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Institutes

THE SPOKENWEB SOUND INSTITUTE (SSI) 2023

Following the SpokenWeb 2023 Symposium, SpokenWeb Network members are invited to take part in the SpokenWeb 2023 Institute, a two-day series of workshops and training activities designed in collaboration with the University of Alberta’s Sound Studies Institute.

Conference Schedule

Thursday, May 4

9:00 AM – 9:15 AM MDT

 

Welcome And Introduction

Loc: Visualization Lab, Digital Scholarship Centre 2-20A
 

9:15 AM – 10:30 AM MDT

 

Artificial Voices

Chair: Geoffrey Rockwell

  • Panelists: Yelena Gluzman (University of Alberta), Ben Tucker (University of Alberta)

Join artists and scholars Yelena Gluzman and Ben Tucker for a panel discussion on artificial voices, focusing on how and why text to speech technologies are generated. The session will start with a screening of STS scholar Yelena Gluzman’s short film Invisible Machines which is about captioners, mediation and transforming talk to text. Gluzman’s film will be followed by a presentation by Ben Tucker about Alberta Phoentic’s Laboratory’s project to develop talk to text models for South African English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa, Xhosa and Malagasy.

Loc: Visualization Lab, Digital Scholarship Centre 2-20A; Format: Panel
 

10:45 AM – 12:00 PM MDT

 

Sound Braiding

  • Instructors: Luisa Isidro Herrera, Nicole Marchesseau, and Johann Sander Puustusmaa (York U)

Sound Braid (https://www.soundbraid.org/) is an emergent web platform committed to exploring incommensurable spaces rooted in captured and ongoing sonic experiences that are at least somewhat remote from expressions of human language or music. Braid collaborators—others interested in exploring sonic worlding from diverse perspectives—will be invited to react with previous posters as moments of sound hosted on the braid plait with possible emanations.

In contrast to the shock and urgency of much of today’s digital life, by opening a gradually self-formulating and non-predictive space, Sound Braid will provide room for thoughtful listening, contemplation, and inquiry into what sound is doing. Participants will be introduced to the Sound Braid platform, and then will be invited to collectively workshop a sonic thread response—or numerous responses—to an existing thread/s.

The workshop will involve a 15-minute introduction, 30 minutes of practical workshopping and 30 minutes of discussion based on the practical component of the workshop (handheld recording devices or phones can be useful for the practical activity, but are not a requirement).

Loc: Visualization Lab, Digital Scholarship Centre 2-20A; Format: Workshop, *Hybrid
 

1:00 PM – 2:15 PM MDT

 

Pulse, Dissipate, Disrupt: A Polyphonic Poetry Workshop

  • Instructor: Kerry Priest (Independent artist)

Polyphonic poetry is a hybrid form of poetry for many voices. Developed by Kerry Priest, her work on multi-voice poetics recently won a commendation from the National Centre for Writing and the UEA in their New Forms award.

The essence of this new form is polyphony, an ancient and indeed global style of music which treats each voice as an equal. This communality allows for the introduction of competing and complementary narratives; multiple authors, diverse communities, and the representation of the non-human, through a sort of poetry ‘dawn chorus’. On a practical level, it allows for the deployment of visual scores, aleatoric techniques and various sorts of improvisation – of text, sound, character, and movement.

In this workshop, participants will be introduced to polyphonic works and given the chance to join in with a couple of group exercises, creating soundscapes according to artistic-conceptual constraints.

Kerry Priest’s work has appeared at the Minack Theatre and on radio stations across Europe on the Radia.FM network, especially Soundart Radio who host a Dartington Radiophonic show.

Loc: Multipurpose Room, Digital Scholarship Centre 2-20B2; Format: Workshop
 

3:00 PM – 4:15 PM MDT

 

Sonic Innovations: The SpokenWeb Digital Anthology

Chair: Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth (U Texas at Austin)

  • Panelists: Trent J Wintermeier (U Texas at Austin); Zachary Morrison (U Alberta); Miranda Eastwood (Concordia) and Matt Kilbane (Notre Dame); Rachel Pickard (UBCO)

The SpokenWeb Digital Anthology brings together literary recordings held by SpokenWeb partner institutions and annotated by researchers in the consortium. The anthology will utilize the AudiAnnotate Audiovisual Extensible Workflow (AWE), a cutting-edge workflow and platform for sharing and curating annotations of audiovisual collections created by Dr. Tanya Clement (UT Austin) and Brumfield Labs. By creating the SpokenWeb Digital Anthology through AWE, we demonstrate the anthology form’s capaciousness beyond print culture as it becomes a collaborative and participatory mode of presenting and interacting with recorded artifacts.

