and opens a tunnel connection with the past, triggers what philosopher Wolfgang Ernst has called the ‘drama of time critical media.’ I like the idea that something dramatic happens when we play with time by playing sound recordings. An encounter with a recorded sound develops as an experience of real time processing. It gives the listener the sense that the temporal process one is hearing is living in the present, replicating the live event of which it is apparently a real time reproduction. Sound recording works on human perception itself and on our perception of time in particular. So Ernst’s argument about the strange drama of sound recording is based on his idea that we’re not cognitively equipped to process events from two temporal dimensions at the same time. When we immerse ourselves in real time sound, we perceive it as live and this jars our awareness of time. So that’s another weird quality of early sound recordings: they give us the experience of feeling time as multi-dimensional. In that way, a phonograph is like a time machine and we’re the time travellers. As an aside, HG Wells published his story, The Time Machine in 1895 soon after the invention of sound recording and film media technologies. Maybe he was inspired by this weird drama of time critical media that Wolfgang Ernst just talking about\n00:15:51\tJason Camlot:\tPart two, what is an early sound recorder? How did recording sounds become possible and how did those early technologies work?\n00:16:05\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:16:06\tJason Camlot:\tMaybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. As we just heard from Lisa Gitelman, wax cylinders weren’t even the first recording technology, just my personal entry into the world of recorded sound. Like a lot of innovations, in hindsight, it seems almost obvious that humans would record sound, including the human voice, and play this back for all the reasons we’ve come to expect. However, like a lot of human inventions, there was a certain degree of serendipity involved in the development of recording technologies and also some inventive talent. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, that one name kept coming up.\n00:16:52\tAudio Recording:\tThomas Edison, Thomas Edison, Edison, Thomas Edison.\n00:16:57\tLisa Gitelman:\tI have doctorate in literature, so I’m a person who’s interested in texts, interested in reading and writing. And after I went to graduate school, I got a job at Rutgers University in New Jersey, working with a team of scholars that have, for a long time, have been researching and publishing the papers of the American inventor, Thomas Edison.\n00:17:19\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Lisa Gitelman again.\n00:17:21\tLisa Gitelman:\tAnd I spent many years working with that team of scholars to educate ourselves and educate the public about this archive and what was it. One of the things in it was a lot of material about the invention of recorded sound and I just was kind of bitten by the buck and became fascinated. In particular with the kind of earliest moments in 1877 and 1878, when the idea recorded sound itself didn’t really exist. One of the most precious things there, were experimental notebooks. So we have the original experimental notebooks in which Edison and his team of inventors were playing around in the 1870s – let’s say, in the fall of 1877 or the summer of 1877 – with lots of telephone devices, basically trying to invent a better telephone. And there was a lot of work in this period by Edison and by many others on telephone and Telegraph work, and there were lots of telegraph systems that did involve paper tapes. Either a telegraphic messages printed on paper tape or paper tape used as a kind of repeating device for telegraph communication, to make telegraphy a little bit more automatic. So using paper was something they had around and it also locked into expectations about inscription. And we have documents that more or less show us a certain moment when Edison realized, ‘Look, the way we’re doing this, we could actually use this technology to not just, you know, sort of transmit sound, but actually save it up.’ So you can actually see this in the manuscript notebooks. And then of course there are lots and lots of pieces of correspondence and business papers, then some promotional materials, so the archive is just a kind of many-splendored collection of oddities in a way. But it’s filled with these stories that can be pieced back together by historians who go through the papers.\n00:19:44\tJason Camlot:\tI’m going to try to take you through a history of acoustic recording technologies from the pre-recording phonautograph of the 1860s to the invention of the tinfoil phonograph in 1877 to the perfected wax cylinder phonograph in 1888. And then, eventually, To the introduction of flat disc gramophone records and beyond. To give this early historical account of sound recording technologies. I’d like to introduce you to:\n00:20:14\tPatrick Feaster:\tMy name’s Patrick Feaster. I’m media preservation specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative at Indiana University and I study the cultural, social, and technological history of sound recording with a particular emphasis on very, very early sound recordings. When we talk about sound recordings today, we generally think of them as something that is intended mainly to be listened to. You record speech music…\n00:20:40\tAudio Recording:\tTesting one, two, three.\n00:20:42\tPatrick Feaster:\t…some kind of sound, then you play it back again as sound.\n00:20:46\tAudio Recording:\tTesting one, two, three.\n00:20:49\tPatrick Feaster:\tThe first person to record a sound out of the air and then play it back was Thomas Edison in 1877, But he was not the first person to record a sound out of the air. The first person to record a sound out of the air was Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. He was a scientific proofreader who, In about 1850 to 1853, was given a treatise on physiology, which included a section describing how the human ear and eardrum work. As he read this, he began imagining to himself an artificial eardrum that would vibrate in the same way that human eardrum does, but then instead of passing those vibrations along to the auditory nerve and the brain so that we could hear them, it would write them down so that, as he imagined, any sound that the human ear was capable of hearing could be written down in this way. The invention he came up with consisted first of all of a big funnel with the membrane at one end of it. And the idea was you’d direct sounds of speech, song, whatever it was, into this funnel, they would cause the membrane to vibrate, then a stylus attached to the other side of the membrane would move back and forth with the vibrations. Now underneath the stylus would be a sheet of paper covered with the soot of an oil lamp and wrapped around a cylinder, and as sounds were directed into the funnel, you’d rotate the cylinder and as the stylus moved back and forth, it would draw a wavy line in the soot. After you’d made your recording, you’d take the sheet of paper off the drum, you’d fix it in an alcohol bath, kind of like fixing a charcoal drawing, and then you’d have this visual record of sound. Now the wavy line on that sheet of paper contains the same kind of information as the wavy groove on an LP. In both cases, we’re dealing with a graph of sound vibrations, the amplitude of sound vibrations over time, but Scott’s phonautograms were not intended for playback, which hadn’t yet occurred to anybody as a possibility at this point. Instead, he thought of the phonautograph as recording sounds in the same sense that a seismograph records earthquakes, you would not expect to be able to take a seismograph record of an earthquake and use it to create another earthquake. In fact, if you could do that, seismographs would probably be a lot more tightly controlled. But at the same time, we don’t think of seismographs as not really recording earthquakes. They really do, they graph out the vibrations of the, uh, the earth tremors and so forth. And similarly, these records were records of sound. But they were intended to be looked at visually, not listened to. Scott wasn’t sure exactly what people would be able to make of these records. He had rather ambitious thoughts that people would learn to decipher recorded words from them. You could perhaps sit and look at a recording of a performance of dramatic oratory or an operatic aria sitting in your chair at home, and maybe if you learned to read these things well enough, you could imagine in your mind’s ear what their performance had sounded like. But again, it was to be strictly a visual record. That’s not to say that we can’t play them back today. In fact, we can, what we need to do is make a high resolution scan of the phonautogram use an algorithm to detect the position of the wavy line and then convert that information into samples in a digital sound file. Once we do that, we can listen to the recordings Scott made, even though at the time they were made, there was no mechanism available to turn them back into sound. There are a few more things we need to do to get intelligible sound out of a phonautogram. The cylinder on which sounds were recorded was turned by hand, so the recording speed was very irregular. If we were to play the sound waves straight off the paper as the appear there would be extreme speed