Ali Azarpanah is a Master student in Digital Humanities at University of Alberta responsible for developing an interface for the web portal.

Shannon Bain has started her new role as a SpokenWeb Graphic/ Web Designer, housed at Concordia University. This role Shannon is an interdisciplinary designer from Montréal. She helps organizations build authentic identities to launch impactful projects, with human-centred design thinking at the heart of all of her work. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Design at Concordia University.

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.

Sadie Barker is a PhD student in English literature at Concordia University and a research assistant for SpokenWeb. She holds an MA in Cultural Studies from McMaster University, where she explored the listening practices and decolonial potentials of spoken word sampling, as a negotiation between text and sound, improvisation and structure. Now, she continues to explore ideas of decolonial sensibility through sonic approaches to text, dialogues surrounding public art, and aesthetic perception in the postcolonial more broadly.

Nick Beauchesne studies the poetics of mysticism and modernist periodical culture as a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is also a poet, vocalist, and performance artist. Nick thoroughly enjoys honing his craft listening to the spectral voices preserved on magnetic tape through the efforts of the SpokenWeb project!

Clint Burnham’s knowledge of modern and avant-garde Canadian poetry and poetics, combined with academic/pedagogical praxis in Marxism/psychoanalysis and digital theory will contribute unique expertise from the perspective of both practitioner and theorist.

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.

Tanya Clement brings necessary expertise in digital sound technologies, data searching and visualization in relation to literary audio corpora, and software development for sound pattern searching.

Stacey Copeland is our Podcast Project Manager and a current Communication Ph.D. student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She received her MA from the Ryerson York joint Communication and Culture graduate program and a BA in Media Production from Ryerson University where she studied with a focus on audio production, sound studies, media culture and gender studies.

Some research areas of interest include feminist media, oral/aural histories, queer cultural studies, media history, sensory ethnography, and cultural heritage.

http://staceycopeland.com/

Digital Arts and Humanities graduate student Craig Carpenter is an AMP Lab Research Assistant and co-producer of the second season of the Soundbox Signals podcast. A storyteller, poet, folk and experimental musician and sound designer, over the past two decades Craig worked as a journalist, production sound mixer, a literary editor, field recordist, foley artist and carnival photographer. A deep interest in the intersection of sound, spirituality, listening and voice, his graduate work will explore through new digital oral histories and archival analog recordings, the influence of the medium of magnetic tape on the 1950s-60s TISH and Black Mountain poets. He currently lives and serves at the Vipassana meditation centre in the mountains outside Merritt, BC.

Rebecca Dowson’s research focus on the intersection of libraries and digital humanities, digital cultural heritage projects, and new forms of scholarly publishing will contribute to these three important areas of the program.

Klara du Plessis is a PhD student in English at Concordia University and the governing board student representative of the SpokenWeb research team. She experiments with a new practice of literary event organization called a Deep Curation, navigating the texts presented and their strategic, thematic arc. Klara’s debut collection of multilingual long poems, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and garnered much critical acclaim. Her second book-length poem, Hell Light Flesh, is forthcoming, September 2020 from Palimpsest Press.

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.

Nina Fesenko is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in English and Communications at Simon Fraser University. Her areas of interest include human impact on the environment, scientific literacy, environmental education, mass consumerism, and political economy.

Al Filreis’s experience in curating and developing PennSound will contribute expertise on the acquisition of hidden collections, and the presentation and use of literary sound recordings in accessible digital environments.

Liz Fischer is a second year PhD student in English at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies medieval literature, the history of text technologies, and digital humanities.

Julie M. Funk is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Victoria. Her research interests are in posthumanism, biopolitics, and biohacking, focusing on digital interventions on body-as-text. She completed her MA in Experimental Digital Media at the University of Waterloo. Julie’s background in English equips her with a critical lens to evaluate rhetorics of remediation, taxonomizing and archiving.

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.

