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Symposia

SpokenWeb Symposium 2024: Sounding the Futures: Listening Across Time and Space

Sounding the Futures: Listening Across Time and Space 

 

The SpokenWeb Research Network is pleased to invite you to attend our next in-person gathering to be held in Calgary, June 5-7, 2024. Join us for “Sounding the Futures: Listening Across Time and Space,” a Symposium and Sound Institute that brings together academics, archivists, librarians, artists, and members of diverse communities interested in literature and sound to exchange ideas, methods, art, and knowledge about modes of engaging with the sonic dimensions of literary practice. This year we will be “sounding out the futures,” with panels, workshops, and guest speakers asking how we engage with questions of futurity across—tethered to, or in resistance of—times and spaces.

Click HERE to view the CFP.

 

The University of Calgary, located in the heart of Southern Alberta, both acknowledges and pays tribute to the traditional territories of the peoples of Treaty 7, which include the Blackfoot Confederacy (comprised of the Siksika, the Piikani, and the Kainai First Nations), the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda (including Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Goodstoney First Nations). The City of Calgary is also home to the Métis Nation of Alberta (Districts 5 and 6).

The University of Calgary is situated on land Northwest of where the Bow River meets the Elbow River, a site traditionally known as Moh’kins’tsis to the Blackfoot, Wîchîspa to the Stoney Nakoda, and Guts’ists’i to the Tsuut’ina. On this land and in this place we strive to learn together, walk together, and grow together “in a good way.”

 

Featured Events

Keynote Session: Preserving the Sound of the 20th Century with Andrea Mills (Internet Archive) 

The keynote presentation, “Preserving the Sound of the 20th Century,” will offer a compelling exploration of the role played by the Internet Archive in preserving and contextualizing the sonic tapestry of the past century. This discussion will encompass several key areas: 

  1. Historical Sound Archive: We will delve into the Internet Archive’s extensive collection of 78 RPM records, LPs, and other historical sound recordings, demonstrating how these materials provide an auditory time capsule of 20th-century literary sound. 
  2. Web Archiving and Literary Sound: With a focus on web archiving, we will showcase how the Archive captures the evolving landscape of digital literary sound, ensuring that spoken word performances and audio literature from online sources are preserved for future generations. 
  3. Emerging Technologies and the Future: We will reflect on the evolving technology landscape and how the Archive adapts to continue its mission. This includes discussions on format preservation, digital accessibility, and the Archive’s role in shaping the future of literary sound preservation. 

This keynote will be a dynamic journey through the 20th-century soundscape, highlighting the Internet Archive’s impact on preserving literary sound for the future. 

 

Andrea Mills is the Executive Director of Internet Archive Canada. Andrea joined the Internet Archive in the spring of 2006. In her role as Digitization Program manager, which she held for many years, Andrea worked closely with GLAM institutions across Canada to bring more than 750,000 texts into the digital public domain, all available on https://archive.org. Andrea’s first job was as a library page in her local public library, going on to reference services and the book mending department. Andrea is a trained Goldsmith, with a diploma from George Brown College, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities and a Bachelor of Education with an additional qualification as Teacher Librarian from York University. Over more than 17 years with Internet Archive Canada, Andrea has become immersed in all facets of managing digitization projects at academic libraries, archives and government institutions. In her role as Executive Director, Andrea is responsible for coordinating Internet Archive efforts in Canada, with a focus on building a Canadian Digital Library by and for Canadians. Andrea’s personal approach is centred on accessible reading formats and free, equitable access to public and government information for all. 

 

Plenary Session 1:

Joshua Whitehead (University of Calgary), moderator

Joshua Whitehead is a Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary housed in departments of English and International Indigenous Studies. He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer (Talonbooks 2017), Jonny Appleseed (Arsenal Pulp 2018), Making Love with the Land (Knopf Canada 2022), and Indigiqueerness: a Conversation About Storytelling (Athabasca University 2023) as well as the editor of Love after the End: an Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction (Arsenal 2020).   

 

Liz Howard (Concordia University), “Beyond Haunting: Voice as Indigenous Feminist Resistance”

Liz Howard is a poet, editor, and educator. Her work explores Anishinaabe ways of knowing, cosmology, ecology, and the philosophy and neuroscience of consciousness. Her first collection, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Trillium Poetry Prize. She is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at Concordia University. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario, she currently lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. 

 

Kali Simmons (Portland State University), “Living with Stories: Indigenous Orality and Literary Form” 

Dr. Kali Simmons (Oglala Lakota) is an incoming Assistant Professor of Native North American Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut. Her current book project, The Savage Screen: Indigeneity in the Modern American Horror Film, an examination of Indigenous representation across horror cinema history, argues that many of horror’s generic conventions have troubling colonial origins. Dr. Simmons’ writing has been published in American Indian Quarterly, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Science Fiction Film and Television, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and on Vulture.com. 

 

Plenary Session 2:

Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (University of Calgary), “‘Water sloshing around a calabash’: Poetry, Past, and the Diaspora” 

Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is an assistant professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Canada. Umezurike is the author of literary works such as there’s more (University of Alberta Press), Double Wahala, Double Trouble (Griots Lounge Publishing), Wish Maker (Masobe Books), and a co-editor of Wreaths for a Wayfarer (Daraja Press). 

 

Amatoritsero Ede (Mount Allison University), “Orality, Graphology and Candence in My Poetry” 

Amatoritsero Ede is an Assistant Professor at Mount Allison’s University’s English Department and the Publisher and Managing Editor of the Maple Tree Literary Supplement, MTLS. He is an award-winning poet with three poetry collections, a literary nonfiction book and publications in over a dozen anthologies. 

 

Mpoe Mogale (University of Alberta), “Ancestral Threads: Dance, Song, and Poetry as Timeless Vessels of Cultural Knowledge”

Mpoe Mogale (they/them) reigns from Lebowakgomo, South Africa and splits their time between amiskwaciywâskahikan and moh’kínst’sis in Canada. They hold a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Political Science and a wealth of expertise in community-based research, facilitation, and arts administration. Mpoe’s primary art-making form is dance, with a curiosity in the place of Blackness in spaces that deny it, as explored through several projects, including “What (Black) Life Requires” (produced by Mile Zero Dance and Azimuth Theatre). Mpoe’s current artistic imaginations have centred on the brilliant and joyous aspects that foreground the lives of Black folks. 

 

Event Details

The 2024 SpokenWeb Symposium and Sound Institute will take place at the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking, University of Calgary, 460 Campus Lane NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4.

For on-site accommodation booking, please email spokenweb2024@gmail.com to receive the booking link and event exclusive code. Accommodation is also available in nearby University District and Motel Village (Banff Trail).

A transit link is available to and from the Calgary International Airport. This service is provided by Route 300 from the Calgary International Airport to downtown. Catch the bus from the airport at Bay 7 (located across Arrivals Door 2) or Bay 32 (located across Arrivals Door 15) from the airport.

A full list of maps and transit routes for the city are available here: https://www.calgarytransit.com/content/transit/en/home/rider-information/lrt-and-bus-station-maps.html.

 

Organizing Team

(L-R: Jason Wiens, Leah Van Dyk, Annie Murray, Kit Dobson, Ben Berman Ghan, and Ryanne Kap.)

Around Calgary

Calgary has a significant number of parks and walking trails, making it possible for a nice stroll, bike ride, or run virtually anywhere in the city. To see a full list of parks, check out the city park map: https://www.calgary.ca/categories/subcategory-parks-grid.html.

Some key parks and paths include: Nose Hill Park (the largest natural space in the city, which includes off-leash areas, trails, and the Nose Hill Medicine Wheel); the Bow River Pathway (48 km of paved pathway along the Bow and Elbow rivers); Confederation Park (great for a picnic in Kensington); and Fish Creek Park.

Alberta’s National Parks include mountain destinations such as Banff, Canmore, Lake Louise, and Jasper. There are various ways to get to and explore the Rocky Mountains (also known as the Rockies) without a car. One of the most inexpensive travel options is On-It Transit, which offers $10 one-way commuting options to Banff and Canmore.

Calgary is home to a number of festivals (large and small) throughout the year, including Globalfest, Taste of Calgary, the Calgary International Film Festival, Calgary Pride, Sled Island, the Calgary Folk Music Festival, and more! https://www.visitcalgary.com/things-to-do/stories-from-calgary/festivals-in-calgary.

The Calgary Public Library has an extensive collection of physical and digital materials. The Central Library was included in Time Magazine’s List of the World’s 100 Greatest Places of 2019, https://calgarylibrary.ca/.

Local Bookstores: Calgary is home to a number of independent bookstores, including: Pages on Kensington, Shelf Life Books, and The Next Page.

Some museums and heritage sites in and around Calgary include: the Glenbow Museum, Heritage Park, Lougheed House, Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Site, Blackfoot Crossing, and Ootssapi’tomowa (Look Out Hill).

Conference Schedule

SpokenWeb 2024 Symposium & Sound Institute Schedule

Wednesday June 5, 2024: Symposium Day 1

 

8:00-9:00        Registration

8:30-9:00        Welcome and Opening Remarks

 

9:00-11:00      Plenary Session 1: Featuring Joshua Whitehead (University of Calgary), Liz Howard (Concordia University), and Kali Simmons (Portland State University).

  • Liz Howard, “Beyond Haunting: Voice as Indigenous Feminist Resistance”
  • Kali Simmons, “Living with Stories: Indigenous Orality and Literary Form”
  • Joshua Whitehead, moderator

 

10:30-11:30    Coffee & Snacks

 

11:00-12:30    Session 1A (including break): Orality and Composition

  • Emma Cullen, “The Garden, a Care Form: Access as Compositional Method & Audio Plots”
  • Kristine Dizon, “Situated Resonances: Poetic-Musical Performances in Critical Contexts and Creative Compositions”
  • Mike Hansen, “RPM Objet d’art”

11:00-12:30    Session 1B: Sounding Annotation: Poetic Futurity Across Time, Technology, and Context with Zoe Bursztajn-Ilingworth, Trent Wintermeier, and Luke Sumpter

 

12:30-1:30      Lunch (provided)

 

12:30-1:30      “Digital Poetic Occurrences: Hearing the Pluriverse in Real Time”: Interactive Sound Recording Session with Erin Scott

 

1:30-3:00        Session 2A: Literary Soundscapes

  • Cameron MacDonald, “Queer Futurity, Lunar Orientations, and Lessening into One’s Voice”
  • Kristin Moriah, “The Silently Speculative Spectator: Black Voice and its Absence in Quicksand”
  • David Sigler, “Sounds of Futurity in Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance

1:30-3:00        Session 2B: Listening and Intervention

  • Maddie Beaulieu, “Thirteen Years Isn’t a Long Time: Listening Through the 2010 In(ter)ventions Gathering”
  • Alison Liu, “Human-Machine Dialogue: Bridging the Gap through Voice Interaction”
  • Sidney Shapiro, “Exploring Generative AI in Sound Technology: A Business Perspective”

 

3:00-4:30        Keynote Session: Preserving the Sound of the 20th Century with Andrea Mills                              (Internet Archive)

 

4:30-6:00        Session 3A: Listening Through Mediums

  • J Shea-Carter, “Neighbouring Sounds: Experimental Radio, Emergent Technologies of Listening, and Hearing Beyond Literary Poetics”
  • Deanna Fong and Jon Saklofske, “Play it by ear: Imagining a Sound-Centric Future for Video Games”
  • Elina Lex, “Volumetric Encounters: Sounding Volumes in the Tantramar Marshes”

4:30-6:00        Session 3B: Eco-Sounds

  • Chelsea Miya, “Eco-Surveillance in the Athabasca: Making Sense (and Sound) of “Slow” Crises”
  • Anna Navarro, “Modal Sounds for the End of the World”
  • Maya Schwartz, “‘Donnie’s last sound was a boot slip’: Relational activism in female narratives of oil work”

 

6:00-8:00        SpokenWeb Student Social Event (on campus). Food and non-alcoholic beverages                        provided.

6:00-8:00        Dinner (on your own)

 

Thursday June 6, 2024: Symposium Day 2

 

9:00-10:30      Session 1A (including break): Interpreting Sound

  • Augusta Funk, “From Ambience to Improvisation: The Interpretive Environment of the Poetry Reading”
  • Marjorie Mitchell and Karis Shearer, “Extreme RDM: Humanities Data, Affective Labour, and Resilient Infrastructure for Apocalyptic Futures”
  • Lisa Samuels, “Of simultaneity with sonic bodies”
  • Erin Scott, “Digital Poetic Occurrences: Hearing the Pluriverse in Real Time”

9:00-10:30      Session 1B: Sonic Remembrance

  • Jasmin Macarios, “Coming Out of the Stacks: Intergenerational archival temporalities in the digitization of the LOOT oral history tapes”
  • Tomasz Michalak, “Hear the Remastered Sound of the Album that Present, Past, and Future Knows; Ladies and Gentlemen, Brain Salad Surgery”
  • Paul Robinson, “This Is a Work of the Living and the Dead”

 

10:00-11:00    Coffee & Snacks

 

10:30-12:00    Session 2A: New Sonic Futures

  • Kelly Baron (panel moderator)
  • Richard Costa, “In the Child’s Place: A Reading of Skaay’s ‘Raven Travelling’”
  • Pouria Torkamaneh, “Reimagining Black Arts: Free Jazz, Non-assimilation, and Amiri Baraka’s Poetic Performance”
  • Andrew Whiteman, “Siren Records: Developing a Sonic Poetry Performance”

10:30-12:00    Session 2B: Performing Sound

  • Nick Beauchesne, “Cassandra’s Empty Eyes Sound Showcase”
  • Stacey Bliss, “Gong Across Canada: Sound, Improvisation, and Creating Good Vibes in ‘Liquid Modern’ Times”
  • Jay Ritchie, “Listening in Many Publics Performance”

 

12:00-1:00      Lunch (provided)

 

1:00-3:00        Plenary Session 2: Featuring Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (University of Calgary), Amatoritsero Ede (Mount Allison University), and Mpoe Mogale (University of Alberta).

  • Amatoritsero Ede, “Orality, Graphology and Candence in My Poetry”
  • Mpoe Mogale, “Ancestral Threads: Dance, Song, and Poetry as Timeless Vessels of Cultural Knowledge”
  • Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike, “‘Water sloshing around a calabash’: Poetry, Past, and the Diaspora”

 

3:00-4:30        Session 3: Sounding Alternatives

  • Michael Bucknor, “Confronting the ‘Silent Shade[s] of Power’: Psycho-sonic Healing in Lillian Allen’s Dub Poetics”
  • Hannah McGregor, “Manifestos as Speculative Futurity and Whimsical Worldbuilding”
  • Karina Vernon, “Wayward Listening in the Black Prairies’ Sonic Archives”

 

4:30-6:00        Session 4A: Embodying Sonic Landscapes

  • David Duhamel, “Towards a crip sound: Hearing and listening to the crip experience in the practices of Alex Dolores Salerno and Christine Sun Kim”
  • Maia Harris, “Proprioception and (em)bodied listening”
  • Anna Veprinska, “Audio Learning, Acoustic Pain, and Creativity”

4:30-6:00        Session 4B: Flight Manifesto with Harlin Steele, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, Dirar Kalash, and Ashanti Monts-Trèviska

 

6:00-7:00        Dinner (on your own)

 

7:00-9:00        Poetry reading event at an off-campus location in Calgary, hosted by Derek Beaulieu. Open to the public.

 

Friday June 7, 2024: SpokenWeb Sound Institute

 

9:00-10:30      Workshop 1: Annotating Across Time and Space, presented by Tanya Clement, Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth, Trent Wintermeier, and Luke Sumpter.

 

10:00-11:00    Coffee & Snacks

 

10:30-12:00    Workshop 2: Exploring Spatial Music Mixing Through Virtual Reality, presented by Théo Bouveyron

10:30-12:00    Workshop 3: Deeper Listening: Reimagining Restorative Justice in the Arts, presented by Cassondra Murray

 

12:00-1:00      Lunch (provided)

 

1:00-2:30        Workshop 4: Electronic Literature + Live Coding Jam/Workshop, presented by Jessica Rodriguez

1:00-2:30        Workshop 5: Alchemical Transformations of Alluvial Deposits, presented by Kerry Priest, Sarah Blissett, Lucinda Guy, Alice Armstrong, and Nuria Bonet

 

2:30-4:00        SpokenWeb Podcast Listening Party

 

4:00-5:30        Sounding Out the Future: SpokenWeb Team Meeting

 

6:00-8:00        Dinner (on your own)

 

 

SpokenWeb Symposium 2023: Reverb: Echo-Locations of Sound and Space

The SpokenWeb Research Network is hosting the 2023 SpokenWeb Research Symposium on the theme of “Reverb: Echo-Locations of Sound and Space” at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada from May 1-3, 2023. As our conference theme, “reverb” invites participants reflect on how sound is situated, transformed, and territorialized through physical, cultural, historical, and political spaces. The conference features panel presentations, author readings, live performance, sound exhibits, and artist talks. Highlights include keynote presentations by Spy Dénommé-Welch and Gascia Ouzounian; a plenary performance of “From the Prairies to the Pacific Rim” by poet-artists Erica Hiroko Isomura, Emily Riddle, and Sacha Ouellet; and Inside the Bag, the launch of the Canadian Literature Centre archives, featuring a roundtable discussion with poets, archivists, and curators.

After the Symposium, SpokenWeb Network members are invited to take part in the SpokenWeb Institute from May 4-5, a series of workshops and training activities designed in collaboration with UAlberta’s Sound Studies Institute.

Click HERE to view the CFP.

Notable Events

Gascia Ouzounian

Keynote Presentation


Gascia Ouzounian is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, where she directs the European Research Council-funded project Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism (soncities.org). Her work is concerned with the philosophies, technologies, and aesthetic ideologies that shape ideas of sound and space, within and across such fields as music, sound art, psychology, sound engineering, and urban design. She is the author of Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts (2021) and recent projects include Scoring the City and Acoustic Cities: London and Beirut.

Spy Dénommé-Welch

Keynote Presentation

Spy Dénommé-Welch (Algonquin-Anishnaabe) is an interdisciplinary scholar, educator and artist. His scholarship examines multimodal approaches to Land-based research and creation, qualitative research methodologies, curriculum and assessment, art, and dramaturgy, looking at how these can produce new forms of knowledge production, education, intercultural collaboration, and artistic expression. Notable projects include Sonic Coordinates: Decolonizing through Land-based Music Composition and Repatriating Music, Sound, and Knowledge Through a Series of Miniatures.

From the Prairies to the Pacific Rim II

Keynote Presentation

In the first recording of “From the Prairies to the Pacific Rim,” poets Emily RiddleSacha Ouellet, and Erica H Isomura traced ancestry, activism, and rivers between Amiskwaciwâskahikan in the Prairies, across the Rocky Mountains, and into the Salish Sea. In this plenary, the poets address the reverberations of waterways via trade routes, resource extraction, and food sources in urban and rural landscapes. From the effects of pollution on Indigenous nationhood to land and water rights, the artists consider how to include levity while speaking to the dire consequences of colonial systems.

Inside The Bag: CLC Archives Launch

Plenary Panel

Inside the Bag is the Centre for Literatures in Canada / Centre de littératures au Canada’s archive of recordings of literary and scholarly readings and lectures from the past 16 years of the Centre’s programming. The launch of this collection will open with a sound collage of the archive’s many voices and conclude with a conversation with poets, archivists, and curators about what it means to create archives of this nature for readers and researchers.

Sounding Out !

Poetry & Open Mic

An evening of live poetry and sound at The Common featuring a collaborative performance by Jordan AbelConyer ClaytonManahil BandukwalaLiam Burke, and Nathanael Larochette. Followed by an open-mic poetry event.

Cabaret of Sound

Live Performance Night

Sound-based performance night at Co*Lab with performances of Waves upon Waves by Guillaume TardifAn Island of Sound by JR Carpenter and Jules RawlinsonWhat is the Sound of the North Saskatchewan River? A Settler and Indigenous Collaboration by Wayne DeFehr, and Light a mono-opera by Klara du Plessis and Jimmie LeBlanc.

Rémy Bocquillon

Sound Artist

Rémy Bocquillon is the SpokenWeb and Sound Studies Institute artist-in-residence. His research interests revolve around epistemic practices bridging the gap between arts, science, and philosophy, which he explores through his own creative work as a sound artist and musician. His latest projects include the publication “Sound Formations. Towards a sociological thinking-with sounds” and the sound installation “Activating Space | Prehending the City”.

in_between debuts at the SpokenWeb 2023 Symposium at the Digital Scholarship Centre.

Rachel Epp Buller

Sound Artist

Rachel Epp Buller is a visual artist, art historian, curator, professor, and mother of three. Her current research-creation project explores listening as artistic method in contemporary art. She is a two-time Fulbright Scholar, first as a researcher at the Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin, in 2011, and then as a Canada Research Chair in Arts and Humanities at the University of Alberta in 2022.

Catch Rachel’s 8-channel sound piece, Winter Walking, on display in the Sound Studies Institute.

Conference Schedule

MONDAY, MAY 1

9:00 AM – 10:00 AM MDT

Welcome And Introduction

Welcome from the Organizers and Elder Francis Whiskeyjack (Saddle Lake Cree Nation).
Loc: HC L-1

10:15 AM – 11:45 AM MDT

 

Session 1a: Sounds Of Protest

Chair: Cecily Devereux

  • Gabriel Mindel (University of California Santa Cruz), “The Drums of Occupy: Reverberant Noise in the Archive of Digital Debris”
  • Pablo Herrera Veitia (University of Toronto Scarborough), “Towards an Acoustemology of Afro-Cuban Poetics of Protest”
  • Andrew Gorin (New York University), “Answers in Progress”: Amiri Baraka’s Mass-Mediated Call-and-Response” [virtual]

Loc: HC L-2; Format: *Hybrid, Panel

Session 1b: Viral Sounds

Chair: Shannon Brown

  • Mickey Vallee (Athabasca U), “Home|Bodies: Noise, Listening and Sound in the COVID-19 Homescape”
  • Zackary Kiebach (UCLA), “The Earworm’s Viral Poetics”
  • Kirsten Feldner (McMaster), “Musical Participation in TikTok’s “Wellerman” Trend: Digital Ballad Publics, and Affective Archives of the COVID-19 Pandemic” [virtual]

Loc: HC L-3; Format: *Hybrid, Panel

Session 1c: Voicing: Deep Fakes, Clones, And Virtual Worlds

Chair: Ariel Kroon

  • Deanna Fong (Concordia U), Jon Saklofske (Acadia U), “Not Not Voice: Ethics and Aesthetics of a Literary Audio Deepfake”
  • Alex Borkowski (York U), “Repetitions, Resurrections, Reverberations: The Politics and Possibilities of Vocal Clones”
  • Hannah McKeating (Texas State U), “Quasimagical Landscapes: Sonic Agency as a Means of World-Building”

Loc: HC L-4; Format: Panel

12:30 PM – 2:00 PM MDT

 

Session 2a: Radio Waves

Chair: Naomi Reitzin

  • Laura Garbes (U Minnesota), “Imagining the White Settler Soundscape: A Colonial History of American and Australian Voice Standards” [virtual]
  • Camilla do Santos (Universidade Federal de Santa Maria), “Poetic Transductions: The Sound Between Fm, Soundscapes, and Installations”
  • Stacey Copeland (Simon Fraser U), “Radio Hands: The Sonic Poetics of Ham Radio”

Loc: HC L-2; Format: *Hybrid, Panel

Session 2b: Sound, Violence, Film

Chair: Michael O’Driscoll

  • María Paula Molano Parrado (Duke U), “Listening Images and Nonhuman Embodiments in Colombian Photography and Film” [virtual]
  • Daniel Schwartz ( McGill U), “Absurd Justice: Documentary Sound in Sergei Loznitsa’s The Trial (2018) and Iakov Posel’skii’s 13 Days (1931)”

Loc: HC L-3; Format: Panel, *Hybrid

Session 2c: Sounding Radical

Chair: Zachary Morrison

  • Lisa Hollenbach (Oklahoma State U), “John Giorno’s “Radio Free Poetry” [virtual]
  • James Robertson (U Calgary), “Hitting the Pause Button: A Software-Assisted Close Listening of Performances by Kevin Davies”

Rm: HC L-4; Format: *Hybrid, Panel

 

2:30 PM – 3:45 PM MDT

Sound Showcase #1

Chair: Chelsea Miya

  • Joseph Chaves (U of Northern Colorado), “Three Cisterns” [performance]
  • Jonny Smith (Independent), “Renderer” [performance]

Rm: HC L-1; Format: Performance

4:00 PM – 5:30 PM MDT

 

(Re)Call & Response: Improvisational Engagements With Land, Sound And Storytelling

Chair: Michael O’Driscoll

In this keynote lecture, Spy Dénommé-Welch will draw from and expand on his extensive experience in land-based research and creation to take up the challenges and promises of engaging collaborative sound maps and site-specific composition as a research creation methodology.

For years I’ve engaged in research, study and thought about the human experience of sound(s), and how our daily interactions with them are shaped by space and temporality. Speaking as both an Indigenous (Algonquin-Anishnaabe) interdisciplinary scholar and a working artist, I’ll explore the creative observation of sounds at the intersection of theory, practice, and sonic expression, while considering deeper ethical engagements that open onto other perspectives, stories, rhythms, and meters. I’ll consolidate observations that I have made through research in creative performance, Land-based methods, and research-creation with different Knowledges earned from lived experience and artistic practice. Catherine Magowan, one of my primary artistic collaborators, will join me for a demonstration of collaborative improvisation.