fluctuations, so severe that you wouldn’t be able to recognize the melody of a tune – something like that. Fortunately, Scott recorded the vibrations of a tuning fork next to the trace of the voice, and the nice thing about that is that the tuning fork always has the same number of vibrations in a given amount of time. And so if we adjust the tuning fork so that it’s at a constant frequency, then we bring the voice in along with it, we can correct for the speed fluctuations from the hand cranking of the cylinder. When we do this, we can hear songs, recitations, very much as they sounded back in the day. The, the tambour was not recorded so successfully, but the pitch very much was\n00:26:39\tPatrick Feaster:\tScott’s recordings were all test recordings to one degree or another. He was really still trying to figure out whether his invention worked and what it could be used to do, so he didn’t go out and record the voices of famous people or famous singers, he pretty much just recorded himself, his own voice. But there was some variety in his recordings. Sometimes he is clearly conducting a dry scientific experiment. Maybe he’s pronouncing words very slowly and deliberately or, or singing a song like ‘O Clair de la Lune’, but holding each note for an uncomfortably long amount of time. The idea here was to see whether, looking at the trace afterwards, you could understand what was going on, you could tell one note from another, maybe different vowel sounds, different consonants would look different from one another. In these cases that’s the sort of thing he was trying to figure out. But sometimes he lets loose with something that really is a full fledged performance. A piece of impassioned, dramatic oratory, a lively rendition of a song from the opera. Here Scott is experimenting with another of his goals for the phonautograph, which is that it could record virtuosic performances. That is, you could have the celebrated figures of the theater and the music hall stand in front of the phonautograph, perform the works for which they were best known, once they were recorded as phonautograms perhaps the, the genius of these people wouldn’t die with them, but future generations could experience it. They could look at those phonautograms, they could hear the performances again in their mind’s ear.\n00:28:29\tLisa Gitelman:\tWell, the real breakthrough I think was when they released themselves in a sense from the idea that paper was a recording medium, and started to try experiments with sheets of tinfoil. Um, so the first successful recording surface was sheets of tinfoil, which sounds weird. They are paper-like, right? They certainly come in sheets. But it was a slightly more durable material and it sort of proved useful for what they were trying to do, which is a very kind of crude acoustic recording. The original device was not electronic in any way, it was just mechanical, and in a sense the tinfoil was part of the machine. So in 1877, and then moreso in 1878, the tinfoil phonograph started to gain a lot of popular attention in newspapers, and eventually there were kind of worldwide demonstrations of this, then miraculous, device.\n00:29:36\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo what this machine looked like, it was basically a long cylinder with a handle or a crank at the end that you could sort of spin to make the machine revolve. It had a funnel attached to it that the speaker would speak into, and then the sound of their voice, the vibrations in the air, would create indentations on the tinfoil. And then those indentations on the sheet of tinfoil that was wrapped around the cylinder, that was sort of the first sound recording. My name is Matthew Rubery, I am a professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Theoretically, that sheet of tinfoil could be replayed again and again, taken off the machine and put back on another machine and played again. But in reality, it did not go so smoothly. Often these sheets of tinfoil tore, they were quite delicate. It was very difficult to rewrap a sheet of tinfoil around a cylinder again, once you’ve taken it off. And then you had to sort of get the rotation speed just right, so you had to have a real skilled operator to turn that handle at just the right speed to recapture the pitch of the original voice. But these tinfoil photographs were the first ones that were made and sort of scraps of tinfoil that were given out at the end of these exhibitions, I mean, what a souvenir, those would be incredibly valuable today.\n00:30:55\tLisa Gitelman:\tWell, I mean, if I were to imitate this recording for a classroom it would be easy for me to, I mean, these sounded just terrible. I’m gonna, you know, fake it, but I think they would have sounded like this, [inaudible,] you know just lots of scrapey surface noise. So the real question there is not so much ‘What did we listen to?’ But the real question becomes, ‘How are people so excited about this new recording technology?’ That question takes you back again to this threshold, when things are really new and you need a way to think about them. Apparently available in 1878 was an intuitive sense of fidelity, that ‘Oh my God, Oh my God, that’s you!’ on the recording, because there was nothing to compare it to.\n00:31:58\tDavid Seubert:\tMy name is David Seubert and I’m the Curator of the Performing Arts Collection at the University of California Santa Barbara. And part of my responsibilities here are the management of the historical sound recordings collection, which notably includes one of the world’s largest collections of early cylinder recordings: about 19,000 titles at this point. And we also have the discography of American historical recordings, which is a large database project to document the output of the early North American sound recording industry. A wax cylinder is really the commercial product that resulted from Thomas Edison’s invention of sound recording in the 1870s, where he initially recorded onto a roll of tinfoil wrapped around a cylindrical mandrel in order to use it for mass production of audio content, whether that’s spoken or music or whatever else it might be. They developed a wax cylinder which is a hard metallic soap that allowed for people to both record onto it and then to play it back as well. So unlike flat disks, a wax cylinders are really a read-write medium like cassette tapes or like an mp3 file where people, individuals could buy commercially produced recordings or make their own. So we have some early interesting content there on cylinders.\n00:33:26\tJason Camlot:\tThe history of early sound recording technologies reveals a close connection between sound and visual text or script. As Patrick Feaster explained the original idea for sound recording, the phonautograph didn’t even imagine playing it back, but conceived of sound recording as a kind of sound to printed script technology. The sound goes in and produces a squiggly line that we might perhaps be able to read. Léon Scott wasn’t able to read the squiggles with his own eyes, but Patrick and his colleagues who work on the first sounds project were able to get a computer to read them as digital data and to make that play t`he sounds that were originally recorded in the 1860s. Pretty amazing. Amazing in part because acoustic recording technologies are so very basic. A simple mechanical approach to capturing the air pressure produced by sound producing events like a person speaking. There’s no electrical transduction of the air pressure in this acoustic process, just a horn or tube to direct the sounds toward a thin diaphragm that is sensitive to the changes in air pressure and a stylus or needle that records those changes in air pressure onto something paper – tinfoil, wax – for safekeeping, and then a reversal of just the same process in this case from recorded bumps or squiggles on a material surface, via a stylus, to make the diaphragm shiver and stir the air again and a horn to make us hear those air pressure movements as the sound that had stirred the air in the past. The connection between sound recording and writing was strong from the beginning. Thinking of sound as a kind of printed text may distort or limit our understanding, our apprehension, our hearing of what is spoken recording really is. What if we try to think of these recordings not as visual scripts to be played, not as spoken or sounded versions of print works, but as audio texts, as generic forms in sound.