Ali Barillaro is a first year Master’s student in English Literature at Concordia University. She has previous degrees in both photography and education. Her personal research focuses on deconstructing and reimagining canonical literature, with a particular interest in science fiction. As a member of the SpokenWeb student team, she is involved in the application of the metadata scheme to the SGW Reading Series and would like to research and examine the formal conventions of poetry reading series, while paying particular attention to the treatment of applause in the SGW recordings.

Evan Berg is an emerging artist based in Kelowna, British Columbia. He holds a certificate in Documentary Film Production from Capilano University and is working on a BFA in Visual Art at UBC Okanagan. He is interested in digital cultures and their role in contemporary life. He explores this theme through the mediums of video, sculpture, sound, animation and installation. As an RA for the SpokenWeb project, Evan has produced artistic work and design including co-creation of the SpokenWeb logo. Evan has exhibited work both locally and internationally.

Gregory Betts is a leading scholar on the Canadian avant-garde, the archivization of experimental literature, and the representation of such work in literary histories. He is the author of Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (University of Toronto Press 2013), editor of 8 books of experimental writing in Canada, co-editor of the forthcoming Avant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries (Wilfrid Laurier University Press), and serves as the current Curator of the bpNichol.ca Digital Archive. He is the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies at the University College Dublin and a Professor of English Language and Literature at Brock University.

Megan Butchart is a fourth-year undergraduate student at UBC Okanagan, majoring in English and History. She is interested in the discipline of archival studies, including the physical and digital preservation of archival collections. Her work on the SpokenWeb Project includes processing the SoundBox collection of literary audio recordings and developing pedagogical tools to promote active learning and engagement with the archive.

Jason Camlot (PI and Director) brings extensive experience in the development and management of interdisciplinary, collaborative research teams, expertise in literary sound recordings, and has developed digital artifacts including a sound archive, digital poetry installations, and mobile media apps. He will guide the vision of the program, foster productive working relationships among network participants, help shape and articulate the goals of projects as they are pursued by working groups, facilitate collaboration across institutions, disciplines and communities, advocate for the project in all contexts, and ensure productive and rewarding experiences for students and emerging scholars.

Piyusha Chatterjee is a PhD student in the Individualized Program at Concordia University. Her research interests are oral history theory and practise, political economy of the city, sounds, and media in the public sphere. For SpokenWeb, she is exploring the possibility of using oral history methodology to engage with literary audio recordings digitized in the collections.

Emma Cullen is an MA student in the Department of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include experimental poetry and fiction, narrative theory, digital humanities, material culture, and book history. She is currently working on documenting metadata and conducting archival research for UAlberta’s collection of SpokenWeb audio recordings.

Cecily Devereux brings extensive knowledge of U Alberta’s collection of cassette and reel-to-reel recordings of Canadian writers from her ten years of work in developing and cataloguing that collection.

Jonathan Dick is a Masters student with the Department of English at the University of Toronto whose research is supported by a generous grant from the Social Science and Research Council of Canada. He holds a Bachelor of Arts with Highest Honours from Trinity College and intends to begin his Doctoral work in 2019, following a brief research position at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in April. He is co-author with Dr. Adam Hammond of a chapter on duplication machines, which will be published in the forthcoming Cambridge Critical Concepts: Technology (2019). For SpokenWeb, Jonathan analyzes the use of dialect in works of contemporary American fiction and poetry, investigating how such socially constructed traits as race, class, and sexuality can be codified (or obscured) by a performer’s manipulation of nonsemantic qualities like pitch and pause length.

Klara du Plessis is a poet and first year PhD student at Concordia University. Her research will focus on the curation of English-language reading series that took place in Montreal over the past 50 years. Currently, she is processing the Vehicule Art Inc. reading series archives for SpokenWeb and compiling initial research findings on the anxiety of technological mediation at readings, and, potentially, the sociological framing of mediocrity through poetry performance.

Patrick Feaster, Media Preservation Specialist for Media Digitization and Preservation at Indiana U, Bloomington, Co-Founder of the First Sounds Initiative, and immediate Past President of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, contributes significant expertise in the history and digital study of historical spoken recordings.

Ian Ferrier brings expertise in coordination and collaboration among literary community organizations relevant to our program.