Rm: HC L-1; Format: *Hybrid, Keynote

5:45 PM – 8:00 PM MDT

 

Exhibition Launch And Artist’s Talk

Chair: Natalie Loveless

Opening launch of in_between, an octophonic sound installation by SpokenWeb Alberta’s Artist-in-Residence Rémy Bocquillon, organized in collaboration with the Sound Studies Institute.

in_between is a sound installation exploring what lies beneath reverberation, echo and resonance, both in their acoustic and semiotic expressions. From the original sound source to the reflected signal, often reduced to either a unique and indiscernible flow or to discrete and separated events, it deals with what happens in-between. What is the liminality of those sound events? A difference in repetition, a lapse in-between reflections? The time to take and make place. It is an in-between that enhances, repeats, but also one that can disrupt and reduce meanings. At once an addition to sonic flows, and a loss of information, of clarity.

In addition to Bocquillon’s featured installation, the following Sound Showcase artist’s works will be exhibited in Digital Scholarship Centre throughout the conference:

  • Echolocation: A Short Film by Nadia Shihab
  • Anthrobiophonia by Ben Nixon and Lisa Anderson
  • Becoming Mighty Real: Queer Sound Relations by Andrew Zealley
  • the way we hold our hands with nothing in them by Xiaoxuan Huang
  • Temporal Duets: Reverberations Between the Live and Mediated Voice by Misha Penton and Shannon Holmes

The Exhibition Opening will be followed by a reception, in the Digital Scholarship Centre main lobby.

Loc: Digital Scholarship Centre, 2-20 Cameron Library, 11231 Saskatchewan Dr. NW, Edmonton, AB


Tuesday, May 2

Chair: Chelsea Miya

Keynote presentation by Gascia Ouzounian, “Shock City: Urban Echopolitics in Gaza”:

In this presentation I suggest that the city can be mobilised as a weapon of war by being made to act as a transmitter of shock, through the propagation and reflection of extremely loud, violent, explosive, and inescapable sounds: ‘environmental noises’ that are designed to harm, and that escape the purview of noise legislation. I explore this idea in connection to the 2014 Gaza War and sonic-spatial-urban conditions in Jabaila Camp, the largest of eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, and one of the most densely populated areas of the world. In examining the ‘echopolitics’ of this war, I draw on the writings of local urban planners who describe such extreme overcrowded-ness and overbuilding that there is no distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ space; and the wartime diary of Atef Abu Saif, a Palestinian journalist and political theorist whose memoir The Drone Eats with Me (2014) is a searing earwitness account of the war. In his diary Abu Saif describes a visual regime in which Palestinians are made hypervisible to Israeli forces through constant surveillance while also being made invisible to the outside world, and an aural regime in which their shouts and screams are ‘swallowed by silence’ while they themselves are forced into a state of constant hypervigilant listening. I consider Abu Saif’s extreme positioning as a listening subject who, in the context of decreased visibility and the constant presence of terrifying noises, is often ‘reduced to an ear’—but for whom listening is traumatic, including through the coupling of his body with the shaking and vibrations of buildings that transmit shock. I consider Abu Saif’s testimony in connection to wider experiences of traumatic listening in the context of contemporary urban drone warfare, asking how the city is weaponized by extending the harmful effects of violent sounds, and how this relates to a broader politics of air, atmosphere, and their governance.

 

10:30 AM – 12:00 PM MDT

 

Chair: Deanna Fong

  •  Joseph Chaves (U of Northern Colorado), “Indirect Signals and the Scene of Recording”
  •  Craig Farkash (Concordia U), “A Sense of Rhythm: Rhythm as a Sensori-Historical Listening Practice” [virtual]

Chair: Ariel Kroon

  •  Cecily Devereux (UAlberta), “Sounds Like Patriarchy: Lola Montez and the Hiss”
  •  Katherine McLeod (U Concordia Montreal) and Emily Murphy (UBCO), “Reverberations of Duende in Canadian Poetics” [virtual]
  •  Scott Inniss (Independent), “Ghost Notes and Decolonial Re-Reverberation in Rachel Zolf’s Janey’s Arcadia”

Chair: Michael O’Driscoll

  •  Rob Shields (U Alberta), “The Social and Political Merits of Inner Voices”
  •  Amandine Coquaz (Concordia U), “Listening to Montreal: A Creative Exploration of the City’s Linguistic Common Grounds”
1:15 PM – 2:30 PM MDT

 

  •  Christina Goestl (Independent), “The Universe is Not Only Queerer Than We Suppose, It Is Queerer Than We Can Suppose” [experimental storytelling]
  •  Moynan King (Western), “There’s Nothing You Need to Do Right Now” [public meditation]
  • Panelists: Jessie Beier (Concordia U), Sourayan Mookerjea (U Alberta), Mark Simpson (U Alberta)

The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) is a collaboratively-authored research-creation intervention that explores myriad ecological, cultural, and political resonances of the three concepts named in its title: energy; emergency; repair. The E.E.R.K combines image, text, and sound to riff on the idea of a repair manual—that staple genre of self-help and self-making—while exploring energy emergency and energy emergence in several entangled registers. The panel presentation will introduce the various sonic dimensions and dynamics of the E.E.R.K. so as to explore the import of sound for the reckoning of energy and its emergencies.

Chair: Sean Luyk

  •  Jacqueline Wylde (St. Francis Xavier U), “Listening and Singing: Sonic Reimaginings of the English Metrical Psalms (1548-1660)” [virtual]
  •  Phillip Kohl (Ludwig Maximilian U of Munich), “The Acoustic Space of Ideology: Engineering Reverberation in the Soviet Union” [virtual]
  •  Miranda Eastwood (Concordia Montreal U), “Networked, Episode One: Reconstructing Data”

Chair: Geoffrey Rockwell

  •  Patrick Feaster and Xiaoshi Wei (SOAS U of London), “The Möllendorff Cylinders: Incunabula of Chinese Literary Audio” [virtual]
  •  Kristen Smith (York U), “Out-sounding Disappearance: Performances of Erasure Poetry”
  •  Abhipsa Chakraborty (SUNY Buffalo), “Vernacular Acoustics: Speech, Embodiment and the Politics of Listening in Mulk Raj Anand’s Writings”

Chair: Maddie Beaulieu

  •  Angus Tarnawsky (Concordia Montreal), “Walking and Listening on the Lachine Canal”
  •  Stephanie Loveless (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), “This Street is a Song: Situated Listening in a Contested Site”
  •  Sara DorowSean Luyk, and Scott Smallwood (U Alberta), “Listening to the “Meaning of Work”

Engage with the histories and experiences of the Indigenous peoples of the Edmonton region through a walking tour of the river valley led by Dr. Dwayne Donald (Métis-Cree) of the Faculty of Education. By walking together through the river valley and sharing stories, Dwayne hopes to provoke a place-based ethical imagination guided by kinship teachings.

*Note: Spots for group activities are limited. Sign-up at registration or contact sw23[at]ualberta.ca.

A tour of the Sound Studies Institute, culminating in an artist’s talk by Rachel Epp Buller and the debut of her new sound exhibit “Reverberations of Winter Walking.”

In January 2022, I moved to Edmonton, in the dead of winter, and embarked on a four-month daily walking practice. I walked in the snow and I walked in the River Valley. I walked with those who had walked before me and I walked alongside coyotes and snowshoe hares. Walking became one of my ways of listening in this place.

Come experience Winter Walking, an 8-channel sound piece on display in the Sound Studies Institute. My presentation will address walking as a form of whole-body listening—hearing, sensing, perceiving, attuning—that might reverberate as a relational and reparative practice.

*Note: Spots for group activities are limited. Sign-up at registration or contact sw23[at]ualberta.ca.

In this experiential session, sound artist and researcher Stacey Bliss will briefly introduce her work with gong cultures and basic gong philosophy of ‘You are a Gong.’ Then, she will lead the group through breathing and humming exercises, followed by a sonic immersion (gong bath or sound meditation).

*Note: Spots for group activities are limited. Sign-up at registration or contact sw23[at]ualberta.ca.

An evening of live poetry and sound at The Common featuring a collaborative performance by Jordan AbelConyer ClaytonManahil BandukwalaLiam Burke, and Nathanael Larochette. Followed by an open-mic poetry event.


WEDNESDAY, MAY 3

Chair: Zachary Morrison

  • Kristine Smitka (Director, CLC), Nicole Brandsma, and Yaghma Kaby (UAlberta, CLC researchers)
  • Shannon Webb Campbell (author) [virtual]
  • Sean Luyk (Digital Projects Librarian, UAlberta)
  • Karis Shearer (SpokenWeb’s Pedagogy Task Force, UBC Okanagan)

Inside the Bag is the Centre for Literatures in Canada / Centre de littératures au Canada’s archive of recordings of literary and scholarly readings and lectures from the past 16 years of the Centre’s programming. Co-hosted by the CLC, the launch event at the SpokenWeb symposium in May will highlight the resonances between the Centre’s archive of contemporary recordings and SpokenWeb’s archive of historic Canadian literary readings, offering scholars, writers, and the reading public a chance to encounter the archive through the theoretical interests and questions foregrounded by SpokenWeb.

Introduced by Dr. Kristine Smitka, the Acting Director of the CLC in 2023, the launch of this archive will open with a short recorded sound collage featuring a selection of the archive’s many voices, and it will conclude with a conversation about what it means to create archives of this nature for readers and researchers. Shannon Webb Campbell, a mixed settler and Mi’kmaq poet and author of Lunar Tides (2022) and I am a Body of Land (2019), will reflect on the intimacy of recording her own voice as she created one of our “covid edition” podcast readings, a task that, she reports, transformed her engagement with the medium of recording.

Chair: Maddie Beaulieu

  •  Sophia Magliocca (Concordia Montreal), “A Study of the Social Q&A: Listening for ‘Camaraderie Tenderness’ in Microcollaboration”
  •  Jason Wiens (U Calgary), “Marvin Francis’ Reverberative Poetics”
  •  Frances Grace Fyfe (Concordia Montreal), “Asking ‘The Overwhelming Question,’ Or, Why Writers Fail at Difficult Conversations”

Chair: Matthew Weigel

  •  Anna Navarro (Independent), “Behind Us Was the Sea: Poetic Listening Practice for Filipino Diasporic Archives”
  •  Jasmin Macarios (U Ottawa), “Queer Coding the Audio Archive: Linked Data and the Lesbian Organization of Toronto (LOOT) Oral History Tapes”
  •  Leah Van Dyk (U Calgary), “Alden Nowlan and the Sonic Commonplace Book” [virtual]

Chair: Theo Gray

  •  Samuel Adesubokan (U Victoria), “Radio and Tactical Listening in a Yoruba Sound World”
  •  Jentery Sayers (U Victoria), “An Activity Theory of Game Audio for Genre Studies” [pre-recorded]
  •  Asia Tyson (U Victoria), “Sound and Spatiotemporal Boundaries in Alien: Isolation”

Chair: Zachary Morrison

  •  Rémy Bocquillon (Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt), “Making Audible the Inaudible: Sound and Space As Matters of Concern”
  •  Jimmy Eadie (Trinity College Dublin), “Sounding Art, Intermediality and the Aural Pivot” [virtual]
  •  Camila dos Santos (Universidade Federal de Santa Maria), “Poetic Transductions: The Sound Between FM, Soundscapes, and Installations” [virtual]

Chair: Sean Luyk

  •  Ipek Oskay (U Alberta), “Soundscape Encounters with Non-Human: On Soundscape Justice and Critique of Synoecism” [virtual]
  •  Richard Costa (UAlberta), “The Soundscape Ecology of Francisco López in La Selva”
  •  Jami Reimer (Simon Fraser U), “Speculative Bioacoustics, Interspecies Audibility, and the Posthuman Choir” [virtual]

Chair: Chelsea Miya

In the first recording of “From the Prairies to the Pacific Rim,” poets Emily RiddleSacha Ouellet, and Erica H Isomura (along with Rita Wong) came together to trace ancestry, activism, and rivers between Amiskwaciwâskahikan in the Prairies, across the Rocky Mountains, and into the Salish Sea.

In this plenary, the poets build upon previous work to address reverberations of waterways via trade routes, resource extraction, and food sources in urban and rural landscapes. From the effects of pollution on Indigenous nationhood to land and water rights, these artists consider how we might include levity while speaking to dire consequences of colonial systems at play.

7:30 PM – 10:00 PM MDT
  •  J. R. Carpenter (Winchester School of Art) and Jules Rawlinson (U of Edinburgh), An Island of Sound [performance]
  •  Guillaume Tardif (U Alberta), Waves upon Waves: Compressed Reflections from a Recording Restoration Odyssey [demo + performance]
  •  Wayne Defehr (U Alberta), What is the Sound of the North Saskatchewan River? A Settler and Indigenous Collaboration [performance]
  •  Klara du Plessis (Concordia University) and Jimmie LeBlanc (Université de Montréal), The Reverberation of Violent Sound: A Screening and Discussion of Light, a Mono-Opera [screening + Q&A]

 

Travel

From the Airport

To travel from the Edmonton Airport in Leduc to Edmonton downtown, there are two options:

Taxi ($62 flat-rate): Hire a taxi with Co-OpAirport Taxi Service, or Uber.

Transit ($10): Take Edmonton Transit Route 747 to Century Park LRT station. Then take the LRT to the station closest to your accommodations if on campus or downtown. Whyte Avenue hotels area 25 minute walk from the closest LRT station, and so taxi or Uber is advisable.

Getting Around Edmonton

The University of Alberta is centrally located in the heart of Edmonton. We are walking distance from Whyte Avenue, Strathcona, and Jasper Avenue, and there are many accessible walking paths and bike trails along the River Valley. Check out the Discover YEG map of popular trails, bike routes, and attractions.

The cheapest and easiest way to navigate the city is by transit. The University LRT train station is conveniently located right on campus and operates from about 5:20 am to 1am daily. Tickets are $3.50 or 10 for $27.75. Visit Edmonton ETS for more info.

If you’re feeling adventurous, try out an e-scooter or e-bike, which are available to rent via mobile app.

Uber or taxis are also always available.

U Alberta Campus Map

Find your way around campus using U Alberta’s campus map, which includes descriptions of and directions to all of our buildings and facilities.

 


 

 

Things to do around the area

Arts and Museums

  • Royal Alberta Museum: Western Canada’s largest museum.
  • Art Gallery of Albertacontemporary and historical collections; artist Esmaa Mohamoud’s exhibit, To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat, is a must see!
  • Muttart Conservatoryone of Canada’s largest indoor botanical collections, noted for its unique glass pyramid greenhouses
  • TELUS World of Science: highlights include the featured exhibits “Blue Whale: Out of the Depths” and “Arctic Journey”

Outdoor Activities

Dining (on-campus)

  • HUB Mall: a number of food options; easily accessed from Humanities Centre via the 2nd floor breezeway
  • Remedy Cafe: iconic Edmonton cafe chain, Indian and Pakistani dishes “with a twist,” vegan and gluten-free options
  • Sugarbowl: popular pub near campus; local craft beers

*See full list of food-services on-campus

Dining (off-campus)

SpokenWeb Symposium 2022: The Sound of Literature in Time: A Graduate Symposium

The SpokenWeb Research Network (www.spokenweb.ca) is excited to host an in-person and virtual graduate student symposium (academic conference) at Concordia University in Montreal, 16-17 May 2022, on the theme of “The Sound of Literature in Time.”

Introduction to Theme:  The concepts of sound, time and literature evoke a wide range of research questions when considered in relation to each other. Together, they may suggest questions about how sound has been represented in literary works from different historical periods, how time has structured the way literary works sound (as with poetic metre), how readings and recitations sound literature across a span of time, and how time is sounded in different literary cultures and communities. Explorations of non-Western temporal frameworks, as in Mark Rifkin’s Beyond Settler Time, and a recent special issue on Black Temporality in Times of Crisis edited by Badia Ahad and Habiba Ibrahim, for example, reveal diverse meanings of temporality across cultures. As a concept, sound is always moving through time, and so, descriptions of sound involve the description of time in motion. Even a piece of sound (a sound ‘bite’) must be in motion to be audibly perceptible. As Don Ihde, in his explorations of sound phenomenology observes, “[i]insofar as all sounds are also ‘events,’ all the sounds are within the first approximation, likely to be considered as ‘moving.’” Without motion, sound is rendered silent. This is especially evident in sounds that have been recorded on time-based audio recording media which suggest the possibility of capturing real historical time in mediated form. Media theorists have noticed how the real-time quality of recorded sound, that it puts us into time that has already passed and opens a tunnel connection with the past, triggers what Wolfgang Ernst has called “the drama of time critical media.” 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 hears is living in the present, replicating the live sonic event, of which it is apparently a real-time reproduction.  Sound recording works on human perception itself, and on our perception of time.  Other sound scholars have noted how the temporal qualities of sound immediately raise questions of historical context. For example, Pierre Schaeffer describes a “sound object” as “something that occurs in a certain place during a particular interval of time” for which questions of “context” apply. Friedrich Kittler’s work on literature and media has insisted that sound recording technology has had a transformative impact upon our relationship to the past. Time itself becomes a variable to be manipulated with technological media (you can speed up, slow down, reverse the direction of the record) suggesting that our capacity to manipulate the media artifact not only enables us to process historical “real time” so that it is experienced as a temporal event in the present, but to transform historical “real time” into events of alternate temporal orders, as well.  Most recently, Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne have explored the history of listening to literature at accelerated speeds by blind audiobook readers, and the technological history of time shifting in speech-oriented sound media. When we are talking about sound, time, and literature, we are considering the intervolved relationship of something we identify as a literary artifact as a kind of event that suggests possibilities of playing, replaying and creating history.  (You can see the original Call for Papers for this symposium, here.)


 

Notable Events

Plenary Talk by T.L. Cowan (University of Toronto): Technologies of Fabulous & Minor Digitization: Trans- Feminist & Queer Cabaret Cross-Platform Methods for Online Research Environments

Monday, May 16, 2022 – 10:30am-12:00am – De Seve Theatre

T.L. Cowan (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Arts Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, as well as a cabaret and video artist. Her creative-research practice moves between page, stage, and screen.

T.L.’s research focuses on cultural and intellectual economies and networks of minoritized digital media and performance practices. Notable commissions for their creative-critical work include the PlugIn Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, Queens Museum in New York City, and Nuit Blanche in Toronto. She is currently completing two monographs, Transmedial Drag and Other Cross-Platform Cabaret Methods, and The Needs of Others: Trauma, Media & Disorder.Their most recent essays are published in Moving Archives (2020), The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities & Art History (2020), American Quarterly (2020) First Monday (2018),Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies (2016), More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (2016, edited by Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars) and as part of Alexandra Juhasz’s #100 Hard Truths.

T.L. frequently collaborates with Jasmine Rault. Together, they hold a SSHRC Insight Grant (2019-2024), entitled “Networked Intimate Publics: Feminist and Queer Practices of Scale, Safety and Access,” and a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2017-2020), entitled “Building a Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory for Minor(itized) Materials.” In addition to the Cabaret Commons, Cowan and Rault co-director another online research site: the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory (DREC). They are also co-editors of a “Metaphors as Meaning and Method in Technoculture,” a special section of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience (Fall 2022) and a book entitled Heavy Processing, about trans- feminist and queer digital research methods and ethics. You can see early versions of Heavy Processing on the DREC.

T.L. is also a co-director of the Critical Digital Methods Institute (CDMI) at the University of Toronto Scarborough, a co-author of the Feminist Data Manifest-NOand collector of the Manifest-NO Playlist.


Plenary Talk by Deanna Fong (Concordia University) and Felicity Tayler (University of Ottawa): “A Heart’s Geography: Service and/or/as Activism in the Literary Archive”

Tuesday, May 17, 2022 – 43:00pm-4:30pm – De Seve Theatre

A Heart’s Geography is an affective mapping of identity to place–a spatial imaginary where all our loved ones are gathered, despite the realities of vast distances and time spent apart. Deanna and Felicity will converse about the role of time in their respective work on the Fred Wah Digital Archive, and the co-publishing communities of Toronto-based magazines, Fireweed, Fuse and Border/Lines. Time has a strong influence on the interrelated concepts of service and activism, which both speakers grapple with in their research. On the one hand, this involves casting a retrospective gaze toward the archives that are in their care, or in the care of institutions, with an awareness of intergenerational activist work; on the other, contemporary archival engagements are undertaken as a future-oriented service toward new generations, as a form of activism in its own right. Both Deanna and Felicity combine ethical data practices with oral history methods to balance these past and future yearnings and this conversational presentation will move between image, recording and interview space as a reflection of their shared ways of working.

Deanna Fong (Concordia University)

Felicity Tayler (University of Ottawa)

Deanna Fong is a Postdoctoral Fellow in English and History at Concordia University, where her work focuses on the ethics of listening in the context of literary audio. With Karis Shearer, she is the co-editor of Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch (Talonbooks, 2020). She directs the fredwah.ca, a digital bibliography and textual repository for Canadian poet Fred Wah. She is currently working on a new book that collects poetry, art, and oral histories with seven Vancouver avant-garde women, which is scheduled for release with Talonbooks in the fall of 2023.

Felicity Tayler, MLIS, PhD is the Research Data Management Librarian at the University of Ottawa. She specializes in Digital Humanities data as her interests include art historical metadata modeling, data visualization, and the print culture of artistic community. Her work as co-applicant on the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership positions the visualization of co-publishing metadata as an entry point into oral history narratives, public events and exhibition practices. Tayler’s critical and scholarly writing has been published widely and related exhibitions have taken place at Artexte and the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives, among other venues.


 

Conference Schedule

Abbreviations and Locations: IP= In-Person Participation, V = Virtual Participation | LB = J.W.  McConnell Library Pavillion, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West. | 4th Space and the J.A. DeSève Cinema are accessible via the main floor mezzanine of the Library Pavillion (LB) | LB 322 and LB 361 are rooms located within the Webster Library, on the third floor of LB (accessible via the main floor mezzanine by stairs or the elevators furthest to the left) | URSA MTL, 5589 Avenue du Parc, Montreal, QC, H2V 4H2 | 1-514-984-4194

Zoom Links for Virtual Participants: There are two Zoom links needed to attend all events: 

CLICK HERE to register for online attendance of Symposium events taking place in the 4th SPACE

CLICK HERE to register for online attendance of Symposium events taking place in the DE SEVE CINEMA

COVID-19 Considerations: Please note that as of 13 May 2022, protective masks must still be worn in all public spaces on campus at Concordia University.  Masks (and hand sanitizer) can be acquired for free upon entry into any Concordia building.  For the latest news concerning protocols, please see Concordia’s COVID-19 updates page.


THE DAY BEFORE – Sunday  15 May 2022
For those of you who are in town, or will be arriving for the Symposium on Sunday (May 15), you are invited (and encouraged) to join us for a special SpokenWeb / ACCUTE joint event, a poetry performance by Oana Avasilichioaei followed by a rapid fire reading of poets who have attended the ACCUTE conference.

 

This in-person (non-hybrid) poetry reading has been organized as an event that will bridge the 2022 ACCUTE conference and the  SpokenWeb Graduate Symposium starting the following day!  The reading will open with a 30-minute performance by longtime SpokenWeb artist friend Oana Avasilichioaei. This will be followed by a sequence of very concise 2-minute readings of by a flock of poets who attended ACCUTE. Organized and hosted by Klara Du Plessis and Eric Schmaltz.

 

Come early for a 5 à 7, have a drink at the cash bar, meet others arriving for the Symposium.  And then stay and listen to the performances.