\n00:35:45\tJason Camlot:\tPart three what are the formal and generic features of early sound recordings? What does it mean to think of a recorded speech as a formal entity? What are the elements that constitute the shape and significance of the audio text? The sound of early speech recordings can help us think about how to answer these kinds of questions. They help us hear how the nature of the recording technology itself had an impact on the Sonic qualities of the audio text that could be produced. As we now know, the technological and material underpinnings of an audio text have a hand in shaping how it was produced, used, and consequently the social and cultural meanings it might come to have. This is a pretty typical argument of design theory, which suggests that the material substratum of an artifact informs the possible courses of action that can be taken with it and frames the practices and meanings that surround it. Now, I don’t mean to say that the capacities and limits of the phonograph as a recording and sound playing device, or the material affordances of a wax cylinder as a storage media format, completely determined the use and meaning of all of the sounds that were accorded in preserved with phonograph cylinder technology, but they did play a role in deciding what kinds of sounds could be captured and in the case of speech recordings, what kinds of spoken audio text could be produced. Two quick examples of this. One: acoustic sound recording required the speaker to speak loudly. You practically had to shout to make that diaphragm vibrate enough so the stylus would dig into the wax deeply enough for the recording to the audible when it was played back. This affordance of phonograph recording technology meant that you couldn’t be all that subtle in your recitation of a literary work. You couldn’t whisper a poem into a phonograph. It wouldn’t stick. So early speech recordings couldn’t rely on wide ranges in amplitude, that’s volume or loudness, to communicate the feelings of the speaker. Here’s a second example: cylinders could hold no more than a few minutes of sound. So the storage capacity of the wax cylinder as a preservation medium had some serious implications for what kinds of texts and speeches could be recorded.\n00:38:33\tDavid Seubert:\tYou know the format was short. I mean, it’s a cylinder up until 1908 or so, only held two minutes of content. And after then, after 1908, they introduced four minute cylinders.\n00:38:45\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s David Seubert again.\n00:38:47\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo Edison, when he invented his phonograph, the first sort of prototype made in December of 1877,\n00:38:55\tJason Camlot:\tDr Matthew Rubery.\n00:38:56\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo, going all the way back to the 19th century here he tested it out by reading or reciting Mary Had A Little Lamb. And I think that’s an interesting choice, although there’s been a lot of speculation about, you know, why start recorded sound history with this particular example. A few reasons come to mind, one is it’s a very short verse, and the first recordings could only record, you know, I think this one was under 10 seconds, which was perfect for a test case. It’s also something that sort of sticks in the mind quite easily, so you don’t have to think about the words, they just sort of come effortlessly to you as many nursery rhymes still do. It’s also helpful for an audience when listening to these early recordings because even though at the time the recording quality was talked about as being incredibly lifelike, when you hear this today, they sound practically inaudible.\n00:39:51\tAudio Recording:\tMarry had a little lamb, his fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.\n00:40:00\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo it helped to have a recording that was familiar, the Lord’s prayer, for instance, was another recording that was often used to sort of demonstrate the phonograph.\n00:40:13\tAudio Recording:\tIn the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen. Hallowed Father who art in Heaven…\n00:40:18\tMatthew Rubery:\tBut that was when people heard these verses read aloud, they could recognize them clearly. Whereas if they heard something unfamiliar, it’d be a lot more difficult for them to actually hear what was being said. So some of the earliest recordings then started out with just snippets of nursery rhymes, a verse or two of poetry, maybe a short speech from a play, and these all sort of fit the earliest sound recording devices, which could only record up to two or three minutes. But they work great, too, for public demonstrations where the phonographic knowledge had been taken around to places and debuted in different cities. And let’s say a scrap of verse might be read, a speech might be recorded as well, some funny noises by the exhibitor might be made, a little bit of music too, to get the sense of the variety of things that could be done with these, these phonographs. That was what happened in 1878 when the photograph first came out, and it wasn’t until about 10 years later that we get to send in the more literary recordings or serious exhibitions. So the phonographs sort of disappears for 10 years after that.\n00:41:24\tJason Camlot:\tYou weren’t wonna make a recording of paradise lost or a full length play or novel because it would have required many hundreds of wax cylinders to do so. Early on when he first introduced the phonograph, Edison had bragged in some newspaper articles about soon having Charles Dickens’ novel, Nicholas Nickleby, on a single audio record.\n00:41:48\tMatthew Rubery:\tThe main thing holding back audio books or full length audio books is what we talked about earlier. The fact that records could only hold two or three minutes of sound up until the 1930s. And it’s not until 1934 that the technology is capable of recording an entire full length book on a set of discs, let’s say nine or 10 records for an average novel. So that’s a big change from a few decades earlier when, you know, Mark Twain once tried to record one of his novels using these wax cylinders that could only hold a few minutes of speech, and he got up to I think about 40 or so and then just gave up because it just wasn’t going to work. There were way too many cylinders needed to make a literary recording. But in the 1930s radio, the radio industry and organizations representing blind people start collaborating to come up with a way to make the record record as much as 20 minutes of speech on each side of a disc. And once that breakthrough is made, that enables the first full length recorded books to be made. And interestingly enough, they’re not made for sighted people, the first recorded books are made for blind people beginning in 1934.\n00:43:04\tAudio Recording:\tTyphoons by Joseph Conrad written in 1903, recorded for the Talking Book Library for the blind by kind permission of the trustees to the estate of the late Joseph Conrad. Chapter one.\n00:43:18\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo it’s a rare example of people with disabilities receiving a technology in advance of everyone else. And it’s not until about 10 years later, until 1948, that those LP records, long playing records, go on the commercial market.\n00:43:32\tJason Camlot:\tSo the forms of early spoken recordings were necessarily short and the audio texts produced were either abridged versions of longer works or ingeniously condensed synecdotal instances or scenes that evoked a larger work from which they came. What actual genres of spoken recording did these media constraints make possible? You couldn’t hear a whole Dickens novel on a cylinder, but you might hear a minor character addressing you as if you are a character yourself in such a novel, giving you the feeling that you were listening to a Dickens character as if he were a real person and as if you were a fictional character.\n00:44:08\tAudio Recording:\tAh, my dear [inaudible] come in come in. I am rejoiced to see you at this [inaudible] moment. Oh and my dear regal friend, [inaudible], now, welcome to this–\n00:44:25\tJason Camlot:\tOr you might get a key transformation scene taken from the play adaptation of a novel to stand in for the novel as a whole, as if somehow Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde could be boiled down to the moment when the professional and respectable Jekyll or Jeekul, as the recording puts it, loses control and transforms into the atavistic monster Hyde.\n00:44:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Chiming bells.] … that terrible night when, transformed as I was into that fiend incarnate Hyde, I murdered the father of the woman I loved. [Organ music.] Ah, I must pray—Pray God to keep away the demons. Ah, God, look into my heart and forgive my sins. You were right. I was wrong. Ah, ah the fiend is coming. Yes. Hyde is here! [Shrill throaty noises.] Stop that damned organ! The noise offends me ears! [Cackling laughter.] [Knocking.] They come for me! They’re going to take me to the gallows! [High tempo organ music.] But I don’t die on the gallows…\n00:45:28\tJason Camlot:\tOr George du Maurier’s best-selling late Victorian novel, Trilby, could be summed up by the scene in which the treacherous and antisemitically-rendered musical genius and mesmerist Svengali mesmerises the innocent Trilby.\n00:45:46\tAudio Recording:\tThe day will come when I shall be the famous Svengali, and hundreds of beautiful women shall fall in love with me — Prinzessin and Contessen and Serene English Altessen. But Svengali will not look at them. He will look inward at his own dream. And that dream shall be all about Trilby — to lay his heart, his genius, his thousand francs at her beautiful white feet. And you shall see nothing, hear nothing, thinking nothing but Svengali, Svengali…\n00:46:20\tJason Camlot:\tWhile no sound recording offers a transparent or unmediated record of a performance event, early sound recordings demanded greater accommodation of the affordances of the recording technology and preservation media than those made after the widespread use of tape recording. So we can’t separate a discussion of the kinds of recordings made in the first decades of sound recording from the technologies and media formats that were used to make them. That said, there were a great variety of genres of recordings made during the acoustic era of sound recording. Looking back to the beginning and the kinds of recordings that were made can help us try to understand why people were interested in these recordings, why they bought them, when they became commercially available, and what they may have meant to the people who listened to them.