Deanna Fong is a PhD candidate in English at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where her research focuses on the intersections of auditory media, event theory, literary communities, and affective labour. With Ryan Fitzpatrick and Janey Dodd, she co-directs the audio/multimedia archive of Canadian poet Fred Wah, and has done substantial cataloguing and critical work on the audio archives of Japanese-Canadian poet and painter Roy Kiyooka. She is the Student Representative on the SpokenWeb Governing Board and a part of the Metadata Task Force. She is also cataloguing the “Readings in B.C.” collection of audio recordings at SFU Special Collections.

Bio coming soon.

Carole Gerson brings extensive knowledge of Canadian literature and Canadian book history, and experience in the creation of Canadian digital heritage resources pertaining to these fields to our research program.

Adam Hammond brings expertise in computational humanities and literary modernism.

Bio coming soon.

Geoff Harder contributes expertise in digitization, archiving, digital repositories, and research data management.

Bio coming soon.

Bio coming soon.

Smaro Kamboureli brings expertise in the areas of Canadian literature, postcolonial and diaspora studies, and theory to our program.  She will initiate research on diasporic voices in literary archives of recorded sound. She is the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto.

Bio coming soon.

Jakob Knudsen is an undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University majoring in First Nations Studies and minoring in Legal Studies. He is of Métis, Danish, Stó:lō, and Dakelh ancestry. He is interested in the perpetuation of colonial ideology and neoliberal hegemony in progressive discourse via Eurocentric thought. He is interested in the development of Trickster methodologies of reading and writing as a means to subvert the contradictions of reconciliatory rhetoric towards restitution and justice for Indigenous peoples. He is currently archiving metadata of the Hartmut Lutz Collection – recordings of lectures, readings, and interviews with Indigenous thinkers and artists from the 1970’s to 1990’s. Jakob lives and work on unceded Indigenous territory belonging to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skxwú7mesh (Squamish), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwitlem) peoples. The settler colony of British Columbia was created using various forms of strategic violence and dispossession, which has structured our society and created lasting injustices that today persist. He acknowledges that, in the present, new forms of colonial violence and dispossession continue to be established on these territories.

Bio coming soon.

Bio coming soon.

Sean Luyk will work to digitize, preserve, and provide access to U Alberta audio and contribute to research on the use of audio recordings in virtual research environments.

Marit MacArthur contributes expertise in voice studies with a focus on the quantification and perception of performative speech patterns and the development and use of digital tools for the analysis of audiotexts.

Cole Mash is a PhD student Simon Fraser University in the English department. His poetry has been published in Forget Magazine, The Eunoia Review, Papershell, and OK Magpie and his critical work has been published in Scholarly and Research Communication. He has worked on a number of major digital research projects as both RA and investigator. He is co-executive director of non-profit organization The Inspired Word Café and Managing Director of Kelowna Poetry Slam. His work centres on Performance Poetry in the traditions of Spoken Word and Slam, and their exclusion from the critical canon. Through digital methods, he hopes to bring that work into the canon whiles simultaneously studying how performance poets notate the paralinguistics of performance onto the page. Currently he is working in the Contemporary Literature Collection (CLC) at SFU’s Special Collections, and cataloguing the current collection of sound.

Brian McFee is Assistant Professor of Music Technology and Data Science at NYU Steinhardt and the NYU Center for Data Science. He holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science (2003) from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and M.S. (2008) and Ph.D. (2012) degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California at San Diego.

His research lies at the intersection of machine learning, signal processing, and information retrieval, with the overarching goal of developing algorithms to expose latent structure in recorded audio. He is an active developer of open source scientific software, and is the primary maintainer of the librosa package for audio content analysis.

Dr. McFee’s primary contribution to the project will be to design and develop materials for a training workshop on computational analysis of spoken word audio recordings.  In service of this, he plans to recruit a student (masters level) to assist with developing materials and software, which will be of general benefit to the project in the long term.

https://bmcfee.github.io/

Hannah McGregor brings expertise in Canadian literature, digital humanities, and podcasting production.