 

Alt Hotel (120 Peel Street), Salle Rose-Fuschia
Sunday, 15 May 2022
5-7 pm socializing, 7-8 pm poetry reading

DAY 1 – Monday May 16, 2022

10:00am-10:30am – De Seve Cinema

Opening Remarks – SpokenWeb Symposium Committee

10:30am-12:00am – De Seve Cinema

PLENARY TALK

T.L Cowan (U of Toronto), “Technologies of Fabulous & Minor Digitization: Trans-Feminist & Queer Cabaret Cross-Platform Methods for Online Research Environments”

12:00am-1:00pm Lunch

1:00pm-2:15pm – 4th Space

Sounding Signs

Chair: Jason Camlot

Aubrey Grant [IP] (Concordia), “Resounding the Hollow: Repetition and Onomatopoeia in Poe’s ‘The Bells’”

Kristen Smith [IP] (York), “Diagrammatic  Codes, Lines, Crosshatchings: Finding Sound in Non-Linguistic Poetry”

Kiera Obbard [IP] (U of Guelph), “Close Reading the Sonic Topology of Instagram Poetry with Poemage”

2:15pm-2:30pm Break

2:30-3:30 – 4th Space

Broadcasting Temporalities

Chair: Katherine McLeod

Joseph Shea-Carter [IP] (U of Guelph), “(Re)sounding Text: Time is Away and Sonic Re-Presentations of Literature”

Nick Beauchesne [IP], Ariel Kroon [IP], and Chelsea Miya [IP] (U of Alberta), “‘’A Voice of One’s Own’: Making (Air)Waves about Gendered Language in 1980s Campus Radio”

3:30pm-4:00pm Break

4:00-5:15pm – 4th Space

Sounding Together

Chair: Michelle Levy

Carlos Pittella [IP] (Concordia), “’We’ the People: Collective Lyric Self in 21st-Century Poetry”

Lee Gilboa [V] (Brown), “Sound Together: The Chorus as a Possible Framework for Collectivity”

Kristin Franseen [IP] (Concordia), “Gossip, Musical Meaning, and (Im)possible Queer Pasts in Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Short Fiction”

5:15-5:30 pm – Break

5:30pm – 7pm – De Seve Cinema

Book Launch for Quotes (SpokenWeb, 2022), with a presentation by Klara du Plessis (Concordia) and Emma Telaro (Concordia), “Remaking Literary Temporality: Launching Quotes: Transcriptions On Listening, Sound, Agency”

 


DAY 2 Tuesday May 17, 2022

10:00am-11:15am – 4th Space

Radical Voices

Chair: Jason Camlot (Concordia U) and Xiaoxuan Huang (UBCO)

Sophia, Magliocca [IP] (Concordia) “Discovering Sexual Agency in Caroline Bergvall’s Goan Atom: Linguistic and Bodily Mutation” 

Shazia Hafiz Ramji [V] (U of Calgary) and Kyle Kinaschuk [V] (U of Toronto), “Sounding the Wind: Acoustic Kinships in Disappearing Moon Cafe” 

Effy Morris [IP] (Concordia), “Tone As Tonus: (Un)grammaring Ontology With Kamau Brathwaite’s Nation Language”

11:15-11:30 Break

11:30am-12:30pm – 4th Space

Sonic Memories

Chair: Annie Murray

Linara Kolosov [V] (SFU), “Sixty years of Readings in BC: Access to Memory (AtoM) of the largest SFU sound collection”

Sarah Cipes [IP] (UBCO), “Finding Due Balance: Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as a Feminist Practice in Literary Archives” 

12:30pm-1:30pm Lunch

1:30pm-2:45pm – 4th Space

Improvising Language 

Chair: Michael O’Driscoll

Megan Stein [IP] (Concordia), “Tender Records”

Thade Correa [IP] (Indiana), “Speech is a Mouth”: Notes on the Musical / Experientialist Poetics of Robert Creeley

Donald Shipton [IP] (SFU), “A Night Out of Synch”: Listening and Performance in bpNichol’s “Hour 15”

2:45pm-3:00pm Break

3:00pm-4:30pm – De Seve Cinema

PLENARY TALK

Introduced and Moderated by Jason Camlot

Deanna Fong (Concordia) and Felicity Tayler (U of Ottawa), “A Heart’s Geography: Service and/or/as Activism in the Literary Archive”

4:30pm-5:00pm – Closing Remarks with SpokenWeb Symposium Committee

SpokenWeb Symposium Show and Closing Party (everyone)

7:00 – midnight – URSA MTL, 5589 Park Ave, Montreal, Quebec H2V 4S8

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Reading begins at 8:00 pm

Stay as long as you like…

We recommend having dinner near Ursa before the show. Right next door to Ursa, there is a cute restaurant called Tachido  (5611 Parc Ave) for tacos and tortas! Also very nearby: Nouveau Palais (281 Bernard) and microbrewery Helm (273 Bernard). Ursa is located in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood with no shortage of food options. For something more casual, you could take a walk along St-Viateur, grab a coffee from Olimpico Café, and maybe a slice of pizza next door or a falafel from Yoni. Then, we’ll see you at the show at 8pm!

 


 

Post-Conference Projects

The Symposium Organizing Committee will announce plans for a possible post-conference publication emerging from work presented at the symposium in a short session following the closing plenary lecture.


 

Participants

Nick Beauchesne (U of Alberta) completed his doctoral studies at the University of Alberta in 2020. He currently works remotely as a sessional instructor at the U of A, and in-person at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC. His speciality is in twentieth century occult literary networks and modernist magazines, and he is also a vocalist and synthist performing under the pseudonym of Nix Nihil. As a SpokenWeb RA, he is currently working on a podcast episode about Campus Radio at U of A in the 1980s.

Paper Description:  This paper will be co-presented with Ariel Kroon and Chelsea Miya.

“People Will Laugh at You”: The Shifting Terrain of Pronoun Debates from 1980s Literary Campus Radio to Contemporary News Media 

Pronoun usage is now, more than ever, a subject of debate and discussion online, in the news media, the classroom, and day-to-day living. While it seems that more and more people are talking about pronoun usage today, this topic has been part of feminist conversations on language and literature for decades. While working as research assistants for SpokenWeb Alberta, Ariel Kroon, Chelsea Miya, and Nick Beauchesne were surprised to discover that one of the episodes of the campus radio show Voiceprint, produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, featured a significant section on the use of pronouns. Freelance editor Joanne Kolmes describes in an interview having to fight to use gender-neutral language in a publication. We were struck by how topical this conversation seemed to us, as the issue of pronoun usage has popped up time and again in Canadian media, from Canadian academic Jordan Peterson’s refusal of gender neutral pronouns to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s viral use of “peoplekind.” In our presentation, we will draw on archival radio material from SpokenWeb Alberta, to show how this issue has been brought from the fringe to the mainstream. Back in 1981, being a woman on air was itself radical. Voiceprint was ahead of its time, in that it featured female voices and creators, involved not only in writing and researching the episodes, but producing the episodes. Voiceprint illustrates how campus radio was a crucible for experiments in radio production as well as radical politics, including feminism.

Sarah Cipes (UBCO) is the AMP (Audio Media Poetry) Lab PRC fellow and a PhD Student in the IGS Digital Arts & Humanities theme at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Her research combines audio digitization, vocal studies, and humour philosophy, and incorporates recorded literary and comedic performances. She has contributed to archival digitization efforts with the British Columbia Regional Digitized History project. Sarah graduated with a master’s degree in Information Science (Archives and Record Management) from the University of Toronto in 2021 and holds a BA in English from UBC Okanagan. She acknowledges that she lives and works on Syilx Okanagan territory.

Paper Description:

“Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as a Feminist Practice in Literary Archives”

Finding the balance between making archival information publicly accessible to researchers and protecting the subjects of archival objects/documents has long been a source of difficulty for archivists and researchers alike. While FIPPA, PHIPPA, and Canadian Copyright legislation give us legal guidelines to follow, these rules are based solely on time (how long has the creator been deceased? How long ago was this object created?) and ownership (who holds copyright?). These questions satisfy the most basic legal needs for archival access but create problems when it comes to protecting subjects of archival documents. This is particularly pressing with archival sound recordings, in which subjects who are being recorded may not have any legal rights over the tapes. In some cases, subjects are recorded without their knowledge, bringing to light issues surrounding consent. 

These issues are sticky, and can lead to uncomfortable situations for archivists, researchers, and archival subjects alike. Our approach is to employ sound editing software to remove unwilling subjects from sound recordings while still making the rest accessible to the public. Sound editing can also be used to literally amplify subjects whose voices are traditionally left in the background, particularly those with less resonant voices (usually cisgender women), for whom microphone technology was not created. 

Through transparent and comprehensive editorial versioning notes, these compassionate edits can be used by researchers who may otherwise be unable to access certain recordings. Drawing on the findings of myself, Karis Shearer, and Deanna Fong, I will provide an overview of the practical creation process and value of feminist edits within the literary archive.

Thade Correa (Indiana U) hails from Northwest Indiana and studied at Indiana University Bloomington (BA English and music, 2006), University of Chicago (MA, 2010) and University of Notre Dame (MFA, 2013). A writer, poet, and translator as well as a musician, he is currently a first-year PhD candidate in English at Indiana University Bloomington.

Paper Description:

“‘Speech is a mouth’: Notes on the Musical / Experientialist Poetics of Robert  Creeley”

How can literary studies engage with poetry’s sonic dimensions, especially as exemplified by writers like Robert Creeley, a poet who thought of his work as literary music? This study explores Creeley’s poetry from a sound studies perspective and asks how poetic sound performs and enacts meaning. In considering this, the works of figures like Friedrich Kittler, Roland Barthes, and Vijay Iyer are drawn upon to demonstrate how Creeley’s poetry might be understood in musical terms.  Specifically, Iyer’s concept of experientialist music is shown to converge with Creeley’s poetics and applied to a reading of Creeley’s poems to illuminate the role of sound as it functions in his work. Iyer claims that certain musical practices are essentially experiential in that they are concerned with enacting the real experience or process of body-mind perception rather than merely representing perceptual objects. For Iyer, experiential practices emphasize 1) embodiment (rather than abstract formal unity), 2) temporality (or in-time process orientation rather than over-time objective orientation), and 3) an active exploration-construction of the world.  These aspects are identified as operative in three of Creeley’s poems (“The Language,” “Time,” and “My New Mexico”) which are discussed and close read as “music” rather than simply as “literature,” demonstrating both how Creeley’s work can be seen (heard) as a musical and experientialist project in its own right as well as the immense potential that the lens of sound studies offers as an alternative pathway to understanding contemporary literary art, wholly complementary to more traditional literary criticism.

Klara du Plessis (Concordia U) is a fourth year PhD candidate affiliated with Concordia University. Her current research aims to schematize different modes of literary event curation and to think critically about the often neglected labour that goes into shaping poetry reading series. Klara is the author of Ekke and Hell Light Flesh, and has three books of poetry and criticism forthcoming.

Presentation Description: Klara will co-present with Emma Telaro

“Remaking Literary Temporality: Launching Quotes: Transcriptions On Listening, Sound, Agency”

The 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium resulted in a number of divergent conference proceedings, including our project, Quotes: Transcriptions On Listening, Sound, Agency, an experimental, citational book that excerpted phrases, sentences, and paragraphs from the entire roster of papers and performances. In a self-referential gesture, we propose to discuss our collaborative process of producing this book at the forthcoming Symposium. Pivoting on a critical re/listening and transcription practice, our method worked to diffuse the linear temporality of audiovisual, archival recordings. We fragmented and recontextualized traditional research outputs presented by conference participants in order to recreate new dialogues in a reconstituted, literary temporality. This poetic temporality implies overlaying the records of the papers presented in 2021 with almost a year’s worth of work on our part, listening, selecting, excerpting, transcribing, and repositioning words into a new textual iteration that finally reconstructs time through the agency of print literature. Klara will focus on the act of dialogic juxtaposition inherent to her Deep Curation work, here developed from event-based to editorial practice. Emma will unpack her fragmentary, collage technique and the dialogue she reconstituted between Jonathan Sterne and Nina Sun Eidsheim’s separate plenary talks as an act of ventriloquism, in particular. While this paper will be more descriptive than argumentative in style, introducing the audience to a new publication that will be fresh from the presses at the time of the symposium, it will also aim to represent the critical and creative process of compiling this book as an innovative mode of research creation. 

Kristin Franseen (Concordia U) is a FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow in History at Concordia. Her research examines the place of gossip in the histories of queer musicology and composer biographies, with a focus on the works of early twentieth-century music critic, novelist, and sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson. She is currently at work on a book entitled Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson. Her other interests include the literary reception history of Antonio Salieri, women in the history of music theory, and celebrity endorsements in early metronome advertising.

Paper Description:

“Gossip, Musical Meaning, and (Im)possible Queer Pasts in Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Short Fiction”

American music critic and amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson (1858-1942) is perhaps best known for his two contributions to early gay literature: the novel Imre: A Memorandum (ca. 1905) and the historical study The Intersexes (ca. 1909). These projects are often framed as emergent expressions of sexuality-as-identity translated from medical sexology (Breen 2006, Wilper 2016). Yet Prime-Stevenson’s lesser-known short fiction provides a more eclectic and nuanced look at queer musical meanings and histories. Imre’s reference to symphonies by Tchaikovsky and Beethoven as queer “tone-autobiographies” suggests an approach to coming out grounded in musical feeling. This notion is further developed in the short story, “Prince Bedr’s Quest” (1927), which allows Imre’s protagonists happiness through a snapshot of musical reflection, immersing them in an extended musical and literary reverie. The historical romance “When Art Was Young”/“Aquae multae non” (1883, rev. 1913) uses the trappings of musicological research to frame a love story between rival motet composers in seventeenth-century Italy. Prime-Stevenson’s most autobiographical work—“Once: But Not Twice” (1913)—contrasts the tragedy of queer loss in the present with the happy memories of a former love built on shared musical appreciation and collaboration. Taken together and alongside theories of queer gossip as historical knowledge (Butt 2005) and queer historical imagination through literature (Love 2007), these works reflect Prime-Stevenson’s lifelong attempts to link his musical interests and queer identity through gossipy anecdotes, the construction of a queer musical canon, and experiences of music that are seemingly both historically grounded and existing outside of historical time.

Lee Gilboa (Brown U) is a US based Israeli composer, researcher and audio engineer. In her work Lee uses speech, audio spatialization and vocal processing, and engages with different themes around the sonic identity such as naming, representation, collectivity, and self-expression. Her music has been presented at Roulette Intermedium, Ars Electronica Forum Wallis Festival, The Cube at Virginia Tech, NYCEMF, and Spectrum’s multi-channel festival among others, and she presented papers in conferences such as The Audio Testimonies Symposium and The Sound of Sound Studies. She participated in several master classes and artist residencies internationally, including The Atlantic Center for the Arts, IRCAM Manifeste Academy, and The Honk Tweet. Lee holds degrees from Berklee College of Music Columbia University, and is currently a Ph.D. student at Brown University’s Music and Multimedia Composition program.

Paper Description:

“Sound Together: The Chorus as a Possible Framework for Collectivity”

Sounding as one is not an uncommon phrase in the public and collective spheres. While this phrase points at the possibilities that the ability to act collectively can and does animate for us, it nonetheless approaches the collective through an identitarian perspective which limits the sounding abilities of those who form the collective. In this paper I offer an alternative approach to understanding collective sounding through the framework of the chorus. Thinking with both the classical and musical approaches to the chorus, I will show that attending the chorus as one that sounds together as opposed to sounding as one suggests an accountability towards the variety of voices and identities that form a collective expression, which can allow for more inclusive understandings of collectivity to emerge. Thinking primarily with Saidiya Hartman, Jean Améry and Judith Butler, this paper will introduce a vocally oriented approach to collectivity through questioning the ability of semantic and metaphorical lenses to hear the voice as a whole. By concentrating on the singularities that sound within the collective, I do not wish to reproduce current individualist trends of identity politics , but to make room for the differences to arise from within. A vocally oriented turn to the chorus as a framework for collectivity might allow us to do just that, viewing the collective not as a place for inhabiting an identity, but rather, as a joining of arms and voices through which to find a ground to stand on and a place where one can belong.

Aubrey Grant (Concordia U) is a second-year PhD student at Concordia University’s English  Department. His research examines the ways in which Romantic lyric poetry and Gothic  fiction take up and negotiate new technological modalities of relating to the dead in the  eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries at the intersection of archeology, history, medicine  and urban design. He currently works as a Coordinator at the Centre for Expanded  Poetics, digitalizing and archiving out-of-print modernist poetry journals. His review of  Alexi Kukuljevic’s Liquidation World can be found at Society and Space.

Paper Description:

 “Resounding the Hollow: Repetition and Onomatopoeia in  Poe’s ‘The Bells’” 

In my paper, I argue that Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells” articulates a transformation in  listening techniques marked by a shift from a regime of signs to a regime of signal  processing that prefigures Kittler’s phonographic processing of the real. Arguing along  lines set out by Eliza Richards, Peter Miller, and Jerome McGann, I will begin by  situating Poe’s attention to the mechanics of prosody within nineteenth-century print  culture and industrial reproduction. In this reading, Poe’s poems are prosodic machines  that not only produce an infinite variety of performances, but are themselves  technologically reproducible. While holding onto this theoretical and historical context, I  argue that Poe’s use of onomatopoeia in “The Bells” contests the performative  dimension that critics posit as the interpretive moment of the text.  Indeed, what has escaped notice is the fact that the word ‘bells’ is not itself  onomatopoeiac. Rather, it is only through the operationalization of repetition in the text  itself that it becomes so. Like a real bell’s percussive clapper—which makes its hollow  interior ring and resound—the repetition of this mechanical supplement empties the  word of signification while retaining its acoustic qualities. What occurs, I argue, is that  the repeated graphic inscription itself functions as a playback device from which issue  the uncoded frequencies of an impossible, inhuman sound independent of the  performative utterance. From sign to signal, this sourceless, acousmatic sound, may  well be the music of the printed word’s own dissolution into the noise of the coming  phonographic age.

Kyle Kinaschuk (U of Toronto) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, where he studies the lament form. His research is nested in Canadian literary studies, poetry and poetics, critical and cultural theory, and questions of pedagogy and the university.

Paper Description: This paper will be co-presented with Shazia Hafiz Ramji.

“Sonic Intimacies of Voice and Kinship in SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe”

This paper examines how the sonic elements of SKY Lee’s 1990 novel Disappearing Moon Cafe are pivotal to the novel’s aesthetic reimagining of kinship relations. Disappearing Moon Cafe turns upon the unraveling of the Wong family name over four generations, bringing into focus how Chinese diasporic movements to and within the West Coast—from the mid-nineteenth century to the late-twentieth century—exerted pressure upon kinship relations under conditions of anti-Asian racism in Canada. Despite anxieties to ensure the continuity of a patriarchal lineage protected from incest and miscegenation, Lee’s novel, as scholars such as Larissa Lai and Smaro Kamboureli have argued, produces relational modes of kinship that do not depend upon the biogenetic and the consanguine. In this article, we extend these critical discussions by tracing the shifting trajectory of the wind and its sounds to enumerate a processual mode of listening and knowing. Lee’s figuring of the wind, we contend, disrupts static and mappable kinship relations to instead create imagined, communal intimacies. We interpret the wind as a recurring sonic trope in the novel that complicates conceptions of voice as a singular and innate expression of identity. From the wind’s agentic potential that “snatches words” from the patriarch’s mouth to unpacking its role in romanticizing the Indigenous ancestor of the Wong family in the novel, wind and its actions in the narrative are far from minor. In fact, wind causes sound and noise, which creates a mode of listening to family secrets that cannot be uttered in a straightforward manner. Ultimately, we suggest that Disappearing Moon Cafe provides a way of understanding how the acoustic experience of landscape challenges biogenetic structures of kinship, offering a way to rethink kinship on the axes of settler, diasporic, and Indigenous relations.

Linara Kolosov (Simon Fraser U) is a second year Ph.D. student at Simon Fraser University in the English Department. She joined the SpokenWeb SFU team in May 2019 and focused on entering metadata into SWALLOW, training new research assistants to work in SWALLOW, searching for the best practices of working with the archive and data, and connecting the information in SWALLOW with that of the library archives.

Paper Description:

“Sixty years of Readings in BC: Access to Memory (AtoM) of the Largest SFU Sound Collection.”

Over the last three years, the SFU SpokenWeb team created about 2000 SWALLOW entries, of which more than 1100 belong to the Readings in BC collection. This collection is not organized by topic or period – it is a huge mass of mostly unrelated material collected over the last sixty years by SFU Special Collections. Most of the readings indeed happened in BC, but some were held in Montreal, Mexico, Toronto, New York, and so on. I believe what connects these thousands of cassettes together is our desire to preserve them to remember the material and authors who read, talk, and give lectures on them. This desire was the primary motivation that kept us going even when we had to do the fourth round of editing, listen to parts of each cassette several times, and come up with various tools that made the process of metadata creation faster and easier. Moving the information into SFU’s Access to Memory, as we call it AtoM, was the final step of our work on this enormous collection. Connecting SWALLOW data to the library archive is an integral part of our work because it helps researchers who may not know either about the SpokenWeb project or this diverse collection find and access literary sound archives. In this paper, I want to discuss our work on the metadata and the process of connecting this data to the library’s AtoM system, made with an intention of helping future researchers access the sound literary archives through time.

Ariel Kroon (U of Alberta) defended her PhD in English Literature in September 2021 at the University of Alberta, and still feels like a graduate student. Her research interests include feminist and queer histories, critical theory through the lens of science fiction, solarpunk, and speculative imaginaries of crisis. She is a SpokenWeb RA, an independent scholar, and an editor of Solarpunk Magazine. You can find her blogging at WordPress, check out her CV at Academia.edu, and watch her very occasional uploads on Youtube.

Paper Description: Ariel will co-present with Nick Beauchesne (see paper description above) and Chelsea Miya.

Sophia Magliocca (Concordia U) is a Master’s student in English Literature at  Concordia University, Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She is a research assistant for the SpokenWeb  affiliated project entitled “Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides,” led by principal  investigator Dr. Mathieu Aubin. Sophia is currently interested in applying affect theory to  feminist/queer studies, particularly in research that explores how women and sexual minorities  have been sexually documented across literary history. 

Paper Description:

“Discovering Sexual Agency in Caroline Bergvall’s Goan Atom: Linguistic and Bodily Mutation”

In Western societies, increased gay representation in media suggests a movement towards  equality, though this controlled narrative only presents the acceptable queer. In 2001, Caroline  Bergvall publishes Goan Atom, a collection that mirrors linguistic mutation with sexual activism.  Bergvall’s poems utilize subversive and non-standard conventions of syntax, orthography, and  phonetics to generate an audible and visual reaction; her modulations of formal literary traditions  demand attention. For example, in “Ambient Fish” Bergvall is mindful of sound, particularly  blending aggressive expressions like “fuckflowers,” and “Alien phock fish” with the sweet  vulnerability of “loose in your ouch” (Bergvall 72). The repetition and iterative transformation  of her poems generate a pulse and flow that mimic the process of sexual awakening. Theorist  Silvan Tomkins explains that hierarchical relationships are maintained through contempt-disgust,  “either when the oppressed one assumes the attitude of contempt for himself or hangs his head in  shame” (139). For years, performance excess has been used in queer and feminist activism to  dismantle systems of sexual shame. Yet, within these same systems, female and queer bodies are  actively commodified and made consumable. Bergvall presents the formless body as the primer  for sexual connaissance. Her collection shatters conventional language codes in order to render  the poems individually inconsumable. She applies the same theory to bodies in order to present  sexual transcendence as a unifying gesture that defies individual gender. In other words, to be  commodified requires an oppressive consumption, an action which Bergvall’s collection resists  by layering untraditional language with bodily mutations.

Chelsea Miya (U of Alberta) is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the SpokenWeb at the University of Alberta. Her research and teaching interests include critical code studies, nineteenth-century American literature, and the digital humanities. She has held research positions with the Kule Research Institute (Kias), the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC), and the Orlando Project. She co-edited the anthology Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene (Open Book Publishers 2021), and her article “Student-Driven Digital Learning: A Call to Action” appears in People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities outside the Center (MIT Press 2021).

Paper Description: Chelsea will co-present with Nick Beauchesne (see paper description above) and Ariel Kroon.

Effy Morris (Concordia U) writes, makes and thinks through the precarity of grammar, gender, sexuality and space. Currently a PhD student in English at Concordia University, s/he/y is co-editor of the online interdisciplinary magazine O BOD and a research assistant for the Centre for Expanded Poetics. T/he/r work has been published in The Literary Review, rivulet and Soliloquies Anthology.

Paper Description:

“Tone As Tonus: (Un)grammaring Ontology With Kamau Brathwaite’s Nation Language”

Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite situates the revolutionary power of language within the breath and bodies of people. Emphasizing the complex interculturation that produced the “English…that is not English” within the Caribbean, his neologism Nation language distinguishes itself from the often reductive and pejorative category of “dialect”. Barred from speaking their African languages, the enslaved people of the Ashanti, Congo, Ibo, Yoruba and others, embedded the tonal and tense modulations of their native tongues within English. Disregarded as noise and thus nonsense by colonizers, Nation language was and is used as subversive communication to bar unwelcome listening and readability. If speech from a knowledge system is thought to be use-less or non-sense, it is, as Fred Moten notes, “operative outside of exchange”. Nation language divests itself from linguistic and interlocutive sovereignty by redirecting the channels and energetic concerns of communication. By refusing the call, or rather being otherwise to the position of answering, Nation language enacts a revolutionary grammatical shift from people in resistance to people as resistance. Brathwaite’s poetry collection Middle Passages transcribes the sonic and grammatical tense ambiguities present in the orally formative lineage of Nation language within the African/Caribbean diaspora. With sound as central to meaning making, Nation language resists how English and other colonial languages created ontologies that marginalized and categorized—specifically black bodies—as objects. This paper examines how the sound of Brathwaite’s Nation language poetry necessarily (un)grammars ontology for the hi-fi expression of Carribean black being.

Kiera Obbard (U of Guelph) is a PhD student in The School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. Her SSHRC-funded project, The Instagram Effect: Contemporary Canadian Poetry Online, examines the complex social, cultural, technological and economic conditions that have enabled the success of social media poetry in Canadian publishing. 

Paper Description:

“Close Reading the Sonic Topology of Instagram Poetry with Poemage”

Since 2013, Instagram poetry (Instapoetry) has seen a major increase in popularity with Instapoets like Rupi Kaur garnering millions of followers on Instagram, selling out venues, and topping best-sellers lists globally (Maher; Mongeon; Yuan). Merging performative styles, print poetry, and social media technology, Instapoetry operates not only as spoken word poetry, social media poetry, or print poetry but lives in and problematizes the boundaries of all three simultaneously.  Much critique of Instapoetry is based on its perceived (lack of) literary value or difficulty, and its association with social media (e.g., Watts; Roberts). However, by focusing on the print or social media versions of the poems, these critiques gloss over the importance poets like Kaur place on performance—and specifically, on audiences hearing their poetry read aloud. In a 2019 interview, Kaur situated performance and spoken word as essential to her poetry, stating: “Paper is where the poetry lives, but performance is where the words come to life” (Onwuemezi and Pymm). If Kaur’s poetry is crafted to be spoken and heard—to emphasize the sonic patterns and rhythm—and not only read on a page or screen, then it is critically important to contend with the sonic patterns of Instapoetry. Considering the multiple components of Instapoetry together reveals the form’s potential to expand traditional (and canonical) genres of poetry and modes of literary analysis. In this paper, I will use Poemage, an open-source visualization tool for exploring the sonic topology of poems, to engage in a sonic close reading of a selection of Kaur’s Instagram poetry. The creators of Poemage define sonic topology as “the complex structures formed via the interaction of sonic patterns — words connected through some sonic or linguistic resemblance — across the space of the poem” (McCurdy et. al, Poemage: A Visualization Tool). In contrast to the movement in the digital humanities towards distant readings of literary texts, Poemage was developed as a collaboration between data visualization experts, poets and poetry scholars to computationally engage in sonic close readings of poetry. My article will build from Nina McCurdy, Julie Lein, Katharine Coles, and Miriah Meyer’s work with Poemage and computational and sonic poetry scholarship to demonstrate the significance of contending with the sonic patterns of Instapoetry. In doing so, I will demonstrate how a sonic close reading of Rupi Kaur’s poetry can reveal new modes of literary analysis for short-verse poetry, challenge existing notions of the literary value of Instapoetry, and encourage us to take Instapoetry seriously. Finally, I will argue that Instapoetry both participates in and pushes the boundaries of contemporary genres and categorizations of poetic form and literary value.