This panel will showcase contributions to the SpokenWeb Digital Anthology with participating researchers contextualizing their recordings and annotations historically and culturally and reflecting on digital annotation as an emergent scholarly and archival practice. As a group, we will also discuss the process of creating the anthology and the questions that arose when thinking through the anthology form’s relationship to old and new media.

Loc: Visualization Lab, Digital Scholarship Centre 2-20A; Format: Panel
 

4:30 PM – 5:45 PM MDT

 

Untamed Melodies X Birding By Ear

  • Panelists: Mallory Chipman (Independent artist), Yvonne Mullock (Independent artist), John Acorn (U Alberta)

Join artists, researchers, and educators Yvonne Mullock, Mallory Chipman, and John Acorn for a panel discussion on thinking creatively about art practice at the intersection of bioacoustics, zoomusicology, sonic ecology, and research-creation. This conversation is situated within a broader discussion about how activities within the sciences and the humanities can inform and complement each other and produce multivalent projects which engage communities across disciplinary boundaries.

Loc: Visualization Lab, Digital Scholarship Centre 2-20A; Format: Panel


Friday, May 5

9:00 AM – 10:30 AM MDT

 

A Linked Data Approach To SpokenWeb Collections

  • Instructor: Francisco Berrizbeitia, Tomasz Neugebauer

This workshop will explore the possibilities of Linked Data within the SpokenWeb collections. Linked Data is structured data that is interlinked with other data, in our metadata schema this interlinking occurs on different fields such as location, creator, contributors and most notably on the content’s fields.

The first part of the workshop will be a demonstration of a tool we developed to make such interlinking task easier on the cataloguers, along with some example applications and visualizations produced using a linked data system. In the second part of the session, we will invite participants to join in a discussion about the different possibilities of linked data technology that might be of interest to our community moving forward.

Loc: Visualization Lab, Digital Scholarship Centre 2-20A; Format: Workshop, *Hybrid
 

10:45 AM – 12:15 AM MDT

 

Radio Histories And Futures: The Use Of Archives And Programming In Radio Research And Storytelling

  • Brian Fauteaux (U Alberta), “The Fluidity of Satellite Radio Programming: Online Archives, Pop-up Channels, and Nostalgia in the “Future” of Radio”
  • Stacey Copeland (producer, Amplify Podcast Network)
  • Laura Vilchis Sanchez (U Alberta), “Lessons from Latin American Community Radio”
  • Jennifer Waits (co-founder, Radio Survivor), “Finding College Radio Archives and College Radio Finds”

Loc: Visualization Lab, Digital Scholarship Centre 2-20A; Format: Panel
 

1:30 PM – 3:30 PM MDT

 

DIY Scores For Deep Listening

  • Instructor: Stephanie Loveless (sound and media artist)

This participatory workshop will introduce the sounding and listening meditations of composer and sound pioneer Pauline Oliveros. In this workshop, we will explore the difference between passive hearing and active listening, collaborate in group sonic meditations, and develop our own site-responsive scores for listening and sounding. With these activities, we will work towards cultivating attunement to, and agency within, our sonic environment.

Loc: Kiva Room, Ed 2-103; Format: Workshop
 

3:45 PM – 4:45 PM MDT

 

SpokenWeb Futures Dialogue

  • Chair: Jason Camlot (SpokenWeb Director, Concordia Montreal U)

SpokenWeb has accomplished an enormous amount in its four-year existence as a research network. We have developed our own database (Swallow) and the SpokenWeb Metadata Schema for literary audio; digitized, catalogued and described many thousands of archival recordings; studied and written about those recordings in numerous scholarly and creative forms and formats, including over sixty (short and long) episodes of the uniquely collaborative, scholarly SpokenWeb Podcast; we have helped develop and improve tools for the analysis and annotation of spoken audio (AudiAnnotate, Gentle and Drift); created protocols for the legal and ethical use of digital spoken recordings; invented and implemented new ways of teaching with sound in the literature classroom; to name just a few important contributions. Our activities, outputs, and impacts have been substantial. Our priorities were set from the outset of our funded partnership and are reflected by the inter-institutional task forces we have struck over the last four years, to help us accomplish our goals. Beyond our goals in preservation, cataloguing, describing, studying, and mobilizing knowledge about archival recordings, we have engaged in a wide range of related research and development activities. Pretty much everything becomes a research question within our network, and we have been great at framing our work in forms of analysis and explication that benefit the wider scholarly community.