\n00:47:07\tLisa Gitelman:\tWhen a recorded sound first came into existence. The way people had to understand it was on its merits, in a sense, in relation to older technology, right? When a new technology comes along and the only way you can grapple with it is to look backward., and looking backward from recorded sound in the 1870s was really to think about text, was really to think about reading and writing and what we now think of as all the alternatives to recorded sound.\n00:47:38\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Lisa Gitelman again.\n00:47:39\tLisa Gitelman:\tA bunch of people signed up with this company, this exhibition company. A lot of them were journalists. Again, going back to the idea that this was somehow about writing and reading. But they were entertainers too, and in my research I just became kind of fascinated with newspaper accounts of these demonstrations. And they all, I mean, weirdly, they all seem to take something of a similar form. When people were faced with this recording device in small audiences or even large concert halls they tended to mimic to the machine to recite nursery rhymes, little scraps of Shakespeare, little tidbits of things they already had memorized, lots of kind of mimicry and animal noises and, I won’t say farting into the machine, but so that kind of mentality, it was a kind of, you know, low brow bonding, if you will, over the potential of this machine\n00:48:39\tPatrick Feaster:\tHistories of the commercial recording industry tend to focus on music, but really the spoken word was a very important part of what it had to offer from the very beginning.\n00:48:47\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Patrick Feaster again.\n00:48:49\tPatrick Feaster:\tMoreover, there were a few different types of recordings that featured spoken language very, very prominently. Some recordings were relatively straightforward recitations of existing, often well-known literary works, somewhat more common than this where recordings in which a performer would take on some particular persona, often an ethnic character, and perform a monologue in that character, usually humorous. A number of different ethnicities were represented. A performer, Will N. Steel specialized in a Jewish character named Einstein.\n00:49:28\tAudio Recording:\t[inaudible] my boy Ikie is a bright boy. Some day he shall set the moon on fire [inaudible]\n00:49:35\tPatrick Feaster:\tFrank Kennedy had a German character named Schultz.\n00:49:38\tAudio Recording:\tChildren are a necessary evil. There’s many different kinds of children. For instance, there’s the good boy, who goes to Sunday school when it grows up he becomes cashier in a bank and he finally skips to Canada with all the money he can get a hold of.\n00:49:53\tPatrick Feaster:\tBest known example of this type was a performer named Cal Stewart whose character Uncle Josh Weathersby was enormously popular for about 20 years.\n00:50:06\tAudio Recording:\tWell sure, we’ve just had our annual camp meeting at Punkin Center.\n00:50:11\tPatrick Feaster:\tThis was a character from rural New England who would tell about his naive blunders visiting New York city. Or sometimes he’d talk about things that happened back home in Punkin Center.\n00:50:26\tAudio Recording:\tIt was a great affair. Wow. For several days we was pretty busy baking and cooking and making preparations.\n00:50:35\tPatrick Feaster:\tThen there’s a third category of more elaborate productions in much the same spirit as later radio drama or radio comedy where you have multiple characters performing sound effects, music, all fitting together to convey some story through sound.\n00:50:53\tAudio Recording:\tMorning [inaudible]. Morning [inaudible] Don’t you know me? Wait ’til I take off my whiskers. We’ll i’ll be darned if it ain’t the constable. What be ya doin’ up outside? Doin’ up? Detectivin’! That’s what I’m doin’ up.\n00:51:08\tPatrick Feaster:\tBut this was done with the phonograph, much earlier examples of this stating back well into the 1890s. Not all early phonographic audio theater was humorous. There were serious examples including a dramatization of the San Francisco earthquake, reenactments of battles in the Spanish American war, one piece by Ada Jones and Len Spencer called House Cleaning Time\n00:51:37\tAudio Recording:\tLet me in. [inaudible] don’t you dare come in without drying your feet on the mat. Why, woman my feet are so wet you couldn’t dry them on the stove! Well, come in then.\n00:51:41\tPatrick Feaster:\tIs really more of a sentimental piece, an old couple reminiscing about their lives together, but a majority of it is humorous and a very large proportion of it involves ethnic humour.\n00:51:59\tAudio Recording:\tGood morning Miss Riley, how are ya this morning?\n00:52:02\tPatrick Feaster:\tThere were practical reasons for this, much the same as the practical reasons that made ethnic humour so popular in other venues on the Vaudeville Stage in high dialect pieces published as filler in newspapers. Invoking an ethnic stereotype meant you didn’t have to spend any time on character development.\n00:52:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Inaudible] for you Mrs Riley, my husband and I have been married for two long years.\n00:52:34\tPatrick Feaster:\tBy taking on an Irish stage dialect, a black stage dialect, a German or so-called Dutch stage dialect, any one of a number of different conventionalised ways of speaking, but as soon as you adopt one of these conventionalised dialects, you can take for granted that your audience will make certain assumptions about the character you’re representing and will understand what’s going on based on them. And if all you have to work with is a short slot on a Vaudeville schedule, a few lines of space in a newspaper or two to three minutes of sound recording, then this type of efficiency can be very valuable.\n00:53:22\tJason Camlot:\tPart four: why early spoken recordings are important for understanding of the longer history of audio books, sound recording, and performance today. When I say that early sound recordings are weird, maybe what I’m really saying is that recordings from the early period of the technology can teach us a lot about those of subsequent periods. The fact that we are estranged from the content media and methods of performance in early sound recordings help us see and hear the elements that are less obvious to us in the case of recordings and media that we take for granted today. When we think about literary history by engaging with sound archives, it requires us to think about how the recordings that document the performance of literary texts, conversations, and activities were made and used and how the media and methods of production shaped the audio documents we can hear today. When tape recording became widely accessible in the 1960s with people carrying portable Wollensak and Uher reel-to-reel tape recorders around, they still weighed like 20 pounds, so not quite so portable as an audio cassette Walkman, a mini disc recorder, or an iPhone still when they were carrying these Wollensak and Uhers around, suddenly live readings that lasted an hour or more could be captured and listened to in another time and place.\n00:54:55\tAudio Recording:\tIt’s the sort of thing we do in Vancouver, like we sit down and read the whole book and this was published the same day as Dan Persky’s The Day, a book called The Day and uh it’s about the same length, about a hundred pages and he read The Day and then we took a break and I read Autobiology and then we took a break of a couple of hours and then he read The Day again.\n00:55:17\tJason Camlot:\tWe know that literary readings lasting hours did take place in the 19th century too, there are newspaper reports about that. But there were no reel-to-reel tape recorders back then. Our audible history of the literary past is shaped, in part, by the material nature of the media and archives we have today. Early recordings help us understand that about all subsequent media recordings, even the seemingly invisible digital formats like MP3 files. The difference between digital audio media and the analog and acoustic media technologies is pretty significant. For one thing, analog media capture sound in one continuous stream, and in that sense represent a kind of material index of the original sound event, it records. Digital media, on the other hand, capture microcosmic slices, samples according to a bit rate or frequency data that allows us to rehear the past events, rehear the past events, the past events. They certainly sound as clear or clear to us than all previous analog media and they can record sound events for than any previous material medium, just depends on how much hard drive storage space you have. But there are missing spaces in the documented temporal event in digital audio files that aren’t there in analog recordings. Maybe that makes a difference. Born digital recordings or digitized recordings of the past, turn literary sound into a new kind of data with its own remarkable affordances. We can control, analyze and listen to such audible data in a greater variety of ways than we could with earlier audio media technologies. It’s now very easy to record, store, entire novels on portable devices and to replay them in a variety of places, in the kitchen, walking the dog at the gym, driving to work, and to replay them in different ways. For example, the difference in speeds without changing pitch of the reader’s voice. Speed listening has been around since the 1930s at least recent work by Matthew Rubery, Jonathan Sterne and Mara Mills has shown this. But digital media make possibilities for the manipulation of the human voice, virtually infinite.