Samuel Mercier is finishing a PhD at the Université du Québec à Montréal on the linguistic divide in Québécois and Canadian literary histories. He published the poetry collection Les Années de guerre (2014) at the Éditions de l’Hexagone and his next book is set to be published next fall. He was Chief Editor of Magazine Spirale, is a nonfiction critic for Lettres Québécoises and a frequent writer for Nouveau Projet. His fields of interest are Québec literature, nationalism studies and cultural history. He will be developing the French archives for SpokenWeb​ while working on a audiotextual history of poetry events in Montreal focusing on francophone performances.

Aurelio Meza is a PhD candidate in Humanities at Concordia University. Along with David Lum he designed and developed the prototype for the PoéticaSonora Digital Audio Repository for Latin American Sound Art and Poetry. He participates in the Metadata Task Force group in SpokenWeb, and is interested in signal processing analysis software like Gentle and Drift.

Bio coming soon.

Nick Mount’s expertise in Canadian letters, and in 1960s Canadian culture, will be invaluable for deciphering the contents of our partner collections. A 3M Teaching Award recipient, and long-time teacher of the course “Literature in Our Time” which integrated readings and conversation with contemporary authors into the curriculum, he will also provide insight on teaching with literary recordings.

Andrea (Annie) Murray (Co-applicant) brings essential expertise in archives, multi-format audio preservation, and student training to the project.

Tomasz Neugebauer brings significant expertise in open digital repositories, information visualization, and open source software development.

Holly Pickering is a Master’s student in Digital Humanities, and Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta, situated on Treaty 6 territory in amiskwaciy (Edmonton, Alberta). She is primarily interested in the relationships between cyberlaw, neoliberalism, and intersectional feminism, particularly with respect to intellectual property and information laws, the open-source movement, and the production of DIY and remixed culture online. She is also interested in the use of critical pedagogy and media literacy, and in the use of libraries as educational and open-source spaces that enable citizens to critically produce and consume media. Currently with SpokenWeb, she is working on problems of collecting and representing metadata in an online portal.

Tony Power’s extensive knowledge of the Contemporary Literature Collection at SFU, including hundreds of hours of literary audio recordings, will contribute to work on the SFU literary audio holdings.

Louis Rastelli (collaborator) brings extensive experience in the development of a community-focused archive, and will contribute to the digital development of ARCMTL’s holdings, as well as to community outreach and dissemination activities.

Matthew Rubery is Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (2016) and editor of Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (2011). He also co-curated “How We Read: A Sensory History of Books for Blind People,” a public exhibition held at the UK’s first annual Being Human festival. He expertise in the history of literature, sound studies, and media history.

Megan Ryland is completing her Master of Arts in Educational Studies at UBC. Her thesis focuses on media and digital literacy, informal learning, Twitter, and hashtag activism. Her work as a research assistant for Dr. Hannah McGregor (SFU) supports the production of a literary podcast that will act as a public platform for distributing the audio and analysis created or surfaced from archives as part of SpokenWeb.

Bio coming soon.

David Seubert, Acting Head of Special Collections at the Davidson Library, UCSB, has served as PI on some of the world’s largest projects of cataloguing, digitizing and preserving analogue sound recordings.  His expertise and extensive experience working with sound recordings in archaic formats represents a vital resource to our program.

Karis Shearer, Director of the Humanities Data Lab and the Poetry Okanagan Sound Archive, contributes necessary expertise is in the areas of Canadian poetry, performance, pedagogy, and media culture.

Bio coming soon.

Felicity Tayler is the E-Research Librarian at University of Ottawa with a portfolio in Research Data Management. She is an occasional visual artist and curator, and has published scholarly writing related to literary archives in anthologies, in Journal of Canadian Art History, Canadian Literature, and Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture.

Bio coming soon.

Miles Thorogood, a creative technologist with a focus on digital audio, will contribute expertise in sound design and in crowd sourcing platforms for audio tagging.

Caitlin Voth holds a Master’s in English with a research focus in print culture and Canadian small and private presses. She is the AMP Lab manager and an RA on the SpokenWeb project who works on branding and design, including the SpokenWeb logo. In her spare time, she works in her own letterpress print shop and runs Bite Harder Press.

Darren Wershler’s expertise in Contemporary Poetics, Media history and theory, digital humanities, copyright, and in questions of digital economy, will be of benefit to critical and digital aspects of the program.

Jason Wiens’ expertise and program work focus on Canadian poetry and teaching with archives.