Carlos Pittella (Concordia U) is a Latinx Brazilian poet and literature researcher with Italian-Lebanese-Portuguese roots. As a researcher, he has edited books by and about Fernando Pessoa and contributed regularly to Pessoa Plural. As a poet, his work explores bordercrossing and overdubbed languages. Having lived in Brazil, Portugal, and the US, he’s currently an MA student in English–Creative Writing at Concordia University, Canada. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Brasil/Brazil, Tint, Moist, and the VS Podcast.

Paper Description:

“We” the People: Collective Lyric Self in 21st-Century Poetry

Questions of positionality permeate 21st-century poetics—and seem to come to a head around the intentional inclusion/exclusion of the reader in the speaker’s pronoun of choice, especially when the pronoun in question is “we.” What do we make of a contemporary poem in English written in the first-person plural? How does that choice impact our relationship with the speaker’s voice? And, has that relationship changed in the 21st century, or is it dictated by our inheritance of modernist ideas and the way they have framed our understanding of the lyric self? This paper contrasts current approaches to a lyric “we” with the fragmented lyric self of modernism and puts three contemporary poets in conversation: Nathaniel Mackey, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Solmaz Sharif. I study their voicings of a lyrical “we,” each one particularly fluid, complex, and distinct from the fragmented plurality of modernism: 1) Mackey’s jazzy and serial “we” in the “Song of the Andoumboulou”; 2) Gumbs’s “we” of summoned haunting voices; and 3) Sharif’s political “we” that is implicated in the layered relationships between speaker and a specific “you.” In putting these poets in conversation, I also invoke Cynthia Dewi Oka, George Abraham, and Fernando Pessoa, and, for theoretical support, Maggie Nelson, George Steiner, and Saidiya Hartman.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji (U of Calgary) is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. Her research engages with aurality, colonial archives, the Second World War, and family narratives in Canadian literature. She is the author of Port of Being.

Paper Description: Shazia will co-present with Kyle Kinaschuk (see paper description, above).

Joseph Shea-Carter (U of Guelph), is a PhD Candidate in Literary Studies in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph where they research the ways experimental “Canadian” poetry and art can engender new learning opportunities within or outside post-secondary settings.

Paper Description:

“(Re)sounding Text: Time is Away and Sonic Re-Presentations of Literature”

For the last seven years Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney have produced the genre-defying program, “Time is Away” on NTS Radio. The hour-long broadcasts incorporate spoken word, field recordings, and music to reflect on “the relationship between time, place, power, identity, and history-making” (Black Tower Projects). Their contributions are often “open-ended, associative, polyphonic, and, in places, deliberately opaque” but nonetheless produce “something that is part soundscape, part essay for the radio” (NTS Radio). The first half of my short paper will use Rollo’s and Tierney’s sonic re-presentations of specific texts to demonstrate how soundscapes can repurpose pre-existing literary representation. I will do so by focusing on three specific episodes of “Time is Away” – “John Berger: Pig Earth,” “Walter Benjamin: Berlin Childhood Around 1900,” and “In Translation.” Indeed, each broadcast inhabits, embodies, and ultimately, reanimates pre-existing work by John Berger, Walter Benjamin, and Dante with diverse, contemporary music from across the globe – effectively resituating the work of all three within the polyvocal, heterogenous parameters of the present. The second half of my paper will underscore the pedagogical along with methodological implications of Rollo’s and Tierney’s time bending sound work, specifically the potential ways their literary soundscapes can help students rethink seemingly old texts within modern geopolitical and multicultural contexts. By drawing largely from my own experiences teaching “Time is Away” in a second-year English seminar, my paper will highlight how intersections between literature and sound can engender new, current ways to learn about, deconstruct, and discursively reimagine a text.  

Donald Shipton (Simon Fraser U)  is an MA student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University and an RA for SpokenWeb. His research interests include literary archives, the digital humanities, and contemporary Canadian poetry.

Paper Description:

“A Night Out of Synch”: Listening and Performance in bpNichol’s “Hour 15”

In 1981, Simon Fraser University hosted “The Coast is Only a Line,” a weekend-long literary festival featuring some of the most prominent names in Canadian literature. bpNichol was among the presenting writers and thanks to the diligent documentation of Roy Miki, audio recordings from his performance can now be found within the Reading in BC Collection at SFU. During Nichol’s session he reads from numerous manuscripts, one of them being “Hour 15” from Book 6 of The Martyrology. This poem, like all poems within this section of The Martyrology, were written within a specific time of day in a kind of improvisation. “Hour 15” in particular, Nichol explains in this recording, was written while listening to live jazz in a busy restaurant. What he reads off the page is what he heard that night. This extra context illuminates the polyphonic and musical character of the poem, as well as Nichol’s playful performance of it. He speaks in different voices and volumes, and even at separate moments sings; however, perhaps most compelling in this reading is how Nichol is implicated in the improvisations to which he was previously only an observer. Nichol becomes the performer and we take his place in the audience. This shift allows for the listening at the heart of “Hour 15,” paradoxically, to be heard.

Kristen Smith (York U) is a doctoral candidate at York University researching intersections of contemporary poetry and sound. In both her academic and creative work, Kristen is interested in how art is created in community, connection, and collaboration.

Paper Description:

“Diagrammatic Codes, Lines, Crosshatchings: Finding Sound in Non-linguistic Poetry”

This paper analyzes the operation of sound in non-linguistic poetry to suggest that readers can challenge and reevaluate their relationship to sound, poetry, and communication. Three works are considered: Mary Ellen Solt’s “Moonshot Sonnet” (1964), Carolyn Bergvall’s Drift (2014), and Eric Schmaltz’s SURFACES (2018). This paper will focus on phonographic systems, specifically the alphabetic system of English, in juxtaposition with non-linguistic systems in poetry. Specifically, this essay suggests that visually-oriented poems can be read as para-graphic devices. Some visual poems can be more easily read and analyzed when considered as a graph, chart. or even a musical score than when considered solely as a textual piece working within a fixed alphabetic system. Poetry that is comprised of non-linguistic elements forces radical interrogation of sonic resonances. By removing language (which has sound as its foundation), there is an immediate stalling in reading and sounding process. This essay deliberately troubles the categorization of such works as “poetry” when there is (initially) a complete absence of sound when viewing the material on the page. Yet, these works can still be sounded (albeit untraditionally). Bernstein argues that “a culture’s language is one of its greatest assets and the more we acknowledge that, the richer we will be” (9). Yet, the dynamism of that language, the unacknowledged force that drives it into the mind and hearts of the listener, is sound. Readers can use sound and sounding as the basis for reading, interpreting, and performing these challenging poems.

Megan Stein (Concordia U) is a settler currently residing in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal, Quebec. Megan is  in their third year of the Master of Fine Arts program in Studio Arts, Print Media, at Concordia  University. Prior to relocating, she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2013 from the University  of Alberta, located in amiskwaciy-wâskahikan, or Beaver Hill House, the Nehiyawak (Cree)  name for Edmonton, Alberta, on Treaty 6 territory. Megan works within the methods,  collaboration, and philosophy of printmaking, which extends her practice into teaching, installation, sound, writing, and artist books. Their work has been published in the Æ: The  Graduate Journal of Art Education (Concordia University), and SNAPLine (Society of Northern  Alberta Print-Artists). Her work can be viewed online, via her website:  www.megantamarastein.com.

Paper Description:

“Tender Record

I would like to propose a presentation as artist-talk of my sonic translation project, Tender  Record. The project is ongoing and based on research I began in the summer of 2020 that  investigated methods of translating written language into sound. I was curious about the  underlying sonic potential of linguistic language, and this curiosity led me to ask: Can a written  text or word be seen as an alternative method of composing sounds? Using the program  SonicPi and by mapping the alphabet to midi numbers from the CMajor pentatonic  scale, Tender Record sounds three words: tender, entendre, or tenderness. Each recording is  composed of 3-4 “live loops” of one word, wherein the tones of the word are repeated until  the program is ended. The difference and shape of sound (between and within the loops) is  made by changing the various time-shifting envelopes (attack, delay, and sustain) as well as  amplitude, while the program is being run. Sound and time become intertwined in this process,  as loops shift between distinct and overlapping sounds. For my presentation of Tender Record, I will explain the methods used to explore the sonic  potential of linguistic language and then demonstrate the coding and process. Through this  demonstration, I will perform a live version of one word. This live performance will highlight how each recording of Tender Record is varied through these precise parameters (computer as  synth, static midi numbers) combined with the improvisational aspect of manipulating envelopes. I aim to show how these processes open the sounding of words, in a non-linguistic way. 

Emma Telaro (Concordia U) is a recent MA graduate from Concordia’s English Department. Her research focused on the letter form of Diane Di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letters” as radical, poetic-political method. Currently, she is the Associate Director of  the Association of English-Language Publisher’s of Quebec, and a research assistant for SpokenWeb.

Paper Description: Emma will co-present with Klara du Plessis.   See presentation abstract, above.


 

Travel

Getting to Montreal

Montreal is easily accessible by planes and trains from all the major cities in North America and Europe. Please note that the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), requires anyone, including U.S. citizens, entering or re-entering the United States by land and sea to have a passport or other appropriate secure document.

COVID travel requirements

For the latest news and protocols about travel to Canada as they pertain to COVID-19 regulations, please see the Government of Canada COVID-19: Travel, testing and borders site.

From the Airport

The cheapest way to get downtown from the airport is to take the new airport bus, Route 747, which will bring you directly to the metro system. The fare is $10 and functions as a day pass for the Montreal metro system. Taxis are also available and charge a flat rate of $38 from the airport to downtown Montreal.

From the Train Station and Bus Station:

For those of you coming from Congress in Ottawa, train or bus are good ways to travel.  Gare Central train station is within walking distance from Concordia (if you have a suitcase on wheels, or a very cheap taxi ride.  The Bus station is at Berri, east of where Concordia is located.  To get to Concordia or the hotels from there you may either take the green line going west, from Berri-UQAM to Guy-Concordia, or take the 24 bus that runs along Sherbrooke, going west.

Getting Around Montreal

The Montreal metro system is the fastest and most cost effective way to get around the city. While individual tickets are $3.25, a three day pass is $18 (and will last through the conference).

Metro operating hours are Monday to Friday and Sunday from 5:30 a.m. to 1 a.m., and Saturday from 5:30 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. The average wait time between trains is eight minutes and three minutes during rush hour. For more information about public transportation in Montreal, visit www.stm.info.

If you prefer getting around by taxi, it’s always very easy to flag one down on the street. You’ll also find them in front of your hotel, or at one of the city’s many taxi stands. Also, should the weather prove appropriate, you want to take advantage of the Bixi bicycle rental system that is set up throughout the Montreal metropolitan area.


 

Accommodations

There are many accommodation options in Montreal, near the downtown Concordia University campus.  Ground zero for the conference will be 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd., H3G 1M8, in case you want to use that information for google searches.

GREY NUNS RESIDENCE

For affordable and comfortable accommodations right on the downtown campus, we strongly recommend the lovely Grey Nuns Residence – These are Budget-friendly private rooms right on campus! (*Best rates!*). Book early, before rooms get filled.  The block of rooms available to us at Grey Nuns will remain open for booking only until MAY 10th.  So be sure to book before that date or else you will have to stay elsewhere.

Reservation Instructions:

The Promo code for your delegates to use is SPOKENWEB22 and is valid to book rooms between May 15 and May 23 (should delegates wish to stay for the long weekend).

  1. Visit the Grey Nuns online booking portal
  2. Choose dates and number of guests per room.
  3. Click Do You Have A Promo Code – enter code.
  4. Search availability
  5. Choose a room and make the reservation!

AGAIN, PLEASE BE SURE TO RESERVE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!

HOTELS

We have been in touch with all Concordia University affiliated hotels so that you can secure the corporate rate when you call to book.  Simply ask for the Concordia corporate rate and mention that you are attending the SpokenWeb Conference, if you decide to stay at a hotel.

Click here for a page listing all of the Concordia affiliated off-campus accommodation with contact information.

A couple of affordable and regularly-used options on the list are below (but all are good hotels, some of them even pretty fancy).

Chateau Versailles

(a quaint boutique hotel near campus)

Méridien Versailles

AIRBNB etc.

Let’s just say that there has been significant construction of new Condo buildings in the downtown Montreal area (near Concordia U), and that many of them are available for rent via Airbnb and similar sites.


 

Things to do around the area

Arts & Museums

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: http://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/index.html

Musée d’Art Contemporain: https://macm.org/en/

Canadian Centre for Architecture: http://www.cca.qc.ca/

McCord Museum: http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/

Place Des Arts (Montreal Opera, The Montreal Symphony Orchestra, and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens):http://laplacedesarts.com/index.en.html

Centaur Theatre Company: http://www.centaurtheatre.com/

The National Film Board (Events, Screenings and Personal Viewing Stations): http://www3.nfb.ca/cinerobotheque/

Segal Centre for Performing Arts http://www.segalcentre.org/

Théâtre Français à Montréal: http://montrealgazette.com/entertainment/theatre/thtre-franais-montral-french-theatre-in-montreal-where-to-find-it

 

Dining

Resto Montreal: http://restomontreal.ca/

Montreal Food: http://www.montrealfood.com/

Urban Spoon: http://www.urbanspoon.com/c/67/Montreal-restaurants.html

 

Attractions, Activities and Entertainment

Botanical Gardens: http://www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/jardin/en/menu.htm

Notre Dame Basilica: http://www.basiliquenddm.org/en/

St. Joseph’s Oratory: http://www.saint-joseph.org/en_1001_index.php

Bell Centre: http://centrebell.ca/en/

Cinema Listings: http://www.cinemamontreal.com/eng

Poetry Readings in Montreal: http://wherepoetsread.ca/

May Festivals and Events (GoMontreal): http://www.go-montreal.com/attraction_events_may.htm

Local Entertainment listings searchable by date (MTL.org): https://www.mtl.org/en/what-to-do/festivals-and-events

Voir (listings en français): https://voir.ca/

Véhicule Press’s “Montreal: A Celebration” site: http://www.vehiculepress.com/montreal/index.html

Enso Yoga (pay by class yoga near Concordia): https://ensoyoga.com/

Montreal Gazette: https://montrealgazette.com/

Symposium registrants and participants please sign in here for access to private Zoom links and videos:

Listening, Sound, Agency: An International Scholarly Symposium (18-23 May, 2021) - Online

Listening to sound entails scenarios of subjection and agency. In Althussarian terms we might say that we are persistently interpellated, or hailed into positions of listening subjects in society, requiring us to engage in or with the cultural assumptions and techniques that those listening positions entail. But listening may also represent a capacity for agency. In Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance, Brandon LaBelle, elaborates upon this idea, stating that to listen is “to perceive the ever-changing relations in which the self is always embedded.” As LaBelle proceeds to explore a series of sonic figures, he outlines a complex roster of listening modalities in which listening is inherently relational.

The SpokenWeb Symposium aims to explore a broad range of disciplinary and methodological approaches that reflect upon the relationship between our three keywords: Listening, Sound, and Agency. The event prioritizes the development of new theories and practices for underrepresented voices in audio archives. It will feature plenary talks from Dylan Robinson (Queen’s U),  Jonathan Sterne (McGill U), Mara Mills (NYU), and Nina Sun Eidsheim (UCLA).

The entire symposium will be held via Zoom and is open to the public. All times indicated in the symposium schedule are Eastern Time (ET) as the symposium events will be hosted form Montréal, Canada.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE LISTENING, SOUND, AGENCY SYMPOSIUM

Conference Schedule

Download the full Listening, Sound, Agency Symposium program as PDF

Tuesday, May 18th 

1.0 – 6:00-8:00 pm Plenary Event: Practicing With Sound

Moderated by Ali Barillaro, Klara du Plessis, Emma Telaro

A curated panel of three scholar-practitioners (Julieanna Preston, Dayna McLeod, Teresa Connors) presenting work from their critical-creative practice. Graduate students Ali Barillaro, Klara du Plessis and Emma Telaro from Concordia U will facilitate this session and lead the Q&A with the panelists.

Julieanna Preston (Massey U, NZ), “Tryst’s Sympathetic Entanglements”

Julieanna Preston is Professor of Spatial Practice and Coordinator Master of Fine Arts, at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa/  in Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara/ Wellington, Aotearoa/ New Zealand. Her practice draws from the disciplines of architecture, art and philosophy, and her background in interior design, building construction, landscape gardening, and performance writing.

Dayna McLeod (McGill U), “Queerly Circulating Sound and Affect in Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall”

Dayna McLeod is a performance and video artist whose work uses humour and capitalizes on exploring the body’s social and material conditions using performance-based practices for cabaret and video. She is a lecturer at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill U, and has recently taught a graduate seminar on Queer Aesthetics in Studio Arts at Concordia U, in Montreal.

Teresa Connors (International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation), “Environmental Data and Audiovisual Installations through an Intra-active Lens”

Teresa Connors is Associate Researcher at the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. She is an active creative coder, audiovisual installation and interdisciplinary artist.

Wednesday, May 19th

1.1 – 11:00 am-12:30 pm – Plenary Panel: Teaching with Sound / Sound and Pedagogy

Moderated by Aphrodite Salas (Concordia U)

Nicole Brittingham Furlonge (Columbia U) “‘New Ways to Make Us Listen’: Exploring the Possibilities for Sonic Pedagogy”

Samuel K. Adesubokan, Julie Funk, Faith Ryan, and Jentery Sayers (SpokenWeb at UVic) “Designing Prompts for Literary Audio Studies”

12:30-1:30 pm – Break

1.2 – 1:30-3:00 pm

1.2A – Voice Technologies and Materials: Interdisciplinary approaches to sound, noise and the mediated voice.

Chair: Tanya Clement (U Texas at Austin)

Philippe-Aubert Gauthier, Georges Roussel, François Proulx, Nicolas Bernier (UQAM) “Listening to Acoustic Metamaterials: A futuristic speculation on acoustic lens”

Karine Bouchard (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières) “Listening to Noise in the Art Gallery: A Way to Challenge the Visitor’s Experience”

Chris Mustazza (U Penn) “Distant Listening as Hermeneutic Method: Computational Prostheses, Sonic Genre, and the Poetic Audiotext”

1.2B – Archives of Historical Listening: Histories of listening in different political and media contexts.

Chair: Andrea Murray (U Calgary)

Caroline Kita (U St. Louis) “Anxious Ears: Listening to Postwar German Radio”

Renée Altergott (Princeton U) “The Second French Colonial Empire and the Listening Colonized Subject”

Kevin McNeilly (UBC) “Sounding the Living Archive: Listening with Dálava”

3:00-3:30 pm – Workshop: “Noticing, Noting and Notating Sound”

Hosted by Angus Tarnawsky (Concordia U)

This workshop will provide a practical set of resources for how to document your perspective on everyday sonic moments. Techniques and strategies discussed in this session are suggested as ways of approaching the daily collective sound walk. These sessions, the first of which is at the conclusion of this workshop, are an invitation to get outside—wherever that may be for you—and to “de-Zoom” for a few moments each day. To participate, any combination of the following are required: (1) curiosity; (2) a smart phone (or audio recording device and camera); (3) a pen/pencil and notebook/paper.

3:30-4:30 pm – Collective Sound Walk

4:30-5:00 pm – Break

1.3 – 5:00-6:30 pm Plenary Talk: Dylan Robinson (Queen’s U)

Moderated by Deanna Fong (Concordia U)

Giving/Taking Notice

How do we sense the materialization of colonialism in institutional and quotidian daily structures of relation? Hungry listening—as one among many practices of settler colonial perception—is a set of extractive listening practices indexed by the term xwelítem (starving person) that xwélmexw (Stó:lō people) use to describe settlers. Yet hungry listening is just one way that positionality and perception intertwine to produce different modes of settler listening that are context-specific and non-generalizable. To develop an awareness of the various norms and habits of settler listening positionality requires that we learn to notice different moments of intersection. This learning to notice is not undertaken as a means to amass a comprehensive catalogue of settler perception’s “bad surprises” (Sedgwick). Instead, noticing such moments attune us to positionality‘s material emergence (habitual timbres, rhythm, and tempi), and provide new possibilities for improvisation.

Dylan Robinson is a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) artist and writer. He is also an Associate Professor at Queen’s University, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts. He is the author of Hungry Listening (Minnesota, 2020) on Indigenous and settler colonial forms of listening. His current research focuses on the material and sonic life of Indigenous ancestors held by museums, and reparative artistic practices that address these ancestors’ incarcerations in museums. Other publications include the co-edited collection Music and Modernity Among First Peoples of North America (Wesleyan, 2019) which received both the AMS’s Ruth Solie Award for best collection and the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Ellen Koskoff Prize for edited collections.

Discord Café from 6:30-8:00 pm

Thursday, May 20th

2.1 – 11:00 am-12:30 pm

2.1A – Queer Voice and Agency: Sound as resonating queerly through and across bodies and communities

Chair: Hannah McGregor (SFU)

Moynan King (York U) “Queer Resonance: Trans Vocality and Transtemporal Collaboration”

Mathieu Aubin (Concordia U) “Listening for Queer Sonic Resonances in the Sir George Williams University Poetry Series”

Victoria Roskams (Oxford U) “Queer Listening to Trilby and Teleny

2.1B – Ethics of Listening

Chair: Felicity Tayler (U Ottawa) 

Spy Dénommé-Welch (Western U) and Catherine Magowan “Pivoting towards a Key Change: Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Sonic Production to facilitate Embodied Understanding”

Jason Wiens (U Calgary) “The Sound of the Found: Ethics, Appropriative Poetics, and the Sir George Williams Reading Series”

Katharina Fuerholzer (U Penn) “Aphasic Poetry and the Ethics of Listening”

12:30-1:30 pm – Break

2.2 – 1:30-3:00 pm – Plenary Talk: Nina Sun Eidsheim (UCLA)

Moderated by Michelle Levy (SFU)

Re-writing Algorithms for Just Recognition: From Digital Aural Redlining to Accent Activism

In the mid-1950s, the Eastman Kodak Company famously standardized their Shirley cards test, which used a photograph of a white woman to calibrate colour when printing photos. Jersson Garcia, who worked at a photo lab told the NPR: “‘She was the standard,’ ‘so whenever we printed anything, we had to pull Shirley in. If Shirley looked good, everything else was OK. If Shirley didn’t look so hot that day, we had to tweak something — something was wrong.’” Around the Christmas shopping season of 2009, we saw the same premise illustrated by YouTube videos featuring Hewlett Packard webcams that “can’t see black people.” I argue that, in the same way as Kodak film and HP cameras were calibrated for white skin colour, voice- and listening technologies also carry and reproduce the same social bias, discrimination, and racism. Akin to discriminatory real estate and lending-practice redlining, I dub these practices digital aural redlining. I also identify oppositional uses of these technologies that could counter essentializing practices as aural redline jamming. Considering the vocal synthesis software Vocaloid, voice to text technology, and the Voice Bank Monopoly game, I show how vocal and listening technology listens for, against, and in non-recognition of certain accents, vocal performances standing in for non-whiteness. I conclude by calling for each (accented) accent to be justly recognized, affording each voice its multiplicity and humanity.

Nina Sun Eidsheim studied vocal performance, composition, and philosophy at the University of Agder (Norway) and The Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus (Denmark) before pursuing an MFA in Music at the California Institute of the Arts. She completed her Ph.D. in critical studies/experimental practices program at the University of California, San Diego. Eidsheim is the author of Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Duke, 2015) and The Race of Sound: the Micropolitics of Listening to Vocal Timbre and Vocality in African-American Popular Music (Duke, 2019). She is Professor of Musicology at the Herb Alpert school of Music, UCLA, where she has just launched the PEER (Practice-Based Experimental Epistemology Research) Lab, an experimental research lab dedicated to decolonizing data, methodology, and analysis through creative practice.

3:30-4:30 pm – Collective Sound Walk 

2.3 – 5:00-6:30 pm

2.3A – Music as Ethnographic Sound: Listening to the socio-political resonances of musical sounds and sound performance

Chair: Sadie Barker (Concordia U)

Kate Galloway (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY) “Playing and Listening to the Sounds of Extraction, Surveillance, and Curation as Environmental Monitoring in Games”

Ellen Waterman (Carleton U) “Imagining Otherness Then and Now: Patria Three: The Greatest Show and Anthropologies imaginaires

Junting Huang (Cornell U) “Animating Sound Bodies: Listening to Nakasi in Taiwan’s Labor Movement”

2.3B – Corporeal Listening: Listening to the body through textual and graphic scores and media formats

Chair: Karis Shearer (UBCO)

Katherine McLeod (Concordia U) and Emily Murphy (UBCO) “bill bissett: technoscores for voice-movement”

Shannon Maguire (Algoma U) “Noise, Resistance and Sonic Composition in Leonora Carrington’s Paintings and Prose”

Andrew McEwan (Brock U) “‘Selvesothers’ in Performance: Hannah Weiner’s Community Performance Hearing-Voices Listening”

Discord Café from 6:30-8:00 pm 

Friday, May 21st

3.1 – 11:00 am-12:30 pm – Plenary Talk: Jonathan Sterne (McGill U) 

Moderated by Katherine McLeod (Concordia U)

Of Tape and Time: Compressing and Expanding Sound in the Analog Era

This talk examines the development of analog time-compression and time-expansion technology in the analog tape era. While traditional tape playback could not be sped up or slowed down without affecting the pitch of playback, after World War II a number of devices that could overcome this problem became available. While still quite expensive, they were taken up by blind readers, avant-garde composers, educators, broadcasters, cryptographers, speech researchers, and communication engineers—all populations who had an interest in manipulating playback speed. While the technology is now ubiquitous today and available in standard software like Audible, Pro Tools, and YouTube, this earlier generation’s reflections on tape and time provide new clues into the meaning and politics of media playback.

Jonathan Sterne is James McGill Professor of Culture and Technology at McGill University. He is author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke, 2012), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (Minnesota, 2016). He is at work on two books: Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment, and Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed, co-authored with Mara Mills, and beginning a project on artificial intelligence and culture.

12:30-1:30 pm – Break

3.2 – 1:30-3:00 pm

3.2A – Sonic Spaces: A panel on space, sound, and listening

Chair: Julieanna Preston (Massey U, New Zealand)

Andre Furlani (Concordia U) “Sound Walks / Sounds Walk”

Klara du Plessis (Concordia U) “From Poetry Reading to Performance Art: Agency of Deep Curation Practice”

Julia Polyck-O’Neill (Brock U) “Lisa Robertson’s Archive, Singular and Collective: Feminist Subversions to Institutional Memory”

3.2B – Hearing Voices/Auditory Hallucinations: A panel on disembodied voices from the disciplinary perspectives of Virtual Reality, Psychiatry and literary performance

Chair: Marit MacArthur (UC Davis)

Jon Saklofske (Acadia U) and Deanna Fong (Concordia U) “Reversing the Sacrifice: Auditory Verbal Hallucination and the Productive Disruption of Localization in Virtual Reality Experiences”

Robert Stacey (U Ottawa) “Sounding Degree Zero: Listening to Zombies, Hearing Ourselves”

Kevin Zemmour, Philippe-Aubert Gauthier, Sandrine Rousseau (U Montreal), and Laurie Pelletier (U Sherbrooke) “Listening to Our Voices Experience Project: Empathy for Voice Hearers”

3:30-4:30 pm – Collective Sound Walk

4:30-5:00 pm – Break

3.3 – 5:00-6:30 pm – Plenary Session: Unvoicing: A panel about the politics and poetics of voices and silence

Moderated by Jason Camlot (Concordia U)

Eric Schmaltz (Sheridan) “Poetics of the Unvoice: The Mouths That Do Not Speak in the Poetries of M. NourbeSe Philip and Gerry Shikatani”

Kristin Moriah (Queen’s U) “Playing the Red Record: Ida B. Wells and the Politics of Voice”

Smaro Kamboureli (U Toronto) “Storying Chrystos’s Oral Life Story: The Making of an Archive”

6:30-7:30 pm – Thank you. Closing Remarks. Future Projects. Announcing Weekend Events.

Saturday, May 22nd

4.1 – 1:00-2:30 pm – Plenary Talk – Mara Mills (New York U)

Moderated by Jentery Sayers (U Victoria)

What is Amplification?

Amplification is an old rhetorical term for “making large”: adding detail, repeating, extending in amount or in space. In the nineteenth century, it was occasionally used to describe the mechanical increases in loudness afforded by things like ear trumpets—however terms like “magnification” or “increase” were just as often used. Similarly, in the 1870s Emile Berliner and David Edward Hughes used the language of “magnification” and “multiplication” when discussing their improvements to telephone transmitters—devices later known as microphones. 

In the 19-teens, Irving Langmuir and H.D. Arnold patented new vacuum tubes to “amplify” voltage or electrical current; they called these electronic components “amplifiers.” For Arnold, working in the Bell Telephone System, vacuum tube amplifiers were first meant to be installed as “repeaters”—components that added energy to a voice signal at different stages along a line to combat attenuation. The voice received at the end of a long-distance call would still be marked by loss of volume, but to a lesser degree. Amplification, in other words, referred to signal gain rather than perceptual loudness. As vacuum tubes enabled the construction of longer-distance lines, American telephone engineers created a new mathematical unit to measure transmission loss and amplification—the decibel, which became an international standard. The decibel represents a physical ratio (relative signal energy) rather than “loudness” or perceptual experience. 

The word amplification entered into broad usage with electronics, and since the 19-teens its popular meaning has always been divided between signal and sound. While much recent scholarly work in music has examined the impacts of microphones, loudspeakers, and amplifiers on the soundscape, aesthetics, and human perception, this talk will instead look at the telephone transmission origins of “amplification” and their legacy in present-day critiques of its measurement (the decibel).

Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she co-founded and co-directs the NYU Center for Disability Studies (CDS). She is also a founding editor of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience (winner of the 2020 4S STS Infrastructure Award). Mills works at the intersection of sound studies and disability studies. Most recently, she co-edited the book Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality (Oxford, 2020) with Viktoria Tkaczyk and Alexandra Hui. She has published articles in Grey Room, differences, Social Text, PMLA, and Technology & Culture, among many other academic journals. Her public arts and humanities writing can be found at sites like Triple Canopy, Artforum, Public Books, Somatosphere, and AVIDLY—a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her writing has been translated into German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. More details about her research, grants, and awards can be found at maramills.org.

4.2 – 5:00-7:00 pm – Plenary Event 

International debut of “Small Stones”: a work in poetry, sound, music and typography

Kaie Kellough, Jason Sharp, and Kevin Yuen Kit Lo

Hosted by Jason Camlot and Klara du Plessis

Specially commissioned for the Listening, Sound, Agency Symposium, Griffin-award-winning poet Kaie Kellough, designer and artistic director of LOKI studios, Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, and Constellation recording artist and saxophonist, Jason Sharp, collaborate on an interdisciplinary work. Titled Small Stones, the work is a collage of references from the writing of Caribbean and Latin-American authors. Drawing on the history and settling in the Americas, Small Stones blends vocal performance with dynamic musical improvisation. As language becomes visual and sonic, it fragments and reassembles. This trio has collaborated on several performance installations, notably UBGNLSWRE for the Aga Khan Museum (Toronto, 2020), and FYEAR for the Jazz Ahead Festival (Bremen, 2021). These artists take on the challenge of the online stage and merge their various disciplines into a generative interplay of experimental poetry, sound, music, and typography. Join to experience the premiere of this new piece, followed by a virtual conversation with the performers.

Sunday, May 23rd

5.1 – 8:00-9:30 pm – The Words and Music Show

Hosted by Ian Ferrier and Jason Camlot

Listen to “Radio Ad” for the show here:

On the conference’s closing night, we are partnering with poet, curator, and SpokenWeb community affiliate Ian Ferrier (Wired on Words) to co-host a special edition of the Words and Music Show, a literary and performance cabaret that has been running in Montreal for over twenty years. In this special symposium edition of the Words and Music Show, conference participants are invited to present original creative works and collaborations, including poetry readings and performance, music, sound art, dance, and everything in-between. Whether you intend to perform or observe, we hope you’ll join us as we conclude our conference in a spirit of creativity and celebration.

This event will feature a special performance by Oana Avasilichioaei whose recent book Eight Track (Talon Books, 2019) has just been nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. We will get to hear some of Oana’s sound work, and raise a glass in celebration of her GG nomination!

Oana Avasilichioaei (oanalab.com) interweaves poetry, sound, photography, and translation to explore an expanded idea of language, polyphonic structures, and borders of listening. Her six collections of poetry and poetry hybrids include Eight Track (Talonbooks, 2019, finalist for the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the Governor General’s Literary Award) and Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015). She has created many performance/sound works, written a libretto for a one-act opera (Cells of Wind, 2020), and translated ten books of poetry and prose from French and Romanian, most recently Bertrand Laverdure’s The Neptune Room (Book*hug, 2020, finalist for Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation)

Post-Conference Projects

We’re planning some exciting post-conference projects to come out of the symposium. Keep your ears open for more information about these in the coming months!

The SpokenWeb Symposium 2019: Resonant Practices in Communities of Sound

The submission for papers is open until February 15th, the results will be announced by late February. Please see the Call for Papers here.

We also invite proposals from students for research creation involving SFU literary audio archives. Please see this CFP here.

Notable Events

Dr. Jennifer Lynn Stoever (SUNY Binghamton) – Opening Plenary
“Sonifying Race, Surveilling Space: The Sonic Color Line and the Listening Ear”

May 30, 2019 (Day 1) – 9:30-10:45am

For more information, click here.

 

The Politics and Poetics of Mediated Sound
Performances of poetic work by Jordan Abel, Oana Avasilichioaei, and Jordan Scott

May 30, 2019 (Day 1) – 5:30-7:00pm

For more information, click here.

 

Jason Camlot (Concordia University) – Concluding Plenary
The (Dis)articulating Voice of the Phonograph: Early Spoken Recordings and the Sound of the Literary

May 31, 2019 (Day 2) – 4:45-5:45pm

For more information, click here.

 

Conference Schedule

The program can be downloaded here.

Accommodations

Participants who wish to stay at a SFU Burnaby Campus, may book according to the instructions provided here. Otherwise, they should seek accommodations in downtown Vancouver.

The Literary Audio Symposium: A Free-to-Attend Conference

Digitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.

The Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.

This symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about

1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;

2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;

3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and

4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.

These objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.

From a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways.power

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Conference Schedule

Day 1 – FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2nd

The Uses of Spoken Audio Collections in Research and Creation: New Literary Methods

9:30–-10:00—LB 361—Breakfast

10:00—12:00—LB 322 — Keynotes

Al Filreis (U Pennsylvania)
“The Digital Curation of Audiotexts for Literary Research “

Darren Wershler (Concordia U)
“A Political Economy of Audio Collections, or, The Politics of Audiotextual Inheritance”

Bill Kennedy (Intelligent Machines) “New Contexts for Old Voices: Rethinking the Literary Archive”

12:00—1:30 Lunch (off campus)

1:30—3:30—LB 322—Panel I

Michelle Levy (SFU) and Rebecca Dowson (SFU)
“Data-Intensive Humanities Research: Strategies for Collaboration and Interoperability”

Michael Nardone (Concordia U)
“phonotext.ca: Towards a General Index of Literary Audio”

3:30-4:00—LB 361—Nutritional Break

4:00—6:00 —LB 322—Panel II

Deanna Fong (SFU)
“Itinerant Audio-biography: Digitizing, Editing and Managing the Roy Kiyooka Digital Audio Archive”

Tony Power (SFU)
“Literary Audio in SFU Library’s Contemporary Literature Collection”

6:15-7:15—LB 361— SPECIAL EVENT—Poetry Listening

An Archival Listening to Robert Creeley reading at Sir George Williams U, Fall 1970 (with introduction by Frank Davey and a silent Robin Blaser in the audience). Organized by Katherine McLeod (Concordia U). Approx. 1 hr.

Day 2 – SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3rd

Digital Preservation: Digitization, Cataloging, Storage, and Access

9:30 —10:00—LB 361—Breakfast

10:00—12:00—LB322—Keynotes

Welcome Remarks from Guylaine Beaudry (University Librarian, Concordia U)

David Seubert (UCSB)
“A Digitization Strategy for the Age of Abundance”

Jonathan Sterne (McGill U)
“Understanding Audio Media Formats”

12:00—1:30 Lunch (off campus)

1:30—3:30—LB 362—Panel I

Jared Wiercinski (Concordia U), Tomasz Neugebauer (Concordia U) and Tim Walsh (Canadian Centre for Architecture)

“Selecting an Access and Digital Preservation Platform for Humanities Research in Audio and Video Format: Avalon & Archivematica”

3:30-4:00—LB 361—Nutritional Break

4:00—6:00 —LB 314—Panel II

Lee Hannigan (U Alberta)
“Not Listening: Preliminary Initiatives for Inventorying and Cataloguing Literary Audio Corpora”

Michael O’Driscoll (U Alberta)
“Audiographic Coding, or, Whose Sound is this Anyway?”

Cecily Devereux (U Alberta)
“SpokenWest: Creative Reading Recordings at UAlberta, 1969-1986”

Day 3 – SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4th

Digital Audio Tools: Sound Searching and Visualization

9:30 —10:00—LB 361—Breakfast

10:00—12:00—LB322—Keynotes

Steve McLaughlin and Tanya Clement (U Texas, Austin)
“High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship”

12:00—1:30 Lunch (off campus)

1:30—3:30—LB 362—Panel I

Patrick Feaster (U Indiana, Bloomington)

“Putting Existing Tools to Unanticipated Purposes in Audio Digitization”

Steven High (Concordia U)
“Beyond the Juicy Quotes Syndrome: Building Digital Tools and Platforms in Partnership with Source Communities”

3:30-4:00—LB 361—Nutritional Break

4:00—6:00 —LB 362—Panel II

Ian Ferrier (Wired on Words)

“The Wired on Words Analogue Audio Collection”

Louis Rastelli (Archive Montreal)
“The Audio Materials of Archive Montreal”

Day 4 – MONDAY, DECEMBER 5th

Teaching with Sound: Digital Audio Pedagogy

9:30 —10:00—LB 361—Breakfast

10:00—12:00—LB 322—Keynote

Jentery Sayers (U Victoria)

“Prototyping Impressions of Sound: Pedagogy across the Lab and Gallery”

12:00—1:30 Lunch (off campus)

1:30—3:30—LB 322—Panel I

Catherine Cormier-Larose (Poetry In Voice/Les voix de la Poésie)
“Poetry In Voice: Teaching Poetry With Audio”

Kevin Austin (Concordia U)
“Ear Training in Electroacoustics”

3:30-4:00—LB 361—Nutritional Break

4:00—6:00 —LB 322—Panel II

Annie Murray (U Calgary)
“Overcoming Institutional Barriers to Engagement with Sound and Media Archives”

Jason Wiens (U Calgary)
“Incorporating Archival Audio Practices in Teaching”

Jordan Bolay (U Calgary)
“Re-teaching Reading and Listening Through Experimental Poetry and Audio Archives”

6:30-8:00 —LB 362 (Seminar Room)—Proposed Working Dinner (for members of SSHRC PG team)

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Participants

KEVIN AUSTIN (Concordia U)

“Ear Training in Electroacoustics”

This talk will introduce a variety of issues surrounding ‘ear-training’, or rather, refined hearing, in the domain of electroacoustics (referring to both acoustical engineering and, with examples, electroacoustic music). The starting premise of this talk is that hearing / listening, is all perception. The presentation will frame core questions surrounding ‘how’ auditory perception functions, and therefore considerations of the applicability of different kinds of tools to different data sets. This will include matters of sonic identity and character, and sonic transformation with understanding more deeply various models applicable to pattern identification for manual and automated sound searches.  The talk will also include a brief exploration of how symbolic notation / representation may be approached to develop concepts for multi-dimensional hearing, the fundamental proposition being that ‘how’ we hear will be at the educational core of auditory perception. The refinement of hearing increases the depth of perception, a skill applicable across disciplines, from music to text-sound composition, to spoken literature.

Kevin Austin, Professor of Music at Concordia University, is a Montreal-based composer, educator, arts animator and electroacoustics archivist. A specialist in electroacoustics – all areas, composition, theory [electroacoustics and music], ear-training and music history. For 25 years he was the Coordinator of the Concordia Electroacoustic Studies area at Concordia University. He was a Charter and Founding Member of the CEC (Canadian Electroacoustic Community), and the director of The Concordia Archival Project (CAP). This important initiative, funded by Heritage Canada through Canadian Culture Online, using the Concordia Tape Collection – over 3,000 pieces, has produced the largest single primary resource for the history of electroacoustics in Canada available anywhere in the world.

 

JORDAN BOLAY (U Calgary)

“Re-teaching reading and listening through experimental poetry and audio archives”

“How do you grow a poet?” Robert Kroetsch famously asks in his long poem Seed Catalogue. The second half of the 20th century saw many new poets and types of poetry growing in Canada. Of particular interest to scholars (and of particular difficulty for students) are the formally experimental poets of the post-structural movement, including Earle Birney, bp nicol, and occasional works by Kroetsch (i.e. The Ledger). This paper will examine how audio recordings of these poets’ work, housed in the University of Calgary’s Special Collections Archive, can give direction to students’ readings but also destabilise the notion of singular linear ways of reading or hearing a text. My hope is that this research will demonstrate both the importance of oral readings in the classroom and of audio recordings in the archive.

Jordan Bolay is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Calgary. His research focuses on the intersection of contemporary Canadian poetics, archives and methodologies of the archeology of discourse and knowledge. He is presently focusing on the writing of Canadian poet Robert Kroetsch and of the Canadian West in a broader sense. His participation in The Literary Audio Symposium will complement his research interests and allow him to apply his knowledge of Kroetsch to a consideration of the possibilities for research and teaching of the Kroetsch audio recordings in the University of Calgary collections.

 

JASON CAMLOT (Concordia U)

“Digital Analysis of Spoken Performance: Praat, Sonic Visualizer and Melodyne”

This presentation will demonstrate three digital tools designed for distinct disciplinary or technical purposes as they might be applied to a use in the analysis of literary recordings. Praat, designed by linguists for “doing phonetics by computer” will be explored as a model for the granular micro-analysis of pitch contours in performed poetry. Sonic Visualizer, designed for the visualization of large scale musical compositions, will be applied to the analysis of the pacing and structure of hour-length documentary poetry readings, and Melodyne, a software tool that converts wave-forms into MIDI data, designed for pitch correction and signal separation, will be explored as a model for tangible interaction and manipulation of spoken recordings. Together, the tools will be discussed as models for engaging with literary audio in varying scales of proximity and distance, and will be designed to encourage discussion about the kinds of tools literary and historical scholars need to pursue analytical work with sound in digital environments.

Camlot’s research of the past decade has focused on the history of literary sound recordings and their mobilization through digital platforms and tools. Recent articles relevant to the symposium include “Historicist Audio Forensics: The Archive of Voices as Repository of Material and Conceptual Artifacts,” in Journal 19 (2015), “Le Foster Poetry Conference, 1963” in Voix & Images, “The Sound of Canadian Modernisms: The Sir George Williams University Poetry Series, 1966-1974.” Journal of Canadian Studies, and several articles in the special issue of Amodern on “The Poetry Series” that he has co-edited with Christine Mitchell (2015). His recent digital project is spokenweb.ca. He is Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Concordia University in Montreal.

 

TANYA CLEMENT (U Texas at Austin)

“High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship”

Co-Presented with Steve McLaughlin.  Humanists have few opportunities to use advanced technologies for analyzing large, messy sound archives. In response to this lack, the HiPSTAS (High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship) Project is developing a research environment that uses machine learning and visualization to automate processes for describing unprocessed spoken-word collections of keen interest to humanists. This paper describes how we have developed, as a result of HiPSTAS, a machine learning system called ARLO (Adaptive Recognition with Layered Optimization). I describe a use case for finding moments of applause in the PennSound collection, which includes approximately 36,000 files comprising 6,200 hours of poetry performances and related materials. We conclude with a brief discussion about our preliminary results and some observations on the efficacy of using machine learning to facilitate generating data about unprocessed spoken-word sound collections in the humanities.

Clement’s research centers on infrastructure information impacting academic research, research libraries, and the creation of research tools/resources in the digital humanities. Projects include High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship, “Improving Access to Time-Based Media through Crowdsourcing and Machine Learning” project. Important articles include: “Measured Applause: Toward a Cultural Analysis of Audio Collections.” Cultural Analytics 1; “A Rationale of Audio Text.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 10; “The Ear and the Shunting Yard: Meaning Making as Resonance in Early Information Theory.” Information & Culture 49; and, “Distant Listening: On Data Visualisations and Noise in the Digital Humanities.” Text Tools for the Arts. Digital Studies 3.

 

CATHERINE CORMIER-LAROSE (Poetry In Voice)

“Poetry In Voice: Teaching Poetry With Audio”

The Poetry In Voice project is a recitation contest for Canadian high schools. Its aim is to encourage young readers and students to become interested and involved in an appreciation of poetry through an engagement in the live, spoken performance of literary works. The project archives every one of its organized live readings, as well as selections from professional poets, as a means of providing modelling materials for its student users. Recordings of the recitations are essential to the project as they stand documentary examples for the students who use the PIV website. 875 Canadian high schools were involved in the PIV project last year; 50 000 students recited a poem at school level as a result of this involvement, and over a half a million people visited the PIV site. This presentation will report on the approach to live and online pedagogy through poetry performance that this project has pursued.

Catherine Cormier-Larose is the Quebec French-language director of the Poetry in Voice project which organizes recitation competitions and online teaching tools to encourage poetry performance and appreciation in high schools across Canada. As the longstanding artist director of Les Productions ARREUH which organizes an annual festival, gala and numerous events of literary performance, she is deeply involved in the development of public reading as an important facet of community culture.

 

CECILY DEVEREUX (U Alberta)

“SpokenWest: Creative Reading Recordings at UAlberta, 1969-1986”

From the late 1960s to the 1990s, the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta developed and maintained a collection of cassette recordings of Canadian writers reading from their work. These materials were part of a larger collection of audio cassettes used primarily for teaching. Materially ephemeral and in some cases absolutely unique, the cassettes represent not only an important record from the department that houses the longest-running Writer in Residence program in Canada, they are also part of a much larger national archive of creative communities in the

post-Centennial era in Canada. They thus serve at this time as a compelling case study of non-professional, intermittent, institutionally housed recordings of late twentieth-century author readings in Canada–and, crucially, of the lives of the media on which they have been reproduced. This paper considers the nature and the implications of anachronistic and disintegrating media for the teaching and study of late twentieth-century literary culture in Canada, and makes a case for the importance of digital preservation for public access to cultural histories.

Cecily Devereux is Chair of the Research Board of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) and a member of the Executive Committee of the Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de Littérature Canadienne at the University of Alberta. She has been working with student research assistants and colleagues in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta for more than a decade to catalogue, safely store, and move toward the preservation and digitization of the department’s collection of cassette and reel-to-reel recordings of Canadian writers reading from their work.

 

REBECCA DOWSON (Simon Fraser U)

“Data-Intensive Humanities Research: Strategies for Collaboration and Interoperability”

This presentation (co-presented with Michelle Levy) will consider how faculty, students and librarians can best work together to ensure that rigorous stands for database design, data normalization, and data aggregation are met. We will provide a survey of available options for working with different formats, demonstrate the importance of standards in the collection of metadata, and suggest strategies and tools that can be used to normalize and aggregate data with the goal of making our data interoperable with that of others. We will also suggest potential open source tools well suited to the visualization of audio data. Our particular focus will be on issues that arise with audio data, how it differs from other forms of textual and visual data, how cross-institutional platforms can be leveraged to ensure interoperability, and how libraries and labs can assist in the process of building infrastructure.

Rebecca Dowson is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Simon Fraser University. In this role, she coordinates support for digital research training and knowledge exchange through the SFU Library’s Research Commons, provides research consultations on approaches to digital research and scholarly communication, acts as the Library liaison to grant-funded digital humanities projects, and is a member of the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab Planning Committee at SFU. Rebecca is also responsible for administering SFU’s Open Access Fund and coordinating related Library outreach events associated with scholarly communication. Her research interests include the intersection of libraries and digital humanities, with a particular interest in digital cultural heritage projects, and new forms of scholarly publishing.

 

PATRICK FEASTER (University of Indiana, Bloomington)

“Putting Existing Tools to Unanticipated Purposes in Audio Digitization”

As we go about surveying software applications that are available to us for cultivating our heritage of literary audio in various ways, it’s worth bearing in mind that—with a little creative thinking—we can sometimes put existing tools to uses that differ significantly from their intended ones.

I’ll first illustrate this point in connection with a couple pieces of software recently developed for Indiana University: MediaRIVERS /MediaSCORE, designed to quantify the value and “degralescence” risk of audiovisual collections, and a Physical Object Database designed to track media objects passing through our digital preservation workflow. We created these tools to answer some specific needs which existing software didn’t seem capable of satisfying, but in both cases we’ve ended up putting them to unanticipated uses as our circumstances have evolved—often successfully, but with limitations, as I’ll explain through a brief case study of Orson Welles broadcast recordings held by our Lilly Library.

I’ll then delve into some even more radical cases of repurposing. For the past nine years, I’ve participated in efforts to educe (i.e., “play” or “play back”) older representations of sound on paper, including phonautograms of dramatic oratory recorded by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in the 1850s and 1860s and paper prints made from gramophone discs of poetry recited by inventor Emile Berliner in the 1880s. This work has been carried out primarily with software designed for other spheres of application, such as ImageToSound and AudioPaint, both intended to support experimental sound art. I’ll describe the strategies and challenges involved in applying these programs meaningfully to historical inscriptions, as well as some striking results achieved to date by doing so. However, our need to rely on “repurposed” software in this work is now receding. By way of conclusion, I’ll introduce Picture Kymophone, a new program I’ve written specifically for playing phonautograms and other similar sources, and outline some remaining desiderata for the future.

Patrick Feaster received his doctorate in folklore and ethnomusicology in 2007 from Indiana University Bloomington, where he is now Media Preservation Specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative. A three-time Grammy nominee, co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative, and immediate past president of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, he has been actively involved in locating, making audible, and contextualizing many of the world’s oldest sound recordings.

 

IAN FERRIER (Wired on Words)

“The Wired on Words Analogue Audio Collection”

After curating a spoken word poetry series for over fifteen years, and recording each and every reading and performance over that period, what to we do with the boxes of cassette tapes, mini discs, DAT tapes, and digital audio files on USB that comprise the the collection of audio that documents the events of the series? Ian Ferrier will discuss the nature and significance of the documentation of the Wired on Words reading series that he has curated since 2000, and present his organizations collection as a case study for considering the different kinds of digital development one might take in rendering such a historical series accessible and usable by researchers, artists and the wider public.