\n00:57:33\tAudio Recording:\tA set of drum rondos from synth loops in the cyborg opera. [beatboxing]\n00:57:42\tJason Camlot:\tMe may admire an avant garde poet’s performance of synthetic sounds, like Christian Bök vocalizing drum loops in a movement from a cyborg opera, as evidence of ingenuity and virtuosity in performance\n00:57:56\tAudio Recording:\t[beatboxing]\n00:57:58\tJason Camlot:\tBut really, with digital media plugins, what can’t the human voice sound like or do? Since the end of the 19th century, each phase of media history, performance history, literary history, and socio-cultural history has come with audible recordings of the human voice for us to decipher. By Listening to these recorded voices and all their sonic historicity. We can begin to understand the meaning of human expression as an auditory phenomenon, which is to say as a relational human phenomenon.\n00:58:37\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:58:39\tJason Camlot:\tWhat methods of listening, what audile techniques – to use a phrase from Jonathan Sterne’s book, The Audible Past – have we developed to help us decipher this remarkable audible archive? That’s a big and important question that I’m going to save for a future Spoken Web podcast. In the meanwhile, why not hop onto LibriVox or Audible and have a listen to the complete works of Charles Dickens.\n00:59:13\tAudio Recording:\tA tale of two cities by Charles Dickens. Book one, ‘recalled to life.’ Book one, chapter one, ‘the period.’ It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.\n00:59:46\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n01:00:06\tHannah McGregor:\tSpoken Web is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Cheryl Gladu and Jason Camlot. Our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller, and Matthew Rubery for their candid interviews and continued contributions to Spoken Web. An extra special thank you to everyone who joined us for last months’ #spokenwebpod listening party in celebration of our inaugural episode. Add your voice to the mix on Twitter with #spokenwebpod. To find out more about Spoken Web visits, spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the spoken web podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. If you love us, let us know. Please rate and leave a comment on iTunes or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds."],"score":2.6319342},{"id":"9280","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S1E3, Invisible Labour, 2 December 2019, Sallam and Shearer"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invisible-labour/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Karis Shearer","Nour Sallam"],"creator_names_search":["Karis Shearer","Nour Sallam"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nour Sallam\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/e202a10c-3703-4bcd-b7ad-a2766139698c/sw-ep3-invisible-labour_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep3-invisible-labour_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"37:20\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"34.2 MB\",\"bitrate\":\"128kbps\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3\",\"title\":\"sw-ep3-invisible-labour_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invisible-labour/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-12-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invisible-labour/\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/123757617\",\"venue\":\"University of British Colombia AMP Lab\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.94217525\",\"longitude\":\"49.94217525,-119.39902819775307\"}]"],"Address":["3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Colombia AMP Lab"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Tallman, Warren. “[Warren Tallman reading Walt Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’].” N.d. Home recording. Reel-to-reel tape. SpokenWeb at UBC Okanagan, SoundBox Collection, Warren Tallman fonds, 2012.002.005.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549483421696,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["From archival work to domestic and care work or the hidden labour behind the podcast you’re listening to right now… invisible labour is everywhere. That is, the work and the people not always seen from the outside or valued in our day to day lives. This month we reflect on the often invisible (or inaudible) labour entangled in the SpokenWeb archives. The SpokenWeb team at University of British Columbia Okanagan invite us to listen in to the personal stories of labour hidden behind the tapes found in their SoundBox Collection – in its digitization, editing and creative-critical action that bring these archives to life.\n\nOur producers this month are the members of the SpokenWeb UBC Okanagan AMP Lab with audio production by Nour Sallam and Karis Shearer with additional audio courtesy of the SoundBox collection. Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab.ok.ubc.ca and stay tuned for more AMP podcast magic coming soon to SpokenWeb. A special thank you to AMP members Karis Shearer, Craig Carpenter, Megan Butchart, Evan Berg and Lauren St. Clair for their candid interviews and contributions to this episode.\n\n00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web Podcast stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Okay. Picture an archive. What do you see? Maybe it looks like the library in Beauty and the Beast, all soaring shelves and rolling ladders or maybe you’re imagining Gandalf the Grey blowing dust off crumpled parchment tomes in a stone room lit only by a single candle or, okay, maybe you’ve actually been in an archive, so you’re picturing stacks of numbered boxes and metal rolling carts and maybe that pair of white gloves you have to wear before turning the pages. But whatever you’re imagining right now, ask yourself, how did those boxes get there? Who labeled and cataloged and stored them? Who collected and organized those books and oil, those ladder wheels? Who’s been preserving those dusty old tomes until a wizard gets to them. Archival work, domestic and care work, even the labor of editing and scripting and production behind the podcast you’re listening to right now; invisible labor is everywhere and we absolutely can’t talk about archives without talking about what kind of labor goes into curating and preserving our cultural history. This month our Spoken Web team members reflect on the often invisible or inaudible labor entangled in the Spoken Web archives. The Spoken Web team at university of British Columbia Okanagan invite us to listen in to the personal stories of labour hidden behind the tapes found in their SoundBox collection, in its digitization, editing and creative critical action that bring these archives to life. Here is Karis Shearer and the UBCO team with episode three: Invisible Labour.\n02:36\tKaris Shearer:\tMy name is Karis Shearer and I’m a professor at UBC Okanagan where I teach poetry, I teach in the digital humanities, and I’m really interested in literary audio and what, from a feminist perspective, we’re able to discern or hear around women’s labor in the audio archive. I’m the team lead here at UBC Okanagan on the Spoken Web project and I am working with an amazing team of almost 12 people, I think we’re at now, who’ve been working to process the SoundBox collection. And we bring I think, really interesting strengths as a team in both archiving digitization, literary studies, and research creation. As users or as listeners to audio recordings when we access them online in a digital repository, whether it’s PennSound or Spoken Web, I think often we don’t understand or see the labour that is behind that presentation. That is to say the condition assessment of the tape, the digitization of the tape, the editing of the tape, the making of singles if we’re listening to a single. So that’s what this podcast is going to do is to unpack some of that labour behind the scenes. And so what I wanted to do with this podcast was introduce you to the team behind the recording. So you’re going to hear from some of our team members who will talk about what their contributions are and what they’ve been doing kind of in the collection and the work more broadly, but also with respect to a particular recording – it’s a very special one. So what is the Soundbox collection? It’s a collection of about 166 audio tapes that we have here at UBC Okanagan, housed in the AMP Lab. It’s a really interesting collection because unlike some of the other SpokenWeb collections across the network that were formed around a reading series that took place in usually the 1960s, 70s, 80s, at a particular location. Our collection is not formed around a reading series. It is a collection of very conversational tapes, tapes that were made in the classroom. They’re pedagogical recordings, sometimes they’re interviews, they’re often very informal, and they’re messy tapes because there’s a lot going on in them. People are listening to the television, they’re talking over top of each other, they’re at various distances from the reel-to-reel machine or the tape deck. And that makes them challenging to work with, but also very, very interesting. The tape collection, the SoundBox collection that is, came to me through Jodey Castricano, who’s a colleague of mine. I had been sort of talking about how excited I was about the work that was happening with PennSound, and that I knew was just sort of in the process of starting at Concordia, which would become SpokenWeb and how I was hoping to, you know, create a similar archive of audio recordings. And Jodey said to me, she said, “Just a second, I need to go to my basement and get something for you.” And she came up with a cardboard box and in that cardboard box was a collection of tapes that had been given to her by a professor from UBC named Warren Tallman. And Warren Tallman had given those to her in the early 1990s and said, “Someday you’re going to know what to do with these.” And Jodey said to me, “I think, I think this is it.”