With all that we have done, and are in the process of still doing, this plenary discussion will serve as a first opportunity for us to begin to imagine and formulate what SpokenWeb as a research network might wish to do in the future. What new and additional research priorities and directions are we interested in thinking about? If we were starting the SpokenWeb partnership today, with the infrastructure, protocols, accessible materials, and dissemination structures we have built already in place, where would we want to focus our attention and energy? What should the primary research axes of SpokenWeb 2025 be?

Facilitated by SpokenWeb Director Jason Camlot, with the participation of SW Governing Board members, this session will generate and structure our initial thoughts in response to such questions. This will be the first of an annual SpokenWeb Futures discussion, which will take place at each of the next three Institutes.

 

5:30 PM – 6:30 PM MDT

 

CKUA Archives Tour (Group 1)

For almost a century, CKUA has been part of Alberta’s story. And as the province has grown, so has the station. From our studios, we keep our listeners connected to the best in arts and culture in Alberta.

CKUA’s headquarters hold all the elements for creating great radio: a cast of colourful characters coming and going; equipment and machinery both cutting-edge and well, old; a library holding over a million songs (as well as all kinds of fascinating historical bits and pieces); a performance space hosting concerts, live broadcasts and a lot more.

Why not come to check it out?

Loc: CKUA Headquarters, 9804 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB
 

6:30 PM – 7:30 PM MDT

 

CKUA Archives Tour (Group 2)

For almost a century, CKUA has been part of Alberta’s story. And as the province has grown, so has the station. From our studios, we keep our listeners connected to the best in arts and culture in Alberta.

CKUA’s headquarters hold all the elements for creating great radio: a cast of colourful characters coming and going; equipment and machinery both cutting-edge and well, old; a library holding over a million songs (as well as all kinds of fascinating historical bits and pieces); a performance space hosting concerts, live broadcasts and a lot more.

Why not come to check it out?

Loc: CKUA Headquarters, 9804 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB

 


 

Travel

The SpokenWeb 2023 Institute is hosted by the Digital Scholarship Centre, which is located on the second floor of the Cameron Science & Technology Library on the North Campus of the University of Alberta.

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

THE SPOKENWEB SOUND INSTITUTE (SSI) 2022

The SpokenWeb Sound Institute (SSI) will be back in person this year! It will take place at Concordia University in Montreal, 18-20 May 2022. Participation in SSI workshops and events is open to all members of the SpokenWeb network who are able to attend.  Select workshops may be provided in a hybrid format for those who cannot join in person.

As with all of our planned Institutes, this year’s SSI will provide opportunities to reflect on the past year, solidify the work of each of the SpokenWeb Task Forces, share tools and knowledge, and plan the year ahead. For SpokenWeb members who are not yet affiliated with any Task Force, this will also be a great opportunity to see how you might like to get involved in collaborative projects during the 2021-2022 academic year.


 

Notable Events

Ongoing Activities 

Creating Shortcuts Podcasts Live in the 4th Space and AMPLab, with Katherine McLeod

ShortCuts, Live! is a live-taping of ShortCuts during the SpokenWeb Sound Institute. The recordings will take place at 4th SPACE and The Amp Lab and will be aired in season four of the The SpokenWeb Podcast. All participants in the SpokenWeb Symposium and SpokenWeb Sound Institute are invited to sign-up here, now! 

Exhibition of Listening Sound Agency Quotes and SpokenWeb Soundworks in the Concordia University Library

Among the post-Symposium projects of the virtual 2021 SpokenWeb “Listening, Sound, Agency” Symposium are two works that engage with practices of listening, sound capture, transcription and remediation. Materials and Sounds from these projects have been developed into an exhibition that will be on display to the public in the Concordia University Library from May 15 – July 15, 2022.  Sounds from Listening Sound Agency Soundworks can be heard in the Library Audio Exhibition Stairwell as you climb the stairs and transition into the library space from the LB Mezzanine.  Limited run vinyl records and  record covers along with selected off printed from Quotes, the Riso-printed poetic transcription of sounds from the 2021  Symposium composed and introduced by Klara Du Plessis and Emma Telaro are on display in four large exhibition tables situated on the main floor (LB 2) of the library. The book and record sleeve designs are by Concordia design student Leila Gillsepie.  Sounds for the LSA Soundworks album are curated and mixed by Jason Camlot, Deanna Fong (Postdoctoral Fellow, English and History) and Angus Tarnawsky (PhD student, Communications Studies), and were cut to vinyl by Angus. Read more about these works, below, and visit them at your leisure in the Concordia Library.