Ian Ferrier is a pioneer in Canada’s spoken word poetry scene. A musician and composer as well as a poet, he currently tours Canada, the States and Europe in solo performance and with the spoken word/music/dance company For Body and Light. He is a founder of the spoken word and music label Wired on Words, curator and host of Montreal’s monthly Words & Music Show which has been presenting poets monthly since 2000, and director of the annual Mile End Poets Festival which started in 2009. essays have appeared in Journal of the Americas and Canadian Theatre Review as well as in the online Canadian Review of Literature in Performance (LITLIVE.CA), a journal he co-founded in 2009. He has taught at the Banff Centre and is a past-president of the Quebec Writers’ Federation. In 2011 he was the recipient of what is now the League of Canadian Poets’ Golden Beret Award for outstanding contributions to spoken word.

 

AL FILREIS (U Pennsylvania)

“The Digital Curation of Audiotexts for Literary Research”

This talk will draw upon the case of PennSound and its approach to collecting, curating and augmenting content in order to establish a compelling digital environment for the study and appreciation of literary audiotexts. Using PennSound as a starting point, the main aim of this talk will be to frame fundamental questions about methodological approaches to the critical study of literary sound recordings, and will outline some strategies that digital spoken word archives may take to enhance research with these audible materials.

Al Filreis is Kelly Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Publisher of Jacket2, and most importantly for the purposes of The Literary Audio Symposium, he is Co-Director of PennSound—all at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Secretaries of the Moon, Wallace Stevens & the Actual World, Modernism from Left to Right, and Counter-Revolution of the Word.

 

DEANNA FONG (Simon Fraser U)

“Itinerant Audio-biography: Digitizing, Editing and Managing the Roy Kiyooka Digital Audio Archive”

This presentation will detail my activities digitizing, developing, annotating, and managing the audio archive of Canadian poet, Roy Kiyooka. Kiyooka’s archival fonds at Simon Fraser University contains over 400 analog audio recordings inscribed on a variety of media: cassettes, mini-cassettes, and reel-to-reels. Recorded between 1963 and 1988, a burgeoning period of literary and artistic production, the tapes record the voices of many of Vancouver’s avant-garde figures, such as Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Carole Itter, Al Neil, George Bowering, Alvin Balkin, and Gerry Gilbert. The focus of my presentation will be on the archive’s non-traditional audio genres, which include conversation, performance, ambient sound, and field recordings. I will outline the material, organizational and ethical challenges that these genres pose, attending to questions of navigation, access, privacy and consent.

Deanna Fong is a poet and PhD student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where her research focuses on the intersections of performance, audio archives, literary communities and intellectual property. She is a member of the federally funded SpokenWeb team, who have developed a web-based archive of digitized audio recordings for literary study. With Ryan Fitzpatrick and Janey Dodd, she co-directs the Fred Wah Archive, and is currently developing the digital audio archive of Canadian artist and poet Roy Kiyooka.

 

LEE HANNIGAN (U Alberta)

“Not Listening: Preliminary Initiatives for Inventorying and Cataloguing Literary Audio Corpora”

This presentation will identify the core questions one must ask upon preliminary examination of an audio collection. The University of Alberta (UA) has hosted and recorded regular reading events since the mid-1960s and holds a collection of recorded poetry readings consisting of over 100 media objects (reel-to-reel, cassette tape and digital formats) containing at least as many hours of audio. This collection, in the process of being inventoried, seems to hold a coherent set of recordings of the UA Writer-in-Residence Program (WiR) that has run uninterrupted for forty years, a series of recorded readings held during the “Poet & Critic Conference” of 1969, and an extensive set of reel-to-reel recordings that hold local readings by poets from across North America. The core research questions to be explored pertain to fundamental issues in cataloguing, organization and prioritization of the materials, in relation to questions of available resources for digitization and development and the identification of potential audiences for segments of the collection.

PhD candidate Hannigan earned his MA from Concordia University in 2015, where he worked for two years as a research assistant with the SpokenWeb project. His Master’s Major Research Project, titled “The Critical Archive: A textual analysis of the SpokenWeb project,” considered the possibility of studying the literary reading series as a coherent object. Hannigan’s first academic publication (Al Flamenco and Aurelio Meza), titled “Reading Series Matter: Performing the SpokenWeb Project,” will appear in Making Humanities Matter, part of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). His Doctoral dissertation will be the first material, theoretical, and sociopolitical analysis of the characteristics of the concept of removal in late-20th and 21st-century American poetry. His presentation on the University of Alberta audio holdings will provide important case study material for the symposium, allowing him to frame core questions that are at the centre of his Doctoral research.

 

STEVEN HIGH (Concordia U)

“Beyond the Juicy Quotes Syndrome: Building Digital Tools and Platforms in Partnership with Source Communities”

If the “archival turn” has taught us anything, it is that archives are not neutral sites of storage and preservation. Extractive approaches to data-collection and analysis risk ignoring the ways in which “the archive itself orders the material within its realm, and the possibilities of knowledge production” (Geiger et al, 2010). We must therefore go beyond what Mike Savage calls the “juicy quotes syndrome,” to engage with the project archive as an object of study and to re-imagine how we design and build them. Building on past work as part of Montreal Life Stories, which recorded the life stories of 500 Montrealers displaced by mass violence, we recently embarked on a new project that will result in the Living Archive of Rwandan Exiles and Genocide Survivors. This online archive will enable researchers and community members to follow threads, identify patterns, track changes, map, and listen in new ways to more than 90 hours of video recorded interviews. We intend to do this in partnership with survivors, forging a methodology around participatory database-building where the coding, access conditions and research infrastructure itself serve both university-based researchers and community needs. A toolkit of inter-operable and freely available open source tools is also being developed, and will likewise be developed in collaboration with the source community.

Steven High is the co-founder of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and has spent a number of years on the development of digital tools that will facilitate the analysis of recorded oral history interviews at varying scales. He is also examining the potential of collaboratively produced “living archives” where researchers work closely with ‘source communities.’ He was a member of the Spokenweb research team and contributed to the special issue of Amodern on oral literature.

 

BILL KENNEDY (Intelligent Machines)

“New Contexts for Old Voices: Rethinking the Literary Archive”

Bill Kennedy is the author of two books of poetry (with Darren Wershler and a team of trusty web robots), Apostrophe (ECW, 2006) and Update (Snare, 2010). A longtime literary organizer, Bill ran the Café May Reading Series in Toronto (with Michael Holmes) in the early 90s, and the Lexiconjury Reading Series (with Angela Rawlings) a decade later. He was also a ten-year Artistic Director of The Scream, an alternative literary festival in Toronto that ended its run in 2011. He has edited and designed several award-winning books poetry through Coach House Books. He currently curates the official bpNichol archive (bpnichol.ca, with Gregory Betts).

In real life, he is the Development Director of Intelligent Machines, a digital consultancy and development agency that works mainly in the arts, education and publishing sectors. He specializes in the theoretical, bureaucratic, technical and design issues that come with building online arts archives. He was the director of the first Artmob team, a York University research project focusing on intellectual property issues in arts archivism. He is currently working on several projects with the University of Berkeley in partnership with the Agile Humanities Agency. He is unreasonably giddy at the possibility of working on an archive of twenty years of Gilles Deleuze’s lectures, newly transcribed from extant audio tapes and translated into English, pending the vicissitudes of funding and the caprice of an uncaring universe.

MICHELLE LEVY (Simon Fraser U)

“Data-Intensive Humanities Research: Strategies for Collaboration and Interoperability”

In this presentation (co-presented with Rebecca Dowson), we will consider how faculty, students and librarians can best work together to ensure that rigorous stands for database design, data normalization, and data aggregation are met. We will provide a survey of available options for working with different formats, demonstrate the importance of standards in the collection of metadata, and suggest strategies and tools that can be used to normalize and aggregate data with the goal of making our data interoperable with that of others. We will also suggest potential open source tools well suited to the visualization of audio data. Our particular focus will be on issues that arise with audio data, how it differs from other forms of textual and visual data, how cross-institutional platforms can be leveraged to ensure interoperability, and how libraries and labs can assist in the process of building infrastructure.

Michelle Levy is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in English at Simon Fraser University (SFU). To the discussions of The Literary Audio Symposium she brings extensive expertise in graduate student training, mentorship, supervision, collaboration in the Digital Humanitie, and researched consideration of humanities metadata and databases, database design/architecture, migrating and aggregating data from various platforms, data normalization; and data analysis/ visualization, across multiple platforms

 

KATHERINE MCLEOD (Concordia U)

“An Archival Listening to Robert Creeley reading at Sir George Williams U, 1970”

Dr. Katherine McLeod is an Assistant Professor, Limited Term Appointment, who teaches Canadian Literature in the Department of English at Concordia University. Her current research consists of two book manuscripts: a collection of essays co-edited with Dr. Jason Camlot, Un-Archiving the Literary Event: CanLit Across Media (under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press) and a monograph that examines poetry readings on CBC Radio in the 1950s-60s. She began these projects as a SSHRC-funded TransCanada Institute Postdoctoral Fellow (University of Guelph) and continued this work as a postdoctoral fellow with SpokenWeb (Concordia). She curates wherepoetsread.ca and, at this symposium, will be organizing the archival listening to Robert Creeley on Friday Dec 2nd.

STEVE McLAUGHLIN (U Texas at Austin)

“High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship”

Co-Presented with Tanya Clement.  Humanists have few opportunities to use advanced technologies for analyzing large, messy sound archives. In response to this lack, the HiPSTAS (High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship) Project is developing a research environment that uses machine learning and visualization to automate processes for describing unprocessed spoken-word collections of keen interest to humanists. This paper describes how we have developed, as a result of HiPSTAS, a machine learning system called ARLO (Adaptive Recognition with Layered Optimization). I describe a use case for finding moments of applause in the PennSound collection, which includes approximately 36,000 files comprising 6,200 hours of poetry performances and related materials. We conclude with a brief discussion about our preliminary results and some observations on the efficacy of using machine learning to facilitate generating data about unprocessed spoken-word sound collections in the humanities.

 

ANNIE MURRAY (U Calgary)

“Overcoming institutional barriers to engagement with sound and media archives”

In this presentation, Murray will address some of the barriers that prevent libraries and archives from developing accessible media archives, and will discuss the path that the University of Calgary is taking to overcome them. She will describe a large-scale audio digitization project currently underway, and how it can benefit the literary recordings in our care. She will outline the themes of fundraising, inter-departmental cooperation, relationship building, and risk taking as keystones in Calgary’s approach to developing capacity in the preservation of media-rich archives, with the aim of framing discussion around the prevalence of barriers and the ways around them for large-scale audio digitization projects.

Andrea (Annie) Murray is Associate University Librarian for Archives and Special Collections at the University of Calgary. She oversees significant archival and rare book holdings, particularly in the field of Canadian cultural production. As a Co-Applicant on the Spokenweb project (Camlot, PI), she contributed to the development of the first Spokenweb interface, has co-presented project findings at the conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, and has co-authored articles that appeared in First Monday and Digital Humanities Quarterly, with Jared Wiercinski from Concordia University.

 

MICHAEL NARDONE (Concordia U)

“phonotext.ca: Towards a General Index of Literary Audio”

phonotext.ca is a project initiated to develop an open access index of sound recordings related to Canadian poets and poetry. The function of the site is simple: to organize and provide details on sound recordings related to Canadian poetry and poetics; to document the specific format(s) and relevant bibliographic information for each recording; to list where recordings can be located and listened to; and to provide links to recordings that are digitally available. The primary aim of this project is to aid listeners so they may access recorded materials, while emphasizing the importance of the sonic, performative, and medial aspects of poetic works. This presentation will focus on the idea and the challenges of developing such an index, and will be given as part of the symposium focused on the cataloguing of literary audio materials.

Michael Nardone is a PhD candidate at Concordia University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, where he is completing his dissertation “Of the Repository: Poetics in a Networked Digital Milieu.” His research has been awarded a SSHRC Bombardier CGS Doctoral Award, a J.W. McConnell Doctoral Fellowship, a Concordia U Doctoral Award of Excellence, and an Editing Modernism in Canada Doctoral Stipend. In 2015, he was a PennSound visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Recent articles on poetics, technics, and sound appear in Public Poetics, Leonardo Music Journal, Camera Austria, Jacket2, Canadian Literature, Theatre Research International, and Amodern.

 

TOMASZ NEUGEBAUER (Concordia U)

“Selecting an access and digital preservation platform for humanities research in audio and video format: Avalon & Archivematica”

Concordia University Library selected the combination of Avalon Media System and Archivematica as the access and digital preservation platform for revealing aggregation of a vast and diverse range of audio and video recordings relevant to humanities research. Avalon needs to be combined with software designed specifically for digital preservation tasks that ensure the enduring usability, authenticity, discoverability and accessibility a wide range of media over the very long term. In this presentation (co-delivered by Neugebauer and Wiercinski) we discuss the process of selecting an access and preservation platform and explain which aspects and features of Avalon facilitate the use of humanities audio and video content for unique curation, design and pedagogical-oriented projects.

Tomasz Neugebauer is the Digital Projects & Systems Development Librarian at Concordia University, where he participates in the design, development and implementation of various library applications, including Spectrum Research Repository. His multidisciplinary research experience is focused on open digital repositories, information visualization, and open source software development. He has published in various scholarly and professional journals, including: PLoS One, Information Technology and Libraries, International Journal on Digital Libraries, International Journal of Digital Curation, Art Libraries Journal, Code4Lib Journal, OCLC Systems and Services: International digital library perspectives, and The Indexer. He was the primary investigator on the “Developing an Open Access Digital Repository for Fine Arts Research in Canada” grant (SSHRC, 2013) and an e-Artexte Researcher in Residence, instrumental in the launch of e-Artexte, Artexte’s library catalogue and digital repository for contemporary Canadian art publications.

 

MICHAEL O’DRISCOLL (U Alberta)

“Audiographic Coding, or, Whose Sound is this Anyway?”

Proceeding from both Jacques Derrida’s insight the “archivization produces as much as it records the event” and Jerome McGann’s case for “bibliographic coding,” this presentation will consider the status of the digital artifact that is the remediated spokenword object, with particular attention to the “audiographic coding” of the digital file. How does technology listen? And how, in the UAlberta collection, will that listening condition the work of researchers and students of literary performance? SpokenWest will digitize and make publicly available the rich archive of recorded creative readings held at UAlberta since 1969, featuring readings by many authors of international prominence. This panel will introduce the UAlberta collection, which includes four priority fonds, including fifty-six reel to reel recordings produced 1969-82 and twenty-five cassette recordings dated 1973-86, as well as recordings conducted at several major conferences (1969, 1975, 1978) that highlight presentations by major literary figures.

O’Driscoll is co-lead in the development and implementation of a digitized archive of five decades of creative readings at the University of Alberta, and the collaborative design of portable research methodologies and pedagogical strategies focused on the material production, circulation, reception, and analysis of oral literary performance. His disciplinary expertise in the areas of archive theory, poetry and poetics, and material culture studies are relevant to the successful outcome of this project. He has extensive experience in the design and execution of major collaborative research projects. As former Associate Dean Research, he oversaw the activities of the University of Alberta’s Arts Resource Centre, a team of nine computing and multimedia experts focused on the support of social science and humanities researchers.

 

TONY POWER (Simon Fraser U)

“Literary Audio in SFU Library’s Contemporary Literature Collection”

The Contemporary Literature Collection in SFU Library’s Special Collections & Rare Books Division is a large, focused, mature collection of 20th & 21st C. avant-garde/’innovative’ poetry in English.  Dating from the founding of the university in 1965, it is comprised primarily of published and archival materials but also includes many audio recordings.  In this talk the collection’s curator will provide some background on the CLC as a whole, its history and definition and the collection policy that informs its contents.  With this as context, he will then describe the audio component of the collection – its size and content, the present state of its digitization, as well as the significance of its considerable overlap (as far as writers recorded) with the Sir George Williams poetry series recordings held in the Special Collections at Concordia University in Montreal.  This presentation will be coordinated with other participants from SFU, and in particular with Deanna Fong’s presentation on the audio holdings of a single author (Roy Kiyooka) held within the Contemporary Literature Collection.  

Tony Power is a special collections librarian (M.L.S.) at SFU Library.  Since 2000 he has been curator of the Contemporary Literature Collection. The CLC is a large, focused collection of 20th & 21st C. avant-garde/’innovative’ poetry in English. It is comprised primarily of published and archival materials but also includes many audio recordings

 

LOUIS RASTELLI (Archive Montreal)

“The Audio Materials of Archive Montreal”

This contribution will present the audio collection held by the non-profit community organization Archive Montreal, which consists of thousands of hours of audio materials relevant to community cultural activities in Montreal from the 1950s to the present in a wide range of formats ranging from wire recordings, reel tape, cassettes, acetates, vinyl, DAT tapes, minidiscs, CDs, etc. How should such a collection be catalogued, digitized and presented online for use in research and community activities? What audiences may such a community-developed collection serve, and how might this collection be enhanced through collaborative efforts around digital preservation platforms and collection aggregation with other kinds of institutions, for example, universities? These are the questions we will seek to explore in bringing forward the ARCMTL materials as a case study for consideration at The Literary Audio Symposium.

Louis Rastelli is the founding director of Archive Montreal (ARCMTL), a non-profit community archive centre which serves as a valuable reference for researchers and provides material for use in exhibits and projects touching on Montreal culture and history. Archive Montreal’s preservation activities involve the ongoing acquisition of independently produced local cultural artifacts and publications in multiple formats. Deeply involved in numerous community outreach activities, including the distroboto art dissemination programme, Expozine: Montreal’s largest annual small press fair, and a weekly Archive Montreal radio show, on which audio content from the archive is played, ARCMTL’s participation will bring extensive experience in the development of a community-focused archive and will contribute not only to discussion of the digital development of ARCMTL’s holdings, but to questions of audience and use of the kinds of archival materials.

 

JENTERY SAYERS (U Victoria)

“Prototyping Impressions of Sound: Pedagogy across the Lab and Gallery”

While many digital methodologies rely on tools for recording, analyzing, and visualizing sound, they may also prompt us to “remake” or prototype historical audio. Drawing on research conducted across a humanities lab and art gallery at the University of Victoria, this talk foregrounds the pedagogical affordances of such remaking. It focuses on what may have been the first magnetic recording, conducted in Denmark in 1898 during various experiments with volatile impressions on piano wire. Today, no audio from these experiments exists, and all visual evidence of them is speculative at best. However, enough detail remains to re-perform them with new technologies in the present moment. As a form of laboratory research, prototyping early audio becomes an opportunity to learn about its material composition as well as the embodied contexts of its reproduction. Installing these prototypes in a gallery setting encourages people to test them and also attend to how differences emerge across recordings. As a collaboration involving the arts and humanities, this prototyping process ultimately privileges a historical approach to sound that resists empiricism via screen-based tools and instead fosters a shared space for contingencies to speak.

Jentery Sayers bring expertise in digital pedagogy that involves teaching with sound in humanities contexts. He is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria. His sound studies publications include, “Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic Recording” (American Literature 85.4) and “An Archaeology of Edison’s Metal Box” (Victorian Review 38.2). He is the editor of two forthcoming collections, Making Humanities Matter (U. of Minnesota Press, Debates in the Digital Humanities series) and the Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (Routledge). He is also the co-editor of Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities (Modern Language Association, with Davis, Gold, and Harris). At the University of Victoria, he teaches courses in media studies, digital studies, critical theory, and U.S. fiction after 1940.

 

DAVID SEUBERT (U California at Santa Barbara)

“A Digitization Strategy for the Age of Abundance”

The unintended consequence of the mass movement of analog content to digital forms via platforms such as YouTube and Spotify is an embarrassment of audio riches, but unfortunately only selected riches. The modest and inadequate efforts of libraries and archives to digitize audio collections means that those collections that are left in analog form will become irrelevant to all but the most specialized researchers. This presentation explores this phenomenon as it relates to copyright, technological obsolescence, intellectual laziness, and how it informs the digitization strategy for the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive and other digitized audio collections.
David Seubert is Curator for the Performing Arts Collection at Davidson Library (DL), and has served as Lead Principal Investigator on large scale analogue audio digital preservation projects, including: Packard Humanities Institute, American Discography Project, 2016, Library of Congress digitizing 78s for National Jukebox and editing of metadata, 2015-2016, Ann & Gordon Getty Foundation. Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project, 2011, National Endowment for the Humanities, Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings, 2011-2013; and Institute for Museum and Library Services “Cylinder Recording Preservation and Digitization Project”, 2003-2006.

 

JONATHAN STERNE (McGill U)

“Understanding Audio Media Formats”

Sterne will discuss how the mp3 lies at the center of important debates around intellectual property and file-sharing, but it is also a cultural artifact in its own right. Using the MP3 as a starting point for discussion about the cultural stakes of media formats for both historical research and digital design, Sterne will explore the meaning of formats–analogue and digital–from the perspectives of industry, psychoacoustics, and cultural history. In providing a framework for thinking about the meaning of audio media formats, he will provide key conceptual structures for our collaborative discussion of the implications of digitization of diverse media objects, and the choice of digital audio formats for online spoken word archives.

Jonathan Sterne one of the world’s leading experts in the discipline of sound studies, sound media history and theory. He has developed the field of format studies through his analysis of audio media formats, and will apply this expertise to our discussion of the implications of analogue media formats in relation to digitized audio collections. Sterne is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012). His new projects consider instruments and instrumentalities; mail by cruise missile; and the intersections of disability, technology and perception. Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.

 

TIM WALSH (Canadian Centre for Architecture)

“Selecting an Access and Digital Preservation Platform for Humanities Research in Audio and Video Format: Avalon & Archivematica”

Tim Walsh is the Digital Archivist at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), a research museum in Montréal dedicated to the notion that architecture is a public concern. Among his other tasks at CCA, Tim develops and manages workflows and software tools for processing born-digital archives, oversees development and use of CCA’s Archivematica-based digital preservation repository, and facilitates end user access of digital archives in the Study Room. He holds an MS in Library and Information Science from Simmons College and a BA in English from the University of Florida.

 

DARREN WERSHLER (Concordia U)

“A Political Economy of Audio Collections, or, The Politics of Audiotextual Inheritance”

This talk will both explore the kinds of questions scholars and students might ask of literary audio collections, and work towards theorizing the ideological contexts that inform the formulation of such questions in the first place. Why have literary audio collections emerged as important materials for research and study? How are decisions about which collections will be digitized and preserved made? What are the generational politics that have arisen as a result of the ubiquity of poet’s archives? How do questions about humanities audio collections challenge some of the most basic methodologies that have informed literary studies for over a century? These are some of the questions that will be considered in this presentation with the aim of helping to frame discussion for the day’s work on spoken word collections and methodological approaches.

Darren Wershler is the Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature (Tier 2) and a co-editor of Amodern. He conducts most of his research through AMPLab: between media & literature, and with the Technoculture, Art and Games group (TAG), an interdisciplinary centre that focuses on game studies, design, digital culture and interactive art. Darren is the author or co-author of 12 books, most recently, Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (U of Toronto Press), and Update (Snare), with Bill Kennedy. With Jason Camlot he co-organized the “Approaching the Poetry Series” conference in 2013 and co-authored “Theses on Discerning The Reading Series”, published in Amodern 4 (2015) and has been a Co-Applicant through Camlot’s development of the spokenweb project. His expertise in Contemporary Poetics, Media history and Theory, Digital Humanities, and in questions of digital economy, positions him as an ideal interlocutor with Al Filreis on core questions surrounding the use of humanities audio collections for research.

 

JASON WIENS (U Calgary)

“Incorporating Archival Audio Practices in Teaching”

Building upon Wiens’ recent course design and implementation, this presentation asks how we might best ask students to examine archival audio sources alongside published literary texts, and then to engage in a digitization project of selections from the archival fonds of literary recordings held in the University of Calgary collections. With the aim of bringing to the classroom an awareness of the material conditions under which literature is produced, my discussion will consider not only how students might integrate archival records in literary analysis but contribute to the archive by institutional digitization projects.

Wiens is a Tenure-Track Instructor in English at U Calgary with a research and teaching focus in Canadian literature, archives, pedagogy and contemporary poetry. He has developed courses in which students digitize and curate materials from Canadian writers archives. Wiens’ recent work extends this curricular development to include archival audio holdings, with the aim of exploring their pedagogical applications.

 

JARED WIERCINSKI (Concordia U)

“Selecting an access and digital preservation platform for humanities research in audio and video format: Avalon & Archivematica”

Concordia University Library selected the combination of Avalon Media System and Archivematica as the access and digital preservation platform for revealing aggregation of a vast and diverse range of audio and video recordings relevant to humanities research. Avalon needs to be combined with software designed specifically for digital preservation tasks that ensure the enduring usability, authenticity, discoverability and accessibility a wide range of media over the very long term. In this presentation to be presented by Wiercinski and Neugebauer, we discuss the process of selecting an access and preservation platform and explain which aspects and features of Avalon facilitate the use of humanities audio and video content for unique curation, design and pedagogical-oriented projects.

Jared Wiercinski works as Interim Associate University Librarian (Research & Graduate Studies) at Concordia University where he is responsible for the development and coordination of the library’s user services and projects in support of research and graduate studies. As liaison librarian for the Departments of Music and Contemporary Dance, he supports students and faculty through collection development and research assistance. His research contributions, co-authored with Annie Murray, include publications and conference paper presentations on methodological and multimodal cognitive concerns surrounding the design of web-based sound archives. He was a co-applicant on the “SpokenWeb: Developing a Comprehensive Web-Based Digital Spoken Word Archive for Literary Research” grant (SSHRC, 2012) and a collaborator on the “The Spoken Web 2.0: Conceptualizing and Prototyping a Comprehensive Web-based Digital Spoken-Word Interface for Literary Research” grant (SSHRC, 2010).