\n06:14\tAudio Recording:\tFlood-tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high – I see you also face to face. / Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! / On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious. / Flood tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high – I see you also face to face. / Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! / On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose.\n07:20\tKaris Shearer:\tSo the clip that you’ve just heard is an interesting example of something that’s come out of the collection. I talked about the collection being conversational and having many voices on it. In this particular clip we have just Warren Tallman and he’s reading a Walt Whitman’s poem called ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.’ What we hear first though is Tallman recording the poem solo voice and then it seems that he recorded over top of that initial recording. We still have about 20 seconds of the first one, but he recorded over top of it and created a new type of recording where he’s playing Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in the background. So we have music, we have voice, Tallman’s voice, merge together and it’s this beautiful kind of cadence that he’s timed the poem in a way that works very beautifully with the music. What do we know about this recording? We know that Tallman made this recording roughly around 1966 or ’67, we have that labeled on the box and one of the other recordings on the tape is made in 1966. We also know that Tallman was teaching a Walt Whitman graduate course around that time. In his retirement speech, he says “In 1967 I taught a graduate Walt Whitman course. We put on a Walt Whitman reading, really a group effort if there ever was one, so I gave identical first-class marks to each and all 12 participants.” So we obviously need to do more research. You know, we have lots of questions about this tape, what don’t we know. We don’t know for sure that this was connected to that course, but I think it probably was. I suspect that what we’re hearing is him practicing the type of reading and reading aloud that he was inviting his students to do. We also know from other students in his class that reading aloud was a really important pedagogical approach that he took to reading poetry. So he often made students read over and over again to figure out particular stresses and ways of performing poetry. So it seems to me that this is very likely linked to that, and the idea of adding music is a curious thing. Why Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins? Why that music? I hope that we’ll see scholars coming out of music history and theory approaching this and thinking about the relationship between ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ and what we know about Whitman and that particular recording. I’d also really like to know what recording are we listening to? What version of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins are we hearing here. We know for example that Tallman was recording the poem on his reel-to-reel deck. He can’t be using the same reel to reel deck to play Bach. So does he have a record player in the room with him? He has another device that he’s playing the music on. So you can do some work to narrow down what recording or what version of that music he’s playing in the background, and that’s really interesting to me. The other thing that we hear on this recording, which I find fascinating, is the technology. We hear technology making itself present. Warren Tallman moves a little bit too close, I think, to the mic at a certain point and we hear the feedback, early on in the second part of the second recording. We also know that he hasn’t fully erased the tape when he’s gone to tape over, so we also hear voices and the, and the things that were recorded on the magnetic tape in the past, kind of bleeding through in the present recordings. So we hear other voices that weren’t meant to be necessarily part of that and it has a kind of a ghostly effect. So there’s much to say about recording technology as we’re listening to this tape.\n11:21\tCraig Carpenter:\tMy name is Craig Carpenter. I’m a poet, a freelance journalist, and a sound engineer. I stumbled onto the Spoken Web project when I interviewed a former student of Karis’s for a short profile I was writing for UBC Okanagan. The story focuses on how Lee Hannigan’s graduate work with Spoken Web began with a work study project digitizing the UBCO SoundBox collection. I was immediately intrigued by the project and emailed Karis asking if there was any way I could be of assistance. Aside from my audio background I mentioned in the early nineties I was a student of Robert Hogg’s who had been a member of the TISH poetry collective in the 60s at UBC. Turns out Bob had recently donated quite a number of cassettes to the collection and he and Karis were quite close. So we met and I started helping out refining the digitization process, suggesting equipment and helping with training and the creation of a digitization module. Because I’m old enough to actually remember editing on magnetic tape, I knew stuff like how to thread the reel-to-reel and I was really keen to listen to these old tapes. So I immediately got to work. We had discovered a lot of the Tallman reels were recorded at an odd speed and after some research figured out that the machine these tapes were recorded on used an unusually slow speed that was meant for speech. And our machine, and actually hardly any machines have this speed when we play them back they sounded like chipmunks. With this particular reel of Tallman reading Whitman, it was one of the first I helped digitize and I was explaining to Karis this work around, I was figuring out how we were going to, you know, slow these chipmunks down. And I noticed faintly in pencil on this reel box the word Whitman. And our machine you can switch from playing tracks one and two to tracks three and four, and so I hit that button switching to tracks three and four, and that’s when we heard the speed shift to, you know, regular speed and the unmistakable voice of Warren Tallman come in. And then this warble of classical music swelling up beneath him and Karis was like, “Whoa, what’s that?” And at first I thought maybe the reel wasn’t properly erased. I remember we used to have these big magnets that you’d flip a switch and you’d zap the reels to erase them, and if you didn’t leave them on the magnet long enough they’d leave these sort of ghost recordings. But that wasn’t the case, and with this one, and Karis’s sort of eyes widening. She says, “No, he’s recording himself, reading to the music and he’s reading in perfect time.” And so I turned it up and we both sat there a little bit awestruck at what we were hearing. It was just so beautiful. And there was this added element to how we discovered it so unexpectedly. But what was really interesting is it’s him reading Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ a poem where Whitman imagines a future where people would be experiencing what he’s seeing. “The men and women I saw were all near me, others the same others who look back on me because I looked forward to them…” And we were both looking at each other jaws dropping eyes, getting wider because really felt like Tallman had recorded it knowing that more than half a century later we would discover this recording. I mean, he was likely making it for his students, but in some way it really felt like he was reciting it to us and that we were looking back on him now because he had looked forward to us just as Whitman says in the poem. So there’s this really special sort of chance-becoming-kinetic kind of feeling with this recording. In terms of the work done on the file to improve the sound, I tried not to do too much because I never want to overprocess anything. But so people can more easily listen without straining I did a few things in post-production on this recording a few more things than I usually would. At times it was difficult to hear what Tallman recites over the music. He’s probably playing the music on a record player and using his tape machine to record with a dynamic microphone and you could hear him getting closer and further away from the mic at times. I did some EQing and I used some very light noise reduction, and then compression. And often with restoring audio, if you do too much, you lose too much coloration, you know, you pull out too many of the frequencies and you lose sort of the presence and the ambient kind of feeling that adds a unique quality to the recordings. Of course with these tapes, we always want to keep a master that will be like a mirror for archival sake. But for the sake of listening back and for presenting the audio to audiences I used, on this one, I used a convolution reverb to bring back some of that presence, which was lost with the noise reduction, and that’s not a usual thing I do, but it’s just something in this case I thought I’d try. It was a new plugin that uses this technique where they shouldn’t impulse through the space that they want to recreate. And in this case, I believe it was a church in Chicago. The jury’s out whether or not it necessarily sounds that much better, but it’s definitely easier on the ears than the original one, which is what we’re going for and hopefully not losing too much of that analog character.