SpokenWeb’s AMPLab is located on the sixth floor of Concordia University’s library building, just off a narrow corridor in the heart of the English Department. It is a unique space dedicated to the practice of literary sound studies, housing an impressive collection of audio-related equipment, from turntables and mixers to microphones, vintage reel-to-reel tape machines, […]
Article, SPOKENWEBLOG | AmpLab, literary sound studies, sound equipment
On July 6, 2021, the Poets Corner Reading Series held an event on Zoom featuring poets Ian Williams and Jane Munro hosted by Adrienne Drobnies. After Drobnies reads Williams’s bio, Williams says, “Muted now how about now can you hear me now? I still can’t see you, only your name. Your voice is breaking up” (“Jane […]
Article, SPOKENWEBLOG | Archive of the Digital Present, canadian poetry, Ian Williams, Jane Munro, online, performance
As part of The Tape Box series, Maya Schwartz undertakes a close listening to a rare series of photographs that are part of a larger story of audio recordings and of collaboration.
Article, SPOKENWEBLOG | Barbara Holdridge, Caedmon Records, Collaboration, Marianne Mantell, SFU, Simon Fraser University, The SpokenWeb Podcast, The Tape Box series
While inputting metadata as part of my RA work for Simon Fraser University’s SpokenWeb team, there was one tape that I kept coming back to. The tape is a recording of poet Brian Fawcett reading and being interviewed for the radio program Mountain Pass. After returning to this recording again and again, I decided […]
Article, SPOKENWEBLOG | Brian Fawcett, British Columbia, canadian poetry, Simon Fraser University, The Tape Box series
How might a public dialogue between three modernist poets in 1978—about poetry written in the 1930s and 1940s—remain relevant to thinking about the conditions of Canadian literature today? Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, and Irving Layton, as we have explored in Take 1 and Take 2, examine the shifting relationships between politics, nation, and poetry that are foundational to understandings of what constitutes ‘modernism’ in Canada during these periods.
Article, ShortCuts, SPOKENWEBLOG | Anne Marriott, canadian literature, canadian modernism, canadian poetry, Dorothy Livesay, Irving Layton, literary modernism, Simon Fraser University
This post is the second of a three-part series by Teddie Brock, all based on a 1978 panel discussion with Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, and Irving Layton, as recorded on audio preserved at the Simon Fraser University Archives. Check back on SPOKENWEBLOG for the next installment of this close listening to the archives as they […]
Article, Collections, ShortCuts, SPOKENWEBLOG | Anne Marriott, canadian poetry, Dorothy Livesay, Irving Layton, little magazines, modernism, Simon Fraser University
Dear Brian, So, I hear you’re the data expert? Well, I’ve got a conundrum for you. As an RA for SpokenWeb, we’re often working with disorganized, unlabelled, and sometimes incomplete archival collections. Take, for instance, the Alan Lord Collection we are currently working on. For context, this collection includes AV materials from Ultimatum [1] and […]
Article, SPOKENWEBLOG | ask brian, ask brian mcfee, audio collections, audio editing, Audio Engineer, Audio Tools, brian mcfee, how to, multitrack tape
Abstract Launched in 2005 and rebooted in 2022, the Fred Wah Digital Archive is a digital web project that intends to act as a living archive of the work of Fred Wah, including a new interview with the author. As a consequence of the poet’s interest in the sonic and phonetic aspects of language, the […]
Article, SPOKENWEBLOG | accessibility, audio, captioning, Fred Wah, fred wah digital archive, performance, poetry, transcription
Figure 1. Open Refine GUI. Explaining the Case and Software Tool In 2019, SpokenWeb SFU Project Manager Cole Mash (SFU) and SpokenWeb Systems Task Force member Tomasz Neugebauer (Concordia) began work on editing SWALLOW entries. SWALLOW is an open-source metadata ingestion system developed by the SpokenWeb team to describe and manage the project’s object of […]
Article, Collaborations, DH Design and Tech, SPOKENWEBLOG | audio, batch editing, ben joseph, Cole Mash, data, design, DH, digital humanities, Metadata, openrefine, Sound, SpokenWeb, Swallow, Tech, Tomasz Neugebauer
Introduction This article emerged from the “feminist close listening” methodology we devised together during a collaborative listening session in Montreal, December, 2017. We began the practice of listening to recordings together, in real time, as a way of attuning ourselves to the related inquiries that our archives of interest shared. For Karis, this archive is […]
Article, Collaborations, SPOKENWEBLOG | affective labour, archives, artifacts, audio, close listening, community, Deanna Fong, feminist close listening, gender, Karis Shearer, literary communities, maria hindmarch, no more potlucks, poetry, Simon Fraser University, TISH, UBC, Vancouver, Warren Tallman