 

Non-Presenter Participants

For the length of the symposium, specialists from various disciplines will be engaging in discussions and contributing questions and comments either in person or through remote AV communication.

SARAH ROMKEY (Artefactual Systems)
(December 2)

“Sarah Romkey is the Archivematica Program Manager for Artefactual Systems. Sarah is a graduate of the Dual MAS/MLIS program at the University of British Columbia’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (2008), and for six years worked as an archivist for the Rare Books and Special Collections branch of the UBC Library. While there she used both ICA-AtoM and Archivematica, starting when they were still in beta development. Her Master’s Degree work included internships at the City of Vancouver Archives and UBC Library, and she also worked as a research assistant on the InterPARES 3 project.

Sarah has served on the Board of the Archives Association of B.C. and has presented at Association of Canadian Archivists conferences and the UNESCO Memory of the World in the Digital Age conference in Vancouver (2012) on matters of digital preservation and access. During her years at UBC Library she was a project manager on several digitization projects, and she has experience working with both digitized and born-digital records.”

JOANNA SWAFFORD (SUNY)
(December 3-4)

“Joanna Swafford is the Assistant Professor for Interdisciplinary and Digital Teaching and Scholarship at SUNY New Paltz, specializing in Victorian Literature and Culture, Digital Humanities, Sound, and Gender Studies.  Her book project, “Transgressive Tunes: the Politics of Sound of Victorian Poetry,” traces the gendered intermediations of poetry and music. Her articles and chapters appear or are forthcoming in such publications as Victorian PoetryVictorian Review, Victorian Institute, Debates in Digital Humanities, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and Digital Sound Studies: A Provocation. She is the project director for Songs of the Victorians (http://www.songsofthevictorians.com/), Augmented Notes (http://www.augmentednotes.com/), and “Sounding Poetry,” and is the founder and coordinator of DASH (Digital Arts, Sciences, and Humanities) Lab at SUNY New Paltz. She is also Head of Pedagogical Initiatives for NINES.org (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship).”

 

SEAN LUYK (Music Librarian, Alberta)
(December 2-4)

Sean Luyk is the Music Librarian in the Rutherford Humanities and Social Sciences Library at the University of Alberta and a Service Manager of the University of Alberta Libraries’ streaming media repository, ERA Audio + Video. Sean holds an MA in Music Criticism and B.Mus from McMaster University, and an MLIS from the University of Western Ontario. His research interests span the areas of collegial governance in academic libraries, local music collecting, music information retrieval, scholarly knowledge-making practices involving sound, and web archiving.

 

ELISE CHENIER (SFU)
(December 3-4)

Elise Chenier is a Professor of History at Simon Fraser University. Her areas of expertise include the history of sexuality and oral history. She is the founder and director of the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony alotarchives.org and the creator of an online teaching and learning tool interracialintimacies.org

 

MELANIE HARDBATTLE (SFU)
(December 2-5)

Melanie Hardbattle is currently the Acting Head of Simon Fraser University (SFU) Library’s Special Collections and Rare Books division. A graduate of the University of British Columbia’s Master of Archival Studies program, she has worked at the SFU Library since 2009, during which time she has served as project coordinator for several digitization and community engagement projects, including the Multicultural Canada and Komagata Maru: Continuing the Journey websites, and as Special Collections Archivist (since 2012). Her research interests include the preservation and accessibility of the documentary record of groups not traditionally represented in the archival record.

 

NATHAN BROWN (Concordia U)
(December 2-3)

Nathan Brown is Canada Research Chair in Poetics at Concordia University, where he directs the Centre for Expanded Poetics. He is the author of The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (Fordham, Jan. 2017) and is presently completing a second book manuscript titled Absent Blue Wax: Rationalist Empiricism in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. 

 

CHRIS MUSTAZZA (U Pennsylvania)
(December 2, 4)

Chris Mustazza is a doctoral student in English at the University of Pennsylvania and the Associate Director of the PennSound archive, the world’s largest archive of recordings of poets reading their own work. Chris has edited several collections of previously unreleased recordings of poets, including Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, Robert Frost, and Vachel Lindsay. His writing has appeared in Oral Tradition, the Chicago Review, the Notre Dame Review, and Jacket2. He was awarded a creative grant, for the 2015-16 academic year, by Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room, for research on his dissertation, tentatively titled “The Sociolinguistic Birth of the American Poetry Audio Archive.” He is also the editor of Clipping, a series in Jacket2 that focuses on experimental digital approaches to studying poetry audio.

 

FELICITY TAYLER (Concordia U)

Felicity Tayler is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art at University of Toronto, with a focus upon the print culture of artistic and poetic community. She has contributed scholarly articles to Art Documentation, Art Libraries Journal, International Journal of Digital Libraries, and the Journal of Canadian Art History.

KENNETH SHERWOOD (U Pennsylvania)

Kenneth Sherwood is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University of PA, where he teaches in the graduate program in Literature and Criticism and co-directs the Center for Digital Humanities and Culture. His scholarly research areas are 20th/21st century poetry, orality, digital writing, and digital humanities. He edited Louis Zukofsky’s _A Useful Art: Essays and Radio Scripts on American Design._ His interest in the intersection of poetry and technology began with the founding and co-editing of the hypertext journal RIF/T in 1993 for the Buffalo Poetics program. In 2013 and 2014, he participated in the “High Performance Sound Technology for Access and Scholarship,” National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities, Austin, TX.  As a co-founder of the CDHC, he has facilitated a number of projects involving faculty and graduate students, including the development of an Open Source Toolkit and the curation of a gallery show and online exhibition of digital literature

John Melillo

John Melillo is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Arizona. His book project, Outside In: The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk, explores the relationship between listening and noise through twentieth-century experimental poetry. He makes sound under the name Algae & Tentacles.

 

Research Assistants

CLARA NENCU received a B.A. in English Literature from McGill (2014) and is completing an MA at Concordia. Her research focuses on language and pain in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Fanny Burney’s Journals and Letters. She is interested in medical humanities, classical history and literature, and intertextuality. 

 

VANESSA CANNIZZARO is currently a Master’s student of English at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. She is editor-in-chief of Concordia’s 20th edition Headlight Anthology, and a presenter at this year’s NAVSA and NeMLA conferences.  Vanessa’s current academic focus is on the Victorian lower class and their mobility within liminal sociopolitical spaces. With a background in neuropsychology, Vanessa’s studies branch out into the scientific developments of the Victorian era, and consider the role of illegally obtained pauper corpses for dissection and scientific proliferation.

 

JESSICA TUCKER is a first year MA student in English Literature at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. She received her Honours English Literature degree with Distinction in the spring. She was also published in the Literary Undergraduate’s Colloquium at Concordia in 2015, and is currently part of the team of editors working on the Graduate Colloquium for 2017.  Jessica’s academic interests lie in gender and sexuality, with a main focus on transgender young adult literature. She is interested in exploring how literature helps the early process of identity formation within today’s youth culture. Jessica hopes to either work in publishing or teach at the college level once she earns her degree.

 

MAX STEIN is a media artist based in Montréal. His work explores urban spaces through site-specific performances, installation art, and online mapping.  Stein designed and runs the Montréal Sound Map (2008-present), and has collaborated on other sound mapping projects including TSIKAYA, San Francisco Bay Area Sound Map, Oljud Sthlm, Portland Sound Map, Belfast Sound Map, My Favorite Brussels Sound, and the Soundprint Archive. Most recently, he has launched an online exhibition of urban environments in Montreal called Sounding the City <https://soundingthecity.com>.

spokenweb2016_poster-02

Travel

GETTING TO MONTREAL

Montreal is easily accessible by planes and trains from all the major cities in North America and Europe. Please note that the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), requires anyone, including U.S. citizens, entering or re-entering the United States by land and sea to have a passport or other appropriate secure document.

From the Airport

The cheapest way to get downtown from the airport is to take the new airport bus, Route 747, which will bring you directly to the metro system. The fare is $10 and functions as a day pass for the Montreal metro system. Taxis are also available and charge a flat rate of $38 from the airport to downtown Montreal.

From the Train Station and Bus Station:

For those of you coming from Congress in Ottawa, train or bus are good ways to travel.  Gare Central train station is within walking distance from Concordia (if you have a suitcase on wheels, or a very cheap taxi ride.  The Bus station is at Berri, east of where Concordia is located.  To get to Concordia or the hotels from there you may either take the green line going west, from Berri-UQAM to Guy-Concordia, or take the 24 bus that runs along Sherbrooke, going west.

Getting Around Montreal

The Montreal metro system is the fastest and most cost effective way to get around the city. While individual tickets are $3.25, a three day pass is $18 (and will last through the conference).

Metro operating hours are Monday to Friday and Sunday from 5:30 a.m. to 1 a.m., and Saturday from 5:30 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. The average wait time between trains is eight minutes and three minutes during rush hour. For more information about public transportation in Montreal, visit www.stm.info.

If you prefer getting around by taxi, it’s always very easy to flag one down on the street. You’ll also find them in front of your hotel, or at one of the city’s many taxi stands. Also, should the weather prove appropriate, you want to take advantage of the Bixi bicycle rental system that is set up throughout the Montreal metropolitan area.

Uber is still functioning in Montreal.

Accommodations

Please book your rooms as soon as possible.

We recommend these accommodation options with rooms available:

Chateau Versailles – A quaint boutique next to campus
http://www.chateauversaillesmontreal.com/

Le Nouvel Hotel (1740 René-Lévesque West Montréal) – Right next to campus
http://www.lenouvelhotel.com/

Marriott Residence Inn Westmount – Nice hotel close to campus
http://www.residencemontreal.com/en/

Things to do around the area

Arts & Museums

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: http://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/index.html

Musée d’Art Contemporain: http://www.macm.org/en/index.html

Canadian Centre for Architecture: http://www.cca.qc.ca/

McCord Museum: http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/

Place Des Arts (Montreal Opera, The Montreal Symphony Orchestra, and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens): http://laplacedesarts.com/index.en.html

Centaur Theatre Company: http://www.centaurtheatre.com/

The National Film Board (Events, Screenings and Personal Viewing Stations): http://www3.nfb.ca/cinerobotheque/

Segal Centre for Performing Arts http://www.segalcentre.org/

Théâtre Français à Montréal: http://montrealgazette.com/entertainment/theatre/thtre-franais-montral-french-theatre-in-montreal-where-to-find-it

Dining

Chowhound (Quebec and Montreal):http://chowhound.chow.com/boards/22

Resto Montreal: http://restomontreal.ca/

Montreal Food: http://www.montrealfood.com/

Urban Spoon: http://www.urbanspoon.com/c/67/Montreal-restaurants.html

Attractions, Activities and Entertainment

Botanical Gardens: http://www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/jardin/en/menu.htm

Planetarium: http://www.planetarium.montreal.qc.ca/index_a.html

Notre Dame Basilica: http://www.basiliquenddm.org/en/

St. Joseph’s Oratory: http://www.saint-joseph.org/en_1001_index.php

Bell Centre: http://centrebell.ca/en/

Cinema Listings: http://www.cinemamontreal.com/eng

General Tourism: http://www.tourisme-montreal.org

Local Entertainment listings for the week: http://www.montrealmirror.com/listings/index.html

Véhicule Press’s “Montreal: A Celebration” site: http://www.vehiculepress.com/montreal/index.html

Yoga Montreal: http://www.yogamontreal.com/

Can Lit Across Media: Un-Archiving the Temporal Literary Event

As the culmination of the four-year SSHRC IG-funded project SpokenWeb, a conference “Can Lit Across Media: Un-Archiving the Temporal Literary Event” will be held at Concordia University on June 5-6th 2015. It will gather scholars, writers, archivists and media practitioners for an intensive investigation into the past, present, and future of archiving and un-archiving Can Lit across media. The conference expands the methods and research questions that have defined SpokenWeb’s engagement with audio poetry archives and invites scholars working on other media-diverse archives and collections to join the conversation.

For the past four years, SpokenWeb’s interdisciplinary team of researchers has been investigating the poetry reading as event through its audio archives of the Sir George Williams Poetry Series (1965-1974) and development of the PoetryLab mobile app. Building upon SpokenWeb’s mandate to re-activate engagement with audio poetry archives by presenting them in digital environments and public spaces, and motivated by an interest in exploring the range of media formats that have been used to preserve Can Lit since the 1950s, this conference looks ahead to the future of audio-visual archives of literary events and to the un-archiving of materials that document these events and continue to make them available in the present.

For more information about this conference, contact organizers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod at <spokenwebcanada@gmail.com>

Conference Schedule

Conference Program

All events will be held at Concordia University’s downtown SGW Campus.

All panel sessions and the keynote lecture will take place in Room LB 646, located on the 6th floor of the Library Building (1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.)

Film screening of The Line Has Shattered, “Performing the Literary Archive on Air: A Conversation with Eleanor Wachtel,” and the reception and reading “All the Poets in Town: A Montreal Poetry Recording Party” will take place in the J.A. DeSève Cinema, located in the lobby of the Library Building (1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.)

Campus Map

Day One – Friday June 5th, 2015

9:00-9:30am – Welcome Reception/ Opening Remarks – Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod, organizers

9:30-10:30am – Archives and the Digitization of Nation – Panel Session

Dean Irvine, “Indigenous Networks: Digital Repatriation, the Sto:lo First Nation, and the Street-Sepass Archives”

Linda Morra, “Ira Dilworth, CBC Digital Archives, and the Production of Canadian Citizenship and Culture”

10:45-12:00pm – Mediated Conferences– Panel Session

Karis  Shearer, “Vancouver Poetry Conference, 1963”

Jason Camlot, “The Foster Poetry Conference, 1963: Archival Specters and Traces of the Event”

Andrea Beverley, “Archive Bound: Women and Words in 1983”

Lunch

1:15-2:30pm – Un-Archiving the Literary Event – Panel

Gary Barwin, “From Archive to Newhive: Using historical recordings to create H for it is a pleasure and surprise to breathe.”

Karl Jirgens “Digital Mediations:  Temporal phenomenologies of Janet Cardiff and George Büres Miller’s inter-active walking tours, as archival events.”

Nutritional Break

3:00-4:30 –  Plenary Keynote Lecture – Catherine Hobbs (Library and Archives Canada) “Voices Kept in Context: Un-derpinning and not Un-pinning the Archives of Literary Events”

5:00-6pm – Film Screening – “The Line Has Shattered” by Robert McTavish (J.A. DeSève Cinema)

Dinner and End of Day 1 Activities

 

Day Two – Saturday June 6th, 2015

9:30-10:45 – Archival Blind Spots and Silences – Panel Session

Katherine McLeod,Extension: Phyllis Webb on CBC TV”

Joel Deshaye, “Listening to the Unseen Layton: Irving Layton as a Voice for the Archives”

Felicity Tayler, “Sound as Visual – Visual as Sound: Documentary Traces of Literary Events at Véhicule Art in the Early 1970s”

11-12:15pm – Talking Can Lit – Panel Session

Michael John DiSanto and Robin Isard, “Re-Listening to George Whalley”

Deanna Fong, “Othertalk: Coversational Literary History in the Roy Kiyooka Digital Audio Archive.”

Marcelle Kosman, “Tapping the Canon: Jonathan Goldstein’s WireTap and the Production of Canadian Literary Culture”

Lunch Break

1:15-2:45pm – Archives of Canadian Cultural Production – Panel Session

Andrew Bretz, “Canadian Identity and Shakespeare on CBC Radio, 1936-53”

Annie Murray, “The National Film Board of Canada and the Production of Canadian Literature”

Darren Wershler, “TBA”

Nutritional Break    

3:30-5:30pm – Plenary Panel Discussion – “Performing the Literary Archive on Air: A Conversation with

Eleanor Wachtel” (with Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod)  (J.A. DeSève Cinema)

Dinner Break

8:00pm“All The Poets In Town: A Montreal Poetry Recording Party” (J.A. DeSève Cinema) 

Join us for this final event of the SpokenWeb project. SpokenWeb has focused largely on questions surrounding the documentation (and recording) of literary events. For this event, every Montreal poet who is available will perform a poem on the de Seve stage. The event will be recorded in a multitrack format with some microphones capturing the voices of the poets, and other mics placed in different locations to capture the sounds that will occur concurrently, but out of earshot of the actual reading (including, possibly, the sounds of the city’s Grand Prix celebrations). At a later date, the voices of the readers, plus all other sounds inadvertently captured will be made available online for listeners to mix and listen as they like.Some of the superb poets who will read at this event (the list is growing by the minute) include:

Larissa Andrusyshyn
Maxianne Berger
Linda Besner
Stephanie Bolster
Asa Boxer
Jason Camlot
Jeramy Dodds
Tanya Evanson
Endre Farkas
Ian Ferrier
Raymond Filip
Helen Hajnoczky
Lee Hannigan
Catherine Kidd
Steve Luxton
Jeffrey Mackie
David McGimpsey
Ilona Martonfi
Stephen Morrissey
Daniel O’Leary
Branka Petrovic
Greg Santos
Carolyn Marie Souaid
Mike Spry
Carmine Starnino
John Emil Vincent
Darren Wershler

And more!…

poets_11x14_web

Participants

Conference Program

All events will be held at Concordia University’s downtown SGW Campus.

All panel sessions and the keynote lecture will take place in Room LB 646, located on the 6th floor of the Library Building (1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.)

Film screening of The Line Has Shattered, “Performing the Literary Archive on Air: A Conversation with Eleanor Wachtel,” and the reception and reading “All the Poets in Town: A Montreal Poetry Recording Party” will take place in the J.A. DeSève Cinema, located in the lobby of the Library Building (1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.)

Campus Map

Day One – Friday June 5th, 2015

9:00-9:30am – Welcome Reception/ Opening Remarks – Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod, organizers

9:30-10:30am – Archives and the Digitization of Nation – Panel Session

Dean Irvine, “Indigenous Networks: Digital Repatriation, the Sto:lo First Nation, and the Street-Sepass Archives”

Linda Morra, “Ira Dilworth, CBC Digital Archives, and the Production of Canadian Citizenship and Culture”

10:45-12:00pm – Mediated Conferences– Panel Session

Karis  Shearer, “Vancouver Poetry Conference, 1963”

Jason Camlot, “The Foster Poetry Conference, 1963: Archival Specters and Traces of the Event”

Andrea Beverley, “Archive Bound: Women and Words in 1983”

Lunch

1:15-2:30pm – Un-Archiving the Literary Event – Panel

Gary Barwin, “From Archive to Newhive: Using historical recordings to create H for it is a pleasure and surprise to breathe.”

Karl Jirgens “Digital Mediations:  Temporal phenomenologies of Janet Cardiff and George Büres Miller’s inter-active walking tours, as archival events.”

Nutritional Break

3:00-4:30 –  Plenary Keynote Lecture – Catherine Hobbs (Library and Archives Canada) “Voices Kept in Context: Un-derpinning and not Un-pinning the Archives of Literary Events”

5:00-6pm – Film Screening – “The Line Has Shattered” by Robert McTavish (J.A. DeSève Cinema)

Dinner and End of Day 1 Activities

 

Day Two – Saturday June 6th, 2015

9:30-10:45 – Archival Blind Spots and Silences – Panel Session

Katherine McLeod,Extension: Phyllis Webb on CBC TV”

Joel Deshaye, “Listening to the Unseen Layton: Irving Layton as a Voice for the Archives”

Felicity Tayler, “Sound as Visual – Visual as Sound: Documentary Traces of Literary Events at Véhicule Art in the Early 1970s”

11-12:15pm – Talking Can Lit – Panel Session

Michael John DiSanto and Robin Isard, “Re-Listening to George Whalley”

Deanna Fong, “Othertalk: Coversational Literary History in the Roy Kiyooka Digital Audio Archive.”

Marcelle Kosman, “Tapping the Canon: Jonathan Goldstein’s WireTap and the Production of Canadian Literary Culture”

Lunch Break

1:15-2:45pm – Archives of Canadian Cultural Production – Panel Session

Andrew Bretz, “Canadian Identity and Shakespeare on CBC Radio, 1936-53”

Annie Murray, “The National Film Board of Canada and the Production of Canadian Literature”

Darren Wershler, “TBA”

Nutritional Break    

3:30-5:30pm – Plenary Panel Discussion – “Performing the Literary Archive on Air: A Conversation with

Eleanor Wachtel” (with Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod)  (J.A. DeSève Cinema)

Dinner Break

8:00pm“All The Poets In Town: A Montreal Poetry Recording Party” (J.A. DeSève Cinema) 

Join us for this final event of the SpokenWeb project. SpokenWeb has focused largely on questions surrounding the documentation (and recording) of literary events. For this event, every Montreal poet who is available will perform a poem on the de Seve stage. The event will be recorded in a multitrack format with some microphones capturing the voices of the poets, and other mics placed in different locations to capture the sounds that will occur concurrently, but out of earshot of the actual reading (including, possibly, the sounds of the city’s Grand Prix celebrations). At a later date, the voices of the readers, plus all other sounds inadvertently captured will be made available online for listeners to mix and listen as they like.Some of the superb poets who will read at this event (the list is growing by the minute) include:

Larissa Andrusyshyn
Maxianne Berger
Linda Besner
Stephanie Bolster
Asa Boxer
Jason Camlot
Jeramy Dodds
Tanya Evanson
Endre Farkas
Ian Ferrier
Raymond Filip
Helen Hajnoczky
Lee Hannigan
Catherine Kidd
Steve Luxton
Jeffrey Mackie
David McGimpsey
Ilona Martonfi
Stephen Morrissey
Daniel O’Leary
Branka Petrovic
Greg Santos
Carolyn Marie Souaid
Mike Spry
Carmine Starnino
John Emil Vincent
Darren Wershler

And more!…

poets_11x14_web

 

Travel

Getting to Montreal

Montreal is easily accessible by planes and trains from all the major cities in North America and Europe. Please note that the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), requires anyone, including U.S. citizens, entering or re-entering the United States by land and sea to have a passport or other appropriate secure document.

From the Airport

The cheapest way to get downtown from the airport is to take the new airport bus, Route 747, which will bring you directly to the metro system. The fare is $10 and functions as a day pass for the Montreal metro system. Taxis are also available and charge a flat rate of $38 from the airport to downtown Montreal.

From the Train Station and Bus Station:

For those of you coming from Congress in Ottawa, train or bus are good ways to travel.  Gare Central train station is within walking distance from Concordia (if you have a suitcase on wheels, or a very cheap taxi ride.  The Bus station is at Berri, east of where Concordia is located.  To get to Concordia or the hotels from there you may either take the green line going west, from Berri-UQAM to Guy-Concordia, or take the 24 bus that runs along Sherbrooke, going west.

Getting Around Montreal

The Montreal metro system is the fastest and most cost effective way to get around the city. While individual tickets are $3.25, a three day pass is $18 (and will last through the conference).

Metro operating hours are Monday to Friday and Sunday from 5:30 a.m. to 1 a.m., and Saturday from 5:30 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. The average wait time between trains is eight minutes and three minutes during rush hour. For more information about public transportation in Montreal, visit www.stm.info.

If you prefer getting around by taxi, it’s always very easy to flag one down on the street. You’ll also find them in front of your hotel, or at one of the city’s many taxi stands. Also, should the weather prove appropriate, you want to take advantage of the Bixi bicycle rental system that is set up throughout the Montreal metropolitan area.

Accommodations

The conference is on Grand Prix weekend, which means that hotels in Montreal sell out and that rooms are going fast already. Please confirm your accommodation as soon as possible!

We recommend these accommodation options with rooms available (but going quickly):

Le Nouvel Hotel (1740 René-Lévesque West Montréal) – Right next to campus
http://www.lenouvelhotel.com/
For now, Le Nouvel Hotel has set aside a block of rooms for “Can Lit Across Media.”

Chateau Versailles – A quaint boutique next to campus
http://www.chateauversaillesmontreal.com/

Marriott Residence Inn Westmount – Nice hotel close to campus
http://www.residencemontreal.com/en/

Grey Nuns Residence – Budget-friendly private rooms right on campus! (*Best rates!*)
http://www.concordia.ca/campus-life/summer-accommodations/rooms-rates.html

Things to do around the area

Arts & Museums

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: http://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/index.html

Musée d’Art Contemporain: http://www.macm.org/en/index.html

Canadian Centre for Architecture: http://www.cca.qc.ca/

McCord Museum: http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/

Place Des Arts (Montreal Opera, The Montreal Symphony Orchestra, and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens):http://laplacedesarts.com/index.en.html

Centaur Theatre Company: http://www.centaurtheatre.com/

The National Film Board (Events, Screenings and Personal Viewing Stations): http://www3.nfb.ca/cinerobotheque/

Segal Centre for Performing Arts http://www.segalcentre.org/

Théâtre Français à Montréal: http://montrealgazette.com/entertainment/theatre/thtre-franais-montral-french-theatre-in-montreal-where-to-find-it

 

Dining

Chowhound (Quebec and Montreal):http://chowhound.chow.com/boards/22

Resto Montreal: http://restomontreal.ca/

Montreal Food: http://www.montrealfood.com/

Urban Spoon: http://www.urbanspoon.com/c/67/Montreal-restaurants.html

Attractions, Activities and Entertainment

Botanical Gardens: http://www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/jardin/en/menu.htm

Planetarium: http://www.planetarium.montreal.qc.ca/index_a.html

Notre Dame Basilica: http://www.basiliquenddm.org/en/

St. Joseph’s Oratory: http://www.saint-joseph.org/en_1001_index.php

Bell Centre: http://centrebell.ca/en/

Cinema Listings: http://www.cinemamontreal.com/eng

General Tourism: http://www.tourisme-montreal.org

Local Entertainment listings for the week: http://www.montrealmirror.com/listings/index.html

Véhicule Press’s “Montreal: A Celebration” site: http://www.vehiculepress.com/montreal/index.html

Yoga Montreal: http://www.yogamontreal.com/

Approaching the Poetry Series Conference: Using Literary Recordings as Scholars and Digital Designers

SpokenWeb will be hosting a two-day conference to be held at Concordia University, Friday, April 5 – Saturday, April 6, 2013.  This mini-conference invites scholars and digital developers to engage directly with the recordings of “The Poetry Series” and to present work that explores either methodological or technical approaches one might take—as literature scholars or digital developers—to such documentary literary recordings.