Listening Sound Agency Soundworks brings new and adapted audio productions from an international group of sound artists and scholars on the theme of how sound can be understood to work in relation to the agency of human subjects through acts of listening.  The works were produced and contributed digitally by participants in the 2021 virtual SpokenWeb Symposium  and then became subject to a production process that remediated them from digital audio files to 7” (331/3 rpm) mono lathe cut vinyl records using a 1940s transcription lathe, a Presto 8N machine that has been refurbished and is now in use at Concordia University in Montreal. This remediation process enacts the changing formats through which sounds may be delivered with consequent changes to the audible techniques used to hear and engage with them, and to the degrees of agency exchanged between sounds and listening subjects. Tracks on the album by Renee Altergott, Oana Avasilichioaei, Jason Camlot, Klara Du Plessis, Ian Ferrier, Deanna Fong, Moynan King, Kevin McNeilly, Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne, Julieanna Preston, Eric Schmaltz, Jon Saklofske, and Angus Tarnawsky. This project produced by Jason Camlot, Deanna Fong and Angus Tarnawsky, with original record cover designs by Leila Gillespie.

Quotes: Transcriptions On Listening, Sound, Agency is an experimental, citational book of scholarship that excerpts phrases, sentences, and paragraphs from the entire roster of papers and performances presented at the 2021 online SpokenWeb symposium, likewise entitled Listening, Sound, Agency. By relistening to and compiling traces from all the panels and performances, this project proposes possible conversations, potential interconnections between diverse bodies and modes of research, and underscores the capacity for intellectual overlap, even between scholarship and creative outputs that might seem very dissimilar. The fragments compiled and rearranged in this book are taken out of context, but recontextualized to deliberately foreground dialogue, overlap, shared intellectual and creative concerns, and an overall sense of community and collectivity predicated on innovative modes of listening. Quotes’ curators are fourth year PhD candidate Klara du Plessis and recent MA graduate Emma Telaro, with book design by Leila Gillespie.

Conference Schedule

Locations: | LB = J.W.  McConnell Library Pavillion, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West. | 4th Space is accessible via the main floor mezzanine of the Library Pavillion (LB) | LB 205 and LB 361 are rooms located within the Webster Library, on the second and third floors of LB, respectively (accessible via the main floor mezzanine by stairs or the elevators furthest to the left) |

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.

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

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

CLICK HERE to register for online attendance of Institute events taking place in LB 205

 

Draft Programme (updated 3 May 2022)

WEDNESDAY, 18 MAY 2022

10:00 am-11:30 pm – Hybrid Event – 4th Space

Workshop: Rights Management Cooking Class with Annie Murray, Paige Hohmann, Michael O’Driscoll, Karis Shearer, and Jason Camlot

In this participatory workshop, participants will learn how to cook up a rights management plan. Borrowing liberally from our collective experience of cooking, recipes, and celebrity chefs, the talented chefs in the Rights Management Task Force will guide participants through the main stages of cooking up a rights management plan for their audio collections. The stages are Ingredients, Equipment and Tools, Preparation, Cooking, and Serving. Each participant will receive their own recipe card to document some of their RM plan components and steps. Workshop facilitators will provide participants with helpful documents to help them cook their own rights management plan.

11:30 pm-12:30 pm – Lunch (off campus): 

12:30 pm – 2:00 pm – Hybrid Event – 4th Space

Working Session: Perfecting Your Podcast Pitch, with the SpokenWeb Podcast Team with Hannah McGregor, Kate Moffatt, Katherine McLeod, and Miranda Eastwood

Are you keen to make your first podcast episode, but don’t know where to start? Got lots of ideas, but no idea how to turn them into an episode pitch? Join the SpokenWeb Podcast team – host Hannah McGregor, ShortCuts creator Katherine McLeod, project manager Kate Moffatt and sound designer Miranda Eastwood – for a workshop on going from concept to pitch to episode creation. NO prior podcasting experience is necessary, but participants should come with some episode ideas germinating!

2:00 pm – 2:30 pm – Nutrition Break

2:30 pm- 4:00 pm – Hybrid Event – 4th Space

Working Session: Creating New Projects with AudioAnnotate Working Session with Tanya Clement and Kayleigh Voss

AudiAnnotate [website: http://hipstas.org/awe/] is a free and lightweight tool and workflow to publish and share annotation projects, editions, and exhibits with audio and video files using IIIF and GitHub Pages.

This working session will introduce the AudiAnnotate workflow, which connects existing best-of-breed, open source tools for AV management (Aviary), annotation (such as Audacity and OHMS), public code and document repositories (GitHub), and the AudiAnnