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.

Mahtab Banihashemi is a Master of Building Engineering Student at Concordia University with a background in Architecture. She gained a professional Project Management and Facility Management experience during her involvement in successful projects such as improving the performance of Concordia building elevators.

Currently, as a SpokenWeb Office Interior Designer, she implements interior designs and performs design feasibility assessments and cost estimation. As a SpokenWeb Project Associate, she plays an active role in mobilizing events under the supervision of Yuliya Kondratenko, SpokenWeb Project Manager.

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.

Ahlam Bavi is a conceptual artist, industrial designer, and a digital humanist. Ahlam’s visual artworks consist of conceptual sonic sculptures, digital remediate artworks, 3D calligraphy, and algorithmic 3D printed sculptures.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Adam Hammond brings expertise in computational humanities and literary modernism.

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.”

UBCO Library’s Archivist and Indigenous Studies Subject Librarian, Paige Hohmann is responsible for the campus’s Okanagan Special Collections and Archives. Her expertise is in the best practices in digitization and representation of primary source materials in an electronic environment, and archival education for historical researchers. She is also a project coordinator for Digitized Okanagan History (DOH), a community outreach project which aims to capture and provide web access to under-utilized archival materials

Ben Hynes is a poet and project manager from Newfoundland and Labrador. Having completed his undergraduate work in his home province, he attended Concordia in 2009 to complete his Master’s degree in English, focusing on Creative Writing. After completing his MA, he ventured West to the Pacific and Simon Fraser University to pursue doctoral studies in poetry. Following his time at SFU, he worked for nearly 5 years as a project coordinator in the construction industry. While working at an engineering consulting firm, he was responsible for scheduling, drafting, executing, and delivering construction documents and studies for over 200 construction projects simultaneously. He acted as the focal point for coordination between the internal engineering team and various external stakeholders, including private-public partnerships, local governments, real estate developers, and private individuals. Here, he gained valuable insight into the flexibility, resilience, and practicality of the strengths and skills he honed during his academic career. He also learned how to somewhat wrangle engineers, which he attests is almost as daunting as poet-wrangling, speaking from experience of years of trying to wrangle himself.  Ben is thrilled to return to a creative and scholarly environment and feels his arrival in Montreal as SpokenWeb’s new project manager represents a return to the field of work and activity he values most.

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.

Bio coming soon.

Rohan Ben Joseph is a second-year undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University, majoring in Computing Science and Linguistics. He is interested in Natural Language Processing and Data Analysis. He has experience as a research assistant for the SFU iXLabs working on Human-computer interaction under Dr. Parmit Chilana. His research on Software Daemons and Background Processes was published in the SFU Scientific Undergraduate Research Journal. He is currently working on Metadata processing and data visualisation in the SpokenWeb Project. He enjoys spending his spare time performing spoken word poetry, playing Minecraft and taking care of Artemis, his pet cocker spaniel.

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.

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.

Wade Klaver works for research computing at UBC’s Okanagan campus serving researchers there as well as the greater research community at UBC. Wade began his career in Canada’s oil and gas sector, eventually coming to UBC after more than a decade spent with various high tech start-ups in the Okanagan Valley where he worked in several technical and managerial roles.

A science enthusiast from an early age, Wade’s varied interests and technology experience have prepared him well as a science communicator, effectively bridging the gap between science and technology on one hand and laymen and, whenever possible, the young, on the other.

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.

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.

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.

Eva Lu, currently an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, will soon be pursuing graduate studies at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information in the Library Concentration. She is interested in the circulation and preservation of information, especially those that are digital.

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.

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.

Katherine McLeod researches and teaches Canadian literature through sound, performance, and archives. She co-edited with Jason Camlot CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (MQUP, 2019), and her recent publications include chapters in the books Moving Archives (WLUP, 2020) and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (MQUP, 2019). Currently, she is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Concordia University, where she is writing a book about women poets on CBC Radio, curating the Audio of the Week Series on SPOKENWEBLOG and producing digital content for the Audio of the Month as part of The SpokenWeb Podcast feed.

Follow @kathmcleod and check out the site she curates for Montreal readings at WherePoetsRead.ca and @poetsread.

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.

Marjorie Mitchell is the Copyright, Scholarly Communication and Research Data Management Librarian at UBC’s Okanagan Campus. She brings her expertise is in Research Data management to Spoken Web.

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.

Emily Christina Murphy researches digital humanities, 20th-century literature, networks, and movement with a focus on culture and technology that spans these fields. In July 2018, she joined the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia—Okanagan as Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities, following a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria with the Linked Modernisms project. She contributes two projects to SpokenWeb. With Dr. Katherine McLeod she collaborates on research creation approaches to dance, poetry, and sound in the archives. With Dr. Karis Shearer and the pedagogy task force, she studies the way that Spoken Web bridges data and archives approaches to pedagogy into the classroom, integrating this study into the Modernist Pedagogy Platform.

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.

Moji Nourafkan is an MA student at Simon Fraser University in the Education Department with a background in Computer Engineering. She has experience of working in an Education Technology team as a CALL (Computer-assisted Language Learning) expert. She was involved in producing education software, particularly for language acquisition purposes. She also has 5 years teaching experience in the ESL field and has been working as an ESL instructor in Canada since 2018.

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.

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.

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.

Geoffrey Rockwell directs the Kule Institute for Advanced Study.  His expertise in the development of research tools for the humanities, the design of interactive multimedia, the archiving of digital research data, and the development of data standards for the humanities will support work on prototypes of web interactives and the multiple areas involving data methods for documentation, standards, protocols in our digital archive projects.

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.

Melissa Salrin is Head of Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University. She is an adjunct lecturer for the iSchool at the University of Illinois where she earned an M.A. in history and M.L.I.S. She is interested in outreach, community-based collections, and examining archives as a political space.

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.

Bindu Shankara Reddy is a graduate student at Concordia University pursuing Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is currently a Project Associate in the Spokenweb project. Her goal is to take up teaching profession and to do research in Integrated Circuits. She has also interest in History and Geography.

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 (she/her) is a doctoral student and Killam Laureate in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. She gratefully researches and studies as a settler on the traditional territory of Treaty 7, with her primary research interests located around the environmental humanities and radical revisionings of being in community—both pedagogically and practically—as a model of literary practice. She recently published an article in English Studies in Canada, is passionate about community projects, and is overly fond of coffee. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter @leahvandyk.

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.

Masoumeh Zaare, a PhD student in Educational Technology at Concordia University, is working closely with the Project Management Team under the supervision of Yuliya Kondratenk, SpokenWeb Project Manager. While developing her management skills, she is also helping with knowledge mobilization events.

As a TRAC Delegate in the Department of Education since May 2017, she has reached out to Teaching and Research Assistants at Concordia, assisted with promotion, organized department meetings and solved work issues of her peers. As a Graduate Students Association (GSA) director in Faculty of Arts and Science, she has supported orientation events, workshops, and general assemblies as well.

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.

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.

Aida Eftekhari has started her new role as a SpokenWeb Project Associate, housed at Concordia University. This role will closely work with the Project Management Team led by Yuliya Kondratenko, SpokenWeb Project Manager.

Aida is currently pursuing a Master of Engineering degree focused on Project Planning and Management at Concordia University. She also has a B.A. in Architectural Engineering and Design Management.

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.

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.

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