As a critical/creative constraint for participation in this conference we have asked presenters to engage directly with some facet of the primary-source audio held in our archive and made available via the SpokenWeb site.  Lit papers may build upon ongoing work about specific authors who read in the series, avant-garde poetics, literary performance, etc., by integrating specific examples from The Poetry Series, or may perform substantial close-listenings of particular documented performances in the archive.  From the tech side, we have encouraged presentations and demos of methods or tools useful for annotating, searching, visualizing or otherwise manipulating the digitized audio recordings, using audio from The Poetry Series as test data.

Suggested topics to explore in the original CFP included:

  • Close Listening Methods
  • Methods for historicizing the Poetry Reading Series in the 60s and 70s
  • Avant-Garde Performance
  • Meta-Poetic Discourse (intros and poetry banter)
  • The Poetry Reading as Oral Pedagogy
  • Defining a Prosody of Poetic Performance
  • What We Look at When We Listen
  • What Literature Scholars Do When They Listen
  • Tools for Searching Spoken Word Audio (i.e. Sound Searching)
  • Theories and Methods of Transcription
  • Audio Annotation
  • Audio Visualization
  • Audio Navigation
  • The Limits of The Audio Timeline
  • Pitch, Amplitude and Other Features
  • Web-based DAWs (digital audio workstations)
  • Touching Sound (the haptic web and sound visualization)
  • Controlled Vocabulary, subject-index schemes, collaborative tagging, etc. for poetry/literature

For more information on this conference, please email the SpokenWeb team: spokenwebcanada@gmail.com

web_conferenceweb_vav

Conference Schedule

Friday, April 5th, 2013

10:00 AM – 10:30 AM

Jason Camlot (Concordia U) & Darren Wershler (Concordia U),
“Opening Remarks: Discerning the Poetry Series”

10:45 AM – 12:15 PM – PANEL 1

Tanya Clement (U of Texas at Austin), “Sound Seeings: High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship”

Annie Murray (Concordia U) and Jared Wiercinski (Concordia U), “Making Sense of Sound: Hearing, Seeing and Touching a Web-Based Audio Archive”

Max Stein and Liban Ali Yusuf (Concordia U), “SpokenWeb Developments”/”Automatic Detection of Poetic Devices”

12:15 – 1:00 PM – LUNCH (in house), PARTY SANDWICHES!
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM – PANEL 2

Danny Snelson (U Pennsylvania),”Speaking, speaking, speaking: bill bissett live, in vinyl, on MP3″

Lee Hannigan (UBC, Okanagan), “Robin Blaser’s Audiotexts and the Challenges of Archiving Conversation”

Dean Irvine (Dalhousie U and Yale U), “Mission Control: An Operator’s Manual for Compulibratories”

2:45 PM – 4:15 – PANEL 3

Jane Malcolm (U de Montréal), “the poem among us, between us, there”: Rukeyser’s meta-poetics and the communal soundscape”

Jeff Derksen (SFU), “Secret Publicity, Social Sincerity, and the Politics of Affect: Oppen’s Post-Vanguardism”

Karis Shearer (UBC, Okanagan), “Daphne Marlatt, Making Public(s).”

8:00 PM – 10:00 PM – POETRY READING at the VAV Gallery (VA 037), 1395 Blvd. René Lévesque

Featuring: A soundscape installation by Steph Colbourn and performances by Gregg Betts, Lee Hannigan, Danny Snelson, derek beaulieu, Deanna Fong, Jeff Derksen, Michael Nardone, Karis Shearer.

Saturday, April 6th, 2013

 9:30 AM – 11:00 AM – PANEL 4

Cameron Anstee (U Ottawa), “‘Opera, Theatre, Ballet, etc.’: The Canada Council Learns to Fund Poetry Readings (1959-1974)”

Ashley Clarkson (Concordia U) and Steven High (Concordia U), “Playing with Time: Digital Oral History and Literary Studies in the SpokenWeb Project.”

Michael Nardone (Concordia U), “‘Unstrung, the structure is sound’: Jackson Mac Low’s Language Event and Archive

11:15 AM – 12:45 PM – PANEL 5

Gregory Betts (Brock U), “‘i want nothing to do with me’: Finding Nothing in the Avant-Garde Archive”

derek beaulieu (Mount Royal U/Alberta College of Art and Design), “Charles Reznikoff and Conceptual Writing”

Deanna Fong (Concordia U), “Concentric (Counter)Publics: Embodiment, Confession and Vocalization in Allen Ginsberg’s 1969 Reading”

12:45 PM – 1:30 PM: Closing Remarks

Jason Camlot and Darren Wershler

Participants

Cameron Anstee (University of Ottawa)

“‘Opera, Theatre, Ballet, etc.’: The Canada Council Learns to Fund Poetry Readings (1959-1974)”

In 1959, the Canada Council funded a poetry reading series for the first time. The Contact Poetry Readings received $845.00 “to provide travel and assistance to Canadian poets to present readings of their own work at the Isaacs Gallery, Toronto” (Third Annual Report). Poetry readings were infrequent in Canada up to this point and funding infrastructure to sustain a poetry reading series did not yet exist. Given the rarity of such events, the young Canada Council (founded in 1957) did not have an appropriate category under which to offer financial support. Consequently, the Contact Readings were funded under “Opera, Theatre, Ballet, etc.” Following the rapid growth and rising popularity of poetry readings in Canada during the 1960s, the Canada Council responded by creating a new category, “Public Readings by Canadian Writers” in 1972. During the final year of The Poetry Series at Sir George Williams in 1974, a staggering sixty three organizations, academic institutions and independent poetry reading series received funding under this category; ninety five received funding the following year.

This paper will document and analyse the development of the Canada Council’s funding model as it pertained to poetry readings in Canada from the time of the Contact Poetry Readings in 1957 to the end of The Poetry Series in 1974. This will provide useful historical material context for understanding the development of poetry readings from disparate and infrequent to organized, sustained, and common. The poetry reading became an important form of literary expression in Canada during these decades, and the role of the Canada Council in supporting and facilitating such events must be documented and acknowledged. This paper will examine available correspondence relevant to funding decisions, applications and project descriptions from relevant poetry reading series, and annual reports from the Canada Council. It will assess how the Council attended to funding English and French-Canadian poets, as well as American poets. This work will be primary in nature, establishing a historical framework within which to pursue further critical scholarly analysis focused closely on The Poetry Series. This paper aims to historicize the material and socio-cultural conditions that enabled a poetry reading series as ambitious as The Poetry Series to succeed between 1966 and 1974.

Derek Beaulieu (Mount Royal University/Alberta College of Art and Design)

“Charles Reznikoff and Conceptual Writing”

Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony: The United States 1885-1890 Recitative (New Directions, 1965; excerpts of which Reznikoff read at SGWU in 1967) and Holocaust (Black Sparrow, 1975) are lyrical precursors to a series of Conceptual engagements with the Holocaust. As part of his SGWU reading, Reznikoff performed Testimony ‘s “Domestic Scenes I” (p.13), “Boys and Girls 5” (p. 57) and “untitled” (p. 35) each of which he contextualizes as “are all based on law cases. Ah…I don’t know what…whether that’ll excuse their ferocity, but apparently something like that once happened. The names are different. The facts are the same.”

Reznikoff was called to the bar but never practiced law, yet he lifts language directly from cases in the public record. Vanessa Place—who is an appellate criminal defence attorney specializing in violent sexual predators—uses similar compositional strategies in her Tragodia 1: Statement of Facts (Blanc, 2010).

Heimrad Backer’s nachschrift (1986; English translation 2010)—written supposedly without knowledge of Reznikoff’s efforts—also recontextualizes primary documents from the Holocaust, but while Reznikoff uses testimony from the Nuremberg and Eichmann Trials, Backer uses primary document from the Nazi party.

Robert Fitterman’s Holocaust Museum (Veer, 2011) uses the caption and the label to draw attention to the absent, the eradicated and the missing. With Holocaust Museum Fitterman transcribes the labels given to archival photographs in the online collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (www.ushmm.org) eliding the photographs entirely.

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes referred to trauma as “a news photo without a caption.” Barthes argues that the photograph cannot be isolated from the event that it portrays. We do not see the photograph itself, we only see the image portrayed on the photograph. The photograph represents events without representing itself, an event portrayed without a means of discussing or categorizing.

Gregory Betts (Brock University)

“‘i want nothing to do with me’: Finding Nothing in the Avant-Garde Archive”

My paper will address the act of disavowal as both a common theme and a gesture in avant-garde aesthetics and will further comment on the problem of archiving or remembering works (and readings) marked by such an anti-philosophy. I take my cue on disavowal from Derrida’s discussion of various resistances to analysis wherein he claims that categories of truth (especially as established by psychoanalysis, but also, by extension, literary analysis and archivization) can be disputed convincingly only through disavowal, which ruptures the possibility of a truth claim from within. It is a useful frame in which to identify a recurring theme in Canadian avant-garde writing in the 1960s and 1970s that consistently explores the notion of discovery or uncovering an abyss of nothingness within language of the poem they are writing: thus, Gerry Gilbert proposes that when the “the silence arrives at the fact” the presence of this absence enables “a single uninterrupted poem / by means of the most direct and shortest image” (“Metro”). Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems with its erotic minimalism presents a similar anti-Imagism that marks the creative act with or by its own withdrawal: “You took with so much gentleness my dark”. Withdrawing darkness is different from asserting presence, however, for it declares an ontological erasure at the heart of writing. For both Gilbert and Webb, the poetry performs a disavowal in the erasure of imagery and language. In the Sir George Williams readings, both of these writers read works that articulate a similar strategic disavowal – including, specifically, a disavowal of work, performance, and the community of those gathered to hear them. What particular challenge does this essential disavowal pose to scholars and archivists seeking to represent these events, these performances, and these naked – denuded – works?

Jason Camlot (Concordia University) & Darren Wershler (Concordia University)

“Opening Remarks: Discerning the Poetry Series”

 

Ashley Clarkson and Steven High (Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Concordia University)

“Playing with Time: Digital Oral History and Literary Studies in the SpokenWeb Project.”

For the past year, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Concordia University has been exploring the intersections between oral history, literature and the digital humanities. The SpokenWeb project, headed by Jason Camlot of the Department of English, aims to develop a Digital Spoken Web Archive from a recovered collection of audio recordings made of a series of public poetry readings from 1965 to 1974. However, it is so much more than a database building project. Surviving poets are being invited back to Montreal to read anew in a public series.  Digital audio extracts of the earlier readings are woven into these public events, creating a sense of dialogue across time. The resulting temporal flux creates an atmosphere that is very conducive to self-reflexivity and life review. Meanwhile, at the back of the room, a memory clinic invites audience members to record their reflections on the sensual and embodied experience of listening to and seeing someone perform their poetry, then and now. Participating poets such as George Bowering and David McFadden also recorded lengthy life history interviews earlier in the day, contributing further to the sense of time passing.  How these components will be represented in the digital archive is still an open question.

As the paper’s title suggests, the project has placed oral history into sustained conversation with literary studies and the digital humanities. The notion of “oral literary history” that is emerging from the project acknowledges the significance of experiential accounts of these public readings which are historical and cultural events. The proposed paper aims to explore the ways in which the project works across platforms – from online environments to physical spaces – to generate spaces of individual and collective life review, reciprocal sharing, and deep listening. The SpokenWeb project promises to make a significant theoretical and methodological contribution to digital oral history practice.  As Alistair Thompson once remarked, digital applications or environments “enable anyone, anywhere to make extraordinary and unexpected creative connections within and across oral history.” (Thompson, 2007).

Tanya Clement (University of Texas at Austin)

“Sound Seeings: High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship”

Poetry, stories, and speeches aren’t just what we read or what we hear– they’re how we make meaning and celebrate history. Hundreds of thousands of spoken text audio files – including poetry readings, Native American stories, and presidential speeches – remain untapped in archives throughout the world. These digital artifacts hold our oral traditions, and projects like High Performance Sound Technologies for Analysis and Scholarship (HiPSTAS) out of the University of Texas’s School of Information and the Illinois Informatics Institute  feature high performance data mining tools that help us visualize and understand our sound culture in new ways. Our understanding of the spoken word has been limited not only by technology, but also by our imaginations. This discussion will consider how the emergence of new data mining techniques and visualization software can help us to preserve culture and improve access while facilitating new literacies that foreground how we “read” sound.

Jeff Derksen (Simon Fraser University)

“Secret Publicity, Social Sincerity, and the Politics of Affect: Oppen’s Post-Vanguardism”

In this talk I will approach poetry readings as a moment of publicness engaged in the imagination of counter-publicness rather an event within an established or static public sphere.  I will link the publicness of poetry to Sven Lutticken’s assertion that “Art media as counter media would not be simply semi-public specialist forums, distinct from publicness at large, but avant-garde attempts to forge a different publicness, a counter publicness” (Secret Publicities 30). To do this, I will speculate on George Oppen’s 1968 reading at SGWU as a form of counter-publicness that takes place “on the grounds of a radical dissent from the dominant view of publicness, and the society it represented” (Lutticken 30). However, I hope to locate Oppen’s counter-publicness within his poetics as a form of social sincerity that sought to refigure subject-object relations. In terms of a poem and a reading, this involves a breakdown of producer and audience that figures poetry as a participatory art practice which Boris Groys argues “weakens the radical separation of artist and audience to a certain degree” (Going Public) Sincerity, as a political affect, is moved outside of the psycho-historical subject and placed in a space between producer and audience; imagined in this way, sincerity is a social relation that exists between subjects in social space and as a force that offers an alternative value to a neoliberal subject.  This alteration of subject-object and producer and audience begins to define, I hope to argue, a post-vanguardist practice which is itself at odds, today, with dominant forms of publicity.

Later I will try and think through “sincerity” and this externalization of it in relation to affect theory, but now I want to give us two political (rather than aesthetic or moral) historical markers of the return of sincerity.

This shift is also a proposes a respatialization of poetry readings as a spatial practice

So, what I am proposing is poetry understood (in its writing and reception) as research, and research as a public act.

Deanna Fong (Concordia University)

“Contiguous Counterpublics: Embodiment, Metonym and Vocalization in Allen Ginsberg’s 1969 reading at SGWU”

Analyzing Allen Ginsberg’s 1969 reading as an exceptional, rather than paradigmatic event structure in the Sir George Williams Poetry Reading Series, I will first situate the reading both in relation to the rituals, protocols and practices of Series, and within the history of Ginsberg’s own poetic performance. I will argue that Ginsberg’s reading at SGWU deliberately makes his own corporeality the focus of his performance through acts of cultural transposition, confession, and vocalization. These alternative forms address constitute a counterpublic discourse, as defined by Michael Warner in Publics and Counterpublics by incorporating “the personal/impersonal address and expansive estrangement of public speech” to “challenge modernity’s social hierarchy of faculties” (121)—those that privilege rational-critical forms of discourse. For Ginsberg, this involves operating in a metonymic, as opposed to metaphoric, mode—rather than resolving disparate ideas into a third, shared space of meaning he instead places ideas, phrases and ideologies into contiguous, dyadic contact to resist interpretive closure. This critical strategy not only supports the coexistence of the material and the prophetic, the spiritual and the spectacular, but significantly expands the circulatory space of counterpublic discourse.

Lee Hannigan (UBC Okanagan)

“Robin Blaser’s Audiotexts and the Challenges of Archiving Conversation”

 American-born Canadian poet Robin Blaser’s influence on contemporary Canadian poetry has been an important one. However, as Blaser’s biographer Miriam Nichols has observed, although he has been a “touchstone of [the Canadian] literary scene for decades  . . . [his work] has hitherto received too little attention.” In addition to his long list of publications, Blaser left behind a number of audio recordings, including a 1969 SGW Poetry Series reading that has been made available in the SpokenWeb digital archive.

My paper analyzes this 1969 reading in comparison with a 1974 discussion between Blaser and Canadian scholar Warren Tallman to bring attention to the contrast between the poetry reading and the poetry conversation. Drawing from Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, in which he emphasizes “sound as material, where sound is neither arbitrary nor secondary but constitutive,” I begin by examining how SpokenWeb’s current transcription and annotation practices facilitate the interrogation of poetic discourse. Next, taking Blaser’s and Tallman’s 1974 conversation (housed in the Poetry Okanagan Sound Archive) as a test case, I outline the challenges associated with transcribing and annotating recorded conversation.  Finally, building from Kate Eichhorn’s “Past Performance, Present Dilemma: A Poetics of Archiving Sound,” in which she argues that “[n]owhere is the archive’s creative potential more apparent than at its limit” (184-85), I discuss how SpokenWeb’s current transcription and annotation practices might be used to facilitate scholarly interaction with recorded conversation.

Dean Irvine (Dalhousie University)

“Mission Control: An Operator’s Manual for Compulibratories”

What I propose is a variant on Kenneth Goldsmith’s theorization of uncreative writing–a practice of uncreative reading, one that sees Earle Birney’s experimentation with computer-assisted poetry as an act of human-machine interaction in which he reads digitally generated linguistic code through an analog process of critical perception, curation, and editing. In doing so, I will situate one of his computer-assisted poetry experiments (“Space Conquest”) that he read in February 1968 at Sir George Williams in relation to the history of laboratory-based aesthetic research conducted by avant-garde writers, visual artists, and architects of the early to mid-twentieth century.

Jane Malcolm (Université de Montréal)

“the poem among us, between us, there”: Rukeyser’s meta-poetics and the communal soundscape

 We cannot know how many audience members at Muriel Rukeyser’s 1969 SGWU reading raised a hand to the question, “How many of you have ever written a poem?” Nervous laughter and a charged silence fill the space between Rukeyser’s query and her admission that she “asks the question now in all rooms.”  Focusing on this crucial moment of silence, as well as Rukeyser’s attempt to fill the room with poets, to occupy the “now” with poetry, this paper addresses the creation of imagined communal soundscapes and the poetics (and politics) of audience exchange.  Exploring Rukeyser’s explicit civic investments at the reading (the inclusion of her most incendiary poems from The Speed of Darkness (1968): “Orgy,” “Martin Luther King,” “The Speed of Darkness,” and many others), I want to explore the communal space of the poetry reading—a space that gives “Voices to all our voices”—particularly as a facet of the volatile political landscape of 1969.  Reading (and hearing) the intersections between the language of protest—“These sons,     these sons / fall burning into Asia”—and the bardic impulse—“I know I am space / my words are air,”—we can begin to understand this documentary recording as an archive of Rukeyser’s (and poetry’s?) sonic insurgency.

Annie Murray (Concordia University Special Collections) & Jared Wiercinski (Concordia University Libraries)

“Making Sense of Sound: Hearing, Seeing and Touching a Web-Based Audio Archive”

Much of our learning is multimodal, involving more than one sense modality. When we encounter a web-based archive of sounded poems, we are already combining the auditory with the visual. The web, an increasingly multimodal space for the creation and dissemination of culture, presents opportunities for deep engagement with sound. We will examine how hearing, seeing and touching all contribute to the experience of sounded poems on the web. Drawing upon research that examines the visual aspects of listening, and taking into consideration the haptic orientation of much mobile computing, we explore new ways we might design and interact with web-based audio archives.

Michael Nardone (Concordia University)

“‘Unstrung, the structure is sound’: Jackson Mac Low’s Language Event and Archive”

While numerous lines of dialogue continue to emerge on the archival and pedagogical implications of poetry audio recordings, critical practices based upon the phonotextual object remain underexplored. In this talk, I listen to Jackson Mac Low’s 1971 Sir George Williams performance to trace out possible tactics for phonotextual criticism. I give particular attention to imagining how modes of remixing and (re)performance open up critical engagements that extend beyond the written.

Karis Shearer (UBC Okanagan)

“Daphne Marlatt, Making Public(s)”

Danny Snelson (University of Pennsylvania)

“Speaking, speaking, speaking: bill bissett live, in vinyl, on MP3”

This speech considers spoken performances across a variety of digital platforms and media formats. As a test case, I explore several recordings of readings by bill bissett in the late sixties. Produced for vinyl recording (Awake in th Red Desert, 1968) and live performance in tape and digital formats (SGWU, 1969; Buffalo, 1980; Segue, 2005), bissett’s signature style of live prosody is analyzed in relation to the media platforms and contextual registers it inhabits, case by case. Print artifacts are related to recordings, which are, in turn, related to media platforms and distribution networks. Methodologically, this exploration follows recent trends in format studies (Jonathan Sterne, 2012) and comparative media analysis (N. Katherine Hayles, 2013) in an attempt to understand how specific formats inflect, alter, and transform the meaning of bissett’s readings. This discussion of format in bissett’s performances verges on issues of digital archives, little databases, and the process of transcoding more generally. Both live performance and vinyl record are understood as facets (or modalities) of an internet archive that envelops the work from our present vantage. The historical recordings of bissett’s performances are discussed in correspondence to online sites of dispersion, including Mutant SoundsPennSound, and SpokenWeb—each of which is situated within its own unique intertextual location on the internetMost succinctly, we might say that everything that was once spoken (that is to say, recorded) is continually speaking (differently) as it traverses each new archival context and medial format.

Max Stein and Liban Ali Yusuf (Concordia University)

“SpokenWeb Developments”/”Automatic Detection of Poetic Devices”

Travel

Getting to Montreal

Montreal is easily accessible by planes and trains from all the major cities in North America and Europe. Please note that the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), requires anyone, including U.S. citizens, entering or re-entering the United States by land and sea to have a passport or other appropriate secure document.

From the Airport

The cheapest way to get downtown from the airport is to take the new airport bus, Route 747, which will bring you directly to the metro system. The fare is $9 and functions as a day pass for the Montreal metro system. Taxis are also available and charge a flat rate of $38 from the airport to downtown Montreal.

Getting Around Montreal

The hotel where the conference is being held is conveniently located downtown. The Montreal metro system is the fastest and most cost effective way to get around the city. While individual tickets are $3, a three day pass is $18 (and will last through the conference!).

Metro operating hours are Monday to Friday and Sunday from 5:30 a.m. to 1 a.m., and Saturday from 5:30 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. The average wait time between trains is eight minutes and three minutes during rush hour.

For more information about public transportation in Montreal, visit www.stm.info.

If you prefer getting around by taxi, it’s always very easy to flag one down on the street. You’ll also find them in front of your hotel, or at one of the city’s many taxi stands.

Also, should the weather prove appropriate, you want to take advantage of the Bixi bicycle rental system that is set up throughout the Montreal metropolitan area.

Accommodation

Accommodation for the conference will be at Hotel du Fort, a four-star, classic, independent, boutique hotel, located in downtown Montreal. It is centrally located at the corner of du Fort and Ste-Catherine Streets. The hotel is a five minute walk from Concordia University and is within walking distance to three metro (subway) stations, as well as many of the city’s fine restaurants, shopping malls, and attractions.

Hotel du Fort
1400 Rue du Fort
Montreal, QC
H3H 2R7
Tel: (514) 938-8333 / 1-800-565-6333

View Larger Map

Signature rooms with king size beds and free high-speed wireless Internet are available for our conference participants. The rates are $109 + tax per night, which includes a buffet-style breakfast, or $99 + tax per night without breakfast.

To book your rooms, please call reservations at the above number and mention that you are a guest of the Approaching the Poetry Series Conference at Concordia.

We also have an open-block reservation at the cozy, historic Hotel Chateau Versailles, at a rate of $135 + tax per night. To book at this hotel, you can call reservations at (514) 933-3611 / 1-888-933-8111, and mention the same conference name.

Things to do around the area

Arts & Museums

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts:
http://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/index.html

Musée d’Art Contemporain:
http://www.macm.org/en/index.html

Canadian Centre for Architecture:
http://www.cca.qc.ca/

McCord Museum:
http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/

Place Des Arts (Montreal Opera, The Montreal Symphony Orchestra, and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens):
http://laplacedesarts.com/index.en.html

Centaur Theatre Company:

Home

The National Film Board (Events, Screenings and Personal Viewing Stations):
http://www3.nfb.ca/cinerobotheque/

Segal Centre for Performing Arts
http://www.segalcentre.org/

Théâtre Français à Montréal
http://communities.canada.com/montrealgazette/blogs/stageandpage/archive/2009/09/04/th-233-226-tre-fran-231-ais-224-montr-233-al-french-theatre-in-montreal-where-to-find-it.aspx

Dining

Chowhound (Quebec and Montreal):
http://chowhound.chow.com/boards/22

Resto Montreal
http://restomontreal.ca/

Montreal Food
http://www.montrealfood.com/

Urban Spoon
http://www.urbanspoon.com/c/67/Montreal-restaurants.html

Attractions, Activities and Entertainment

Botanical Gardens
http://www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/jardin/en/menu.htm

Planetarium
http://www.planetarium.montreal.qc.ca/index_a.html

Notre Dame Basilica
http://www.basiliquenddm.org/en/

St. Joseph’s Oratory
http://www.saint-joseph.org/en_1001_index.php

Bell Centre
http://centrebell.ca/en/

Cinema Listings
http://www.cinemamontreal.com/eng

General Tourism:
http://www.tourisme-montreal.org

Local Entertainment listings for the week:
http://www.montrealmirror.com/listings/index.html

Véhicule Press’s “Montreal: A Celebration” site:
http://www.vehiculepress.com/montreal/index.html

Yoga Montreal
http://www.yogamontreal.com/