Samantha Greco is a first year MI student at the Faculty of Information, specializing in Archives and Records Management with a collaboration in Book History and Print Culture studies. She has a background in English and Drama Production (sound design), which grounds her research in literature and sound studies. Her research is currently focused on an exploration of the modernist period in relation to digitally archived oral histories to examine how audio artifacts add layers to written texts and play a role in archival memory making. 

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

Stefan Higgins is a Research Assistant for Dr. Jentery Sayers, at the University of Victoria, and a second year MA student in English and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought. His research is at the intersections of cultural studies, new media studies, and image studies. He is currently working on a thesis that intersects a genealogy of “memes” with academic narratives about “science” and “culture.”

Steven High, co-founder of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, has spent numerous years on the development of digital tools that will facilitate the analysis of recorded oral history interviews at varying scales, has developed oral literary history techniques with the PI, and will provide leadership on the oral history component of our program.

Chris Ick is a M.S. candidate at NYU’s Center for Data Science, with a focus in music and audio research. His research experience lies primarily in astrophysical data analysis, and has prior experience writing technical manuals and designing educational experiments within NYU’s undergraduate physics program. He plans to work with Prof. Brian McFee to build training materials for spoken work computational analysis techniques, and will use his history developing tutorials and writing signal analysis code to help further the projects long-term goals.

Manami Izawa is an undergraduate student at Concordia University, pursuing her passion for industrial design. She has professional experience in education and graphic design. Her goal is to help create a better user experience with her background in B.A. of Linguistics, certificate of Pedagogy and Graphic Design.

Bio coming soon.

As Head of Reader Services at Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto, Roma Kail participates in and manages operations and services related to reference, research, instruction, access and circulation. She enjoys working with a diverse range of researchers and learners. Her current research and coursework involves completion of a certificate in Archives and Records Management from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. She enjoys working at Victoria University Library because it is part of a College environment and has a deep and carefully cultivated Special Collections of rare books and archival fonds.

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.

Richard Kim is an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis studying Computer Science and Linguistics. He has experience as a research assistant for the Computational Linguistics Lab under Dr. Kenji Sagae and Language, Multimodal and Interaction Lab under Dr. Zhou Yu. In addition, he worked as a student developer for Data Science Initiative and Information Educational Technology. Currently, Richard is involved in two grant projects, a NEH grant project (Tools for Listening to Text-in-Performance) and a SSHRC Partnership grant project (Spoken Web), designing programs to assist in editing poetry recordings, provide data analysis and visualization, and calculate new methods for analyzing pitch and timing in speech. His research interests include natural language processing, acoustic analysis, and human-computer interaction. In his spare time, he enjoys playing soccer, reading, and taking naps.

Linara is an MA student at Simon Fraser University in the English Department. As a member of the SpokenWeb team, she hopes to combine her interest in Print Culture studies, poetry, and research while working with the extensive collection in SFU Special Collections.

Bio coming soon.

Michelle Levy (Co-applicant), Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab at SFU, brings a strong theoretical background in literary and sound studies, and extensive expertise in data architecture and management that will prove useful for our creation of metadata standards necessary for the aggregation of diverse corpora of recorded literary readings.

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.

Loryl MacDonald will provide expertise in research data management to this research project.

Jennifer McDevitt (she/her) is an MLIS/MA Digital Humanities candidate at the University of Alberta. Her research investigates how rural public libraries might use young adult fiction featuring social activism narratives to engage with youth and empower them to actively create change in their communities. For SpokenWeb, she works on metadata and website interface design.

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.

Isabelle Michalski pursues a Ph.D. in English with a focus on Asian American Literature at the University of Calgary, where she investigates the works of Winnifred Eaton, Pearl S. Buck, Louise Jordan Miln, and Han Suyin. She explores the way these authors simultaneously conform and subvert contemporary racial stereotypes, and how their romance fiction presents their readers with a picture of a cosmopolitan and transnational United States.

Her research interests center on questions of passing, cosmopolitanism, racialization, hybridity, transnationalism, gender performances, and their intersection with human rights. Isabelle is a dynamic researcher and community leader, motivated by the desire to create a better understanding of Asian American literature and history worldwide.

Bio coming soon.

Chelsea Miya is a PhD Candidate and CGS SSHRC fellow in English and Film Studies at the
University of Alberta where her research focuses on the cultural history of data. She is interested in investigating new ways of exploring and modeling audiovisual data.

Kate Moffatt is a recent graduate of the MA program in SFU’s Department of English. Her research interests lie primarily with women’s pedestrianism in the Romantic period, and she brings a keen interest in the digital humanities, book and literary history, and archives and archival practices to her work as a Research Assistant for SpokenWeb.

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.

Chris Mustazza’s experience in curating and developing PennSound will contribute expertise on the acquisition of hidden collections, and the presentation and use of literary sound recordings in accessible digital environments.

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

Mike O’Driscoll (Co-applicant) brings needed expertise in archive theory, poetry and poetics, and material culture studies and strong leadership and organizational skills from extensive administrative experience as a journal editor, national association executive member, project leader, and major conference organizer.

Chelsea Obodoechina is a Sociology graduate student at Concordia University. With her research focus on the accessibility of digitized information and knowledge, Chelsea has taken on the role of SpokenWeb’s community collections and festival outreach coordinator with the interest of bringing awareness to the project.

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.

Andrew Roberge is a Research Assistant working towards his MA in English at Concordia. His personal research interests include contemporary poetry and intersectional trans studies.

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.

Faith Ryan is working on the SpokenWeb project as an RA under Jentery Sayers at the University of Victoria.

Faith is an English MA student at the University of Victoria. She is interested in contemporary culture and politics. Her research aims to investigate representations of autism and the work of autistic writers in the genre of speculative fiction. When she is not reading or writing she is usually eating baked goods or gardening with her three chickens.

Nour is an Honours English and Political Science major with a passion for literature and art. She is interested in journalism, digital reporting, and the impacts that language and discourse have on perceptions of the world. Nour is also the Copy Editor of The Phoenix News. She is excited to practice attentive listening and explore literary sound through her work as the SpokenWeb UBCO Podcast Producer.

Alex Sanchez is a Research Assistant and MA student of English & Film at the University of Alberta. He graduated cum laude from Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, with a B.A. in English Literature and Society and a minor in American Studies. His personal research interests include zoopoetics, empirical ecocriticism, and the intersection of paleontology and cultural studies. He also has experience in ESL, having taught in Prague for five years.

Dr. Jentery Sayers researched, published, and taught in the areas of sound studies, media studies, digital studies, and modernist and contemporary literature since 2008. He is experienced in the design and implementation of digital tools for literary and cultural analysis as well as the use of sound and audio as modes of scholarly engagement. As a SpokenWeb project co-investigator, he will be involved in developing the pedagogical elements of the SpokenWeb project.

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 AMP Lab and the SoundBox Collection, Shearer is an associate professor at UBC’s Okanagan campus in the Department of English and Cultural Studies. She leads SpokenWeb’s Pedagogy Task Force and contributes expertise in the areas of Canadian poetry, performance, pedagogy, and media culture. She acknowledges that she lives and works on Syilx Okanagan territory.

Lauren St. Clair is an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, studying Computer Science and Data Science. Lauren is interested in data science and its intersections within the digital humanities. She has acted as Events Coordinator for the Quantitative Sciences Course Union (QSCU) and will act as QSCU President for the 2019-20 academic year. Lauren is conducting UX research to inform web development for SpokenWeb. She will also work on the development of the UBCO SpokenWeb SoundBox Collection page.

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.

Emma is a Master’s student in English literature at Concordia University, and a research assistant for Spokenweb. She is interested in the interdisciplinary potential of literature and sound studies and is eager to think about this in relation to an aesthetics of silence, and of its not-so-opposite speech. She likes to listen to things.

Amy Thiessen is an undergraduate student in English at UBCO, and an RA for SpokenWeb as the UBCO team project manager with particular focus on pedagogy and research creation. She is interested in studying poetry, and its relationship with the digital audio world.

Leah Van Dyk is an MA candidate in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, and research assistant on the department’s SpokenWeb project with Dr. Jason Wiens. Their research focuses on the audio recordings housed at the University of Calgary’s Archives and Special Collections for poets and authors such as Robert Kroetsch, Earle Birney, Alden Nowlan, and E. D. Blodgett. Her MA thesis examines water and its environs in contemporary Canadian literature, specifically using theories of elemental ecocriticism and trans-corporeality to discover how water affects, and is affected by, narrative. She also has work forthcoming in the anthology “Feminist Perspectives in Children’s Culture” (Canadian Scholars/Women’s Press).

Isabella Wang is a second-year undergrad, pursuing a double major in English and World Literature at SFU. Her research interests include studies in contemporary eco and urban poetics, Persian and Urdu poetry, poetry in translation, and specifically with SpokenWeb, the digital archives of the TISH poets and Phyllis Webb. She is the author of two poetry collections, On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press 2019), and Pebble Swing (Nightwood Edition forthcoming 2021).

Kylie Warkentin is a third-year undergraduate student in English at the University of Texas at Austin, and an RA for SpokenWeb and other audio projects. She has focuses in education and the great books, and is interested in interdisciplinary cooperation and the ways in which modern stories echo and edit past works.

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

Jared Wiercinski’s contributions will focus on interface design and tools for the presentation and use of digitized literary audio.

Yasaman Lotfizadeh is a Digital Arts and Humanities student at UBC Okanagan. She is a professional Graphic Designer and Art History enthusiast with five years of experience as a university lecturer. Her current study focuses on applying DH theories and tools in connection with the sixteenth-century Persian illustrated manuscripts. Yasaman is the manager of the AMP Lab at UBCO, collaborating both with the SpokenWeb and the Aga Khan Gardens Projects.

Mahshid is currently a first-year M.A. student in the Digital Arts and Humanities Interdisciplinary Graduate program at UBC’s Okanagan campus. She comes from a background in Computer Science and is interested in audio signal processing and music information retrieval. She has joined the team to research the methods of processing the content of the literary recordings collected by SpokenWeb.

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.

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.

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.

Bio coming soon.

Cheryl Gladu has accepted the role of a SpokenWeb Podcast Producer, housed at Concordia University. This role will closely work with SFU Podcast Team led by Hannah McGregor, SFU. Cheryl Gladu, BIB, MBA is an Interdisciplinary PhD Candidate at Concordia University (Management and Design). Cheryl’s current research and professional interests include collaborative design and the creation of places and objects that encourage long-term sustainable behavior change. She is also the producer and host of the Worlds We Want podcast.

Deserae Gogel is an M.A. English candidate at UBC’s Okanagan campus, where her research focuses on performance and on social justice and/in contemporary Canadian theatre. She completed a B.A. and B.Ed. in English at the University of Lethbridge (2016), after which she taught at the high school level in Canada and England. Deserae will be contributing to the pedagogy task force by facilitating the SpokenWeb “Press Play Workshops Series” in the AMP Lab at UBCO, and conducting research on pedagogy and the digital archive.

Bio coming soon.

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.

Rodrigo Velasco is a Mexican artist interweaving text, image, rhythm and sound through relational poetics and live coding, etc. Improvisation and collaborative processes are at the heart of the experience, where thought is being transformed into abstract audiovisual experiences. Rodrigo is a student of the Master of Design at Concordia University in the Department of Design and Computation Arts and part of the SenseLab, a laboratory for thought in motion.

His explorations through workshops, non books and audiovisual performances have been shared internationally as part of /vivo/ 2014, Simposio Internacional de Música y Código, Libre Graphics Meeting 2018, Nuit Blanche, NOCHE EN BLANCO : LATINX (RE) MIX – Eastern Bloc + Never Apart, Electronic Literature Organization – ELO 2018, TOPO Digital Writings Laboratory, live => coding music, IMPA ˜ Rio de Janeiro and MUTEK Montréal Edition 19