\n17:18\tAudio Recording:\tFlood-tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high. I see you also face to face. / Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, How curious you are to me. / On the ferry boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose, / And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations than you might suppose. / The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day, / The simple compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, / every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme, / The similitudes of the past and those of the future, / The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, / on the walk in the street and the passage over the river, / The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away, / The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, / The certainty of others, the life, love, sight hearing of others.\n18:50\tMegan Butchart:\tMy name is Megan Butchart and I am a BA student at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. I joined the SpokenWeb project as an undergraduate research assistant in May, 2018 and one of my main roles on the project has been to catalog the SoundBox collection, which is a collection of tapes held at the UBCO branch of Spoken Web. The SpokenWeb collection is sort of unique among the SpokenWeb network in the sense that it’s not really connected to a university library or special collections archive, but rather was a collection of audio recordings which were gifted to Dr. Karis Shearer by various poets and colleagues. And so as a result, it was never organized or cataloged in the same way that most of the other collections in SpokenWeb were, and so one of the first things I did when I came onto the project was to organize the recordings into fonds, which are collections of artifacts that come from the same source, and so in our case donors. And you know, assess the conditions of the tapes and from there I work to create item level descriptions for each recording. So in the early stages most of the collection was not digitized, and so I sort of began by doing a survey of the collection and cataloging whatever information could be learned from the physical artifact itself. So the box, the label on the cassette or reel or any accompanying material. And I really just created a really simple spreadsheet with categories that I felt would be sort of useful in describing these artifacts, so that included sort of administrative metadata, which sort of recorded the relationships between the tapes and the donors and creators. And then I also created sort of descriptive sorts of metadata, so things like the title, date speakers sort of anyone just connected with the making of the tape, venue, checklists, contents, recording medium tape brand, et cetera. And this is something which grew and evolved as I learned more about sort of different playing speeds and different categories of metadata for audio recordings. Anyway, this was the first stage in cataloging the collection, but as I quickly discovered, while this is fine to get a sort of overview of the collection listening is absolutely imperative to generating accurate metadata for these types of objects, which are quite opaque, sort of in and of themselves. As, you know, we found out things have sometimes been mislabeled or perhaps have been recorded over and then original labels haven’t been changed. And so you can’t just take what the object says sort of at face value. So for example, with this particular recording of Warren Tallman reading Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, it was recorded at the end of a tape that has a recording of a bill bissett poetry reading. And in very faint pencil on the back of the box that holds this tape, it says something which is kind of cryptic, it just says ‘music dash voice Whitman experiment’ which in and of itself could kind of mean anything. So now that we are in the process of digitizing the collection at UBC Okanagan I’m going back and sort of filling in those gaps now that we can actually hear what are on these tapes. And this time, you know, I’m using the much more robust metadata schema that SpokenWeb has developed for cataloging tapes, and entering that information into the metadata ingest system or database that SpokenWeb has developed called SWALLOW at the beginning of using the SpokenWeb metadata schema a few of the challenges that arose really had to do with using a sort of standardized set of metadata categories when our collection, you know, had significant differences from many of the other collections in the Spoken Web network. And so something I kind of discovered early on is that the tapes in the SoundBox collection are, in many ways they’re quite amateurish and they’re kind of casually produced. So for example, they’re not, you know, sort of official finite recordings of an official finite reading series, in which each tape holds sort of a single recording of one event, but instead the collection contains many home recordings and sort of things like audio collage. And so very often these recordings are sort of casual conversations among poets or informal living room readings, recordings of lectures, or simply, you know, a collage of audio clips, either from poets reading, or from, you know, the radio. And so one of the challenges of creating descriptive metadata for this particular collection was navigating sort of challenges that were inherent to these types of unpredictable and sort of multiple recordings. And so the bill bissett Warren Tallman reading Walt Whitman tape is a great example of this sort of challenge, you know, we have two very different types of recordings in terms of content, and so the context in which each were made, but they were held on the same tape. And so the bill bissett recording is a public poetry reading, the Warren Tallman is a home recording, you know, and he’s got classical music playing in the background while reading the poem. And so really all of this has been a huge learning process for me, but I’ve also found the work really exciting.\n24:29\tEvan Berg:\tSo my name is Evan Berg. I hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UBC Okanagan majoring in visual art and minoring in art history and visual culture. I also hold a documentary film certificate from Capilano University. I became involved in the SpokenWeb project because Karis Shearer, who’s the director, the AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, and the leader on the SpokenWeb at UBC Okanagan was aware of my work within the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, as she thought that some of my skills would lend themselves to some of the challenges that they were facing within the lab. Some of those skills involved photography video, both filming and editing and graphic design work. So I was brought on as kind of a ‘do-everything’ person, I didn’t have a necessarily specific role, but one of the ideas was that I would be doing creative engagement within the lab and be able to take on a variety of different tasks that were given to me. Some of those were documenting the archives. So taking documentary photos of our archival objects so that we could catalogue them online. Other things were working with Caitlin Voth and being mentored by Myron Campbell in the design process of both the logo for the Spoken Web project as well as internal logos for the AMP Lab and producing video content. Karis had put a lot of emphasis on creative engagement with the archive in terms of trying to mobilize these archival objects, past just being that, exactly that, archival objects or just sound pieces that would exist online for kind of research purposes. But she wanted some more creative engagement, and so one of the things that I was commissioned to do was focused on a recording by Warren Tallman in which he is reading a Walt Whitman poem called ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.’ And when I first heard the poem it just struck me as being very cinematic, and so I thought that it lent itself very well to some of the stuff that I was doing with video. With this work, I was really thinking about time, and also in the poem itself, Whitman’s poem, it’s discussing kind of these almost mundane moments in life, but then relating them to this kind of much larger universal theme of just human experience. And he’s also talking about people hundreds of years from the point in which he is crossing the Brooklyn ferry, and thinking about the people a hundred years from now who will be doing the same thing. Just thinking of this thread of time of Whitman in the 1800’s, Tallman in the 1960s and then myself in 2019 and kind of adding to this layering where Whitman started the poem, Tallman reads it again, but he’s kind of putting himself into this space – like you can hear the space of the room. He’s adding other kind of artistic elements to this recording by playing Bach in the background, which added a really cinematic feel to the recording. And so I wanted to kind of add myself to this archive And so what I did was I drew on my own experience of never having crossed the Brooklyn ferry, but having lived in North Vancouver and taking the SeaBus from North Vancouver into Vancouver, and that kind of experience that resonated with me when listening to this recording. So this, this poem that is very much about a shared human experience and that was my relation to that human experience of ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.’ And so what I did was in a very short amount of time, just a few days in Vancouver, I went out each evening at kind of sunset and I crossed the SeaBus from Vancouver to North Vancouver and back to Vancouver and back to North Vancouver and back to Vancouver multiple times as the sun was setting. And I recorded, I filmed various people taking this trip.\n29:25\tAudio Recording:\tThe similitudes of the past and those of the future, The glories strung like beads on my smaller sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river, The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away, The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.\n30:00\tEvan Berg:\tUnless you have a reel-to-reel player and have the tapes themselves, the physical tapes, then you can’t listen to these recordings, and so the entire point was to make them publicly accessible but also searchable so that it was user friendly. People could find these things, download, listen to them, but there’s a great amount of labour that goes into that. Also I think this kind of work can be really beneficial to the SpokenWeb project because first of all, there’s so many hours of recordings on these tapes and so sometimes just making a decision to curate one specific recording and then kind of further its accessibility, because in this case, making a video, adding visuals to this audio piece, I could make it more accessible for some younger people who are constantly consuming visual content online. And I think just making the huge collection less intimidating, it offers an entry point for, a more accessible entry point for people first approaching the SpokenWeb project online and seeing these hundreds of hours of the recordings.\n31:30\tLauren St.Clair:\tMy name is Lauren St. Clair, I’m a third and a half yearin computer science at UBCO. I have an interest in sound field recording and the analog format. What brought me to the AMP Lab was actually one of the Tech Talks, part of the Tech Talk series, which was the tape surgery where you got to actually take apart a tape and then turn it into some sort of art piece based off of collage and then you could break apart the tape. I turned mine into a tape loop. So the main reason I went was just an excuse to break apart a tape and try turning it into a tape for the first time. After that I started attending more AMP Lab events, more Tech Talk series and meetings, and then got involved with the larger SpokenWeb project. Later on, after a couple of months of attending events, I was offered the ability to design the SoundBox collection website, which is the collection part of the Audio Media Poetry Lab here at UBCO. And through that we went through a couple iterations of the actual design itself. What’s supposed to be included on the website is information about the authors, the actual recordings, how to get involved with the AMP Lab and its involvement within the SpokenWeb project. And another focus of the website is to make it accessible and a low barrier entry point for those already interested in the collection or those that are just being introduced to the collection for the first time and don’t know about the SpokenWeb project at all. The iterations were mostly things like we need to include this element, how are we going to focus on making sure people are visible in the website and how are we making sure that they’re visible then in terms of the larger SpokenWeb project, so how do we make community something visible apart of this website when we’re introducing people to the project. So another large focus of this is not only making it accessible, but how do we convey the fact that community and undergraduates and students are a part of this project? So right now we’re on the beta of the website and that we have a list of the SoundBox writers and we also have some featured writers, a part of the SoundBox collection, which will have a photo of them, some information about them, and also an audio file taken from one of the collections that we have apart of the SoundBox collection. And then later on we’re going to expand that where we can go through the recordings of all of the writers that we have, such as Warren Tallman, where people will be able to access the Warren Tallman tape. Right now the Warren Tallman tape is not available on the website, but it will be shortly once we expand our website for more writers and audio files to be available. So you need the digitized files and you need the website, and you can kind of think of it and like a project management framework for one of them has a dependency on the other. So you need at least specific things digitized for your beta website in order to have it up and have those things accessible. But also you need to continue on digitization so that would be an interesting balance. Just stay posted for more information about the website, and for what is to come, there will be more provided online as more things are digitized and more rights are cleared.\n35:15\tHannah McGregor:\tThanks so much everyone for listening to episode three of the Spoken Web Podcast. It’s been such an exciting process for me starting to bring this podcast to life, working with an amazing team across the country, getting the chance to find out what my colleagues are up to at institutions that I haven’t had the opportunity to visit, and also starting to ask the question of how we might use podcast to tell stories about different kinds of research. If you’re listening right now and there are certain kinds of stories or ideas you would really love to hear more about, please get in touch with us and let us know. You can always reach out to us spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com and if you’re part of the Spoken Web project and you’re listening to this right now, maybe consider sending us an episode pitch. Spoken Web is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are the members of the Spoken Web, UBC Okanagan AMP Lab with audio production by Nour Sallam and Craig Carpenter and additional audio courtesy of the SoundBox collection. Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab.ok.ubc.ca and stay tuned for more AMP podcast magic coming soon to Spoken Web a special thank you to AMP members, Karis Shearer, Craig Carpenter, Megan Butchart, Evan Berg and Lauren St. Clair for their candid interviews and contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds."],"score":2.6319342},{"id":"9647","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S1 Trailer, Welcome to SpokenWeb, 18 September 2019, Mcgregor"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/trailer/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creator_names_search":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah Mcgregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/e7410595-5a7c-4602-9105-dfab11d89b95/spokenweb_teaser_draft_2_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"spokenweb_teaser_draft_2_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:01:05\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,043,270 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"spokenweb_teaser_draft_2_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/trailer/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-09-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"contents":["(0:03)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\tCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n(00:16)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like?\n(00:19)\tRoy Kiyooka\tThose possibilities of utterance that is more than parochial.\n(00:25)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?\n(00:28)\tG. McEwen\tPlace the needle in the proper groove and then just let the\nthe record speaks for itself.\n(00:34)\tHannah McGregor\tThis is SpokenWeb, a podcast about how literature sounds. I’m Hannah McGregor and every month I’ll be bringing you stories from across Canada that take us into the archives of our literary history.\n(00:50)\tDorothy Livesay\tMostly, I like to sort of go back over the years and trace the\ndifferent, uh, things.\n(00:56)\tHannah McGregor\tI hope you’ll join us at spokenweb.ca or wherever you get your\npodcasts.\n "],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549762342912,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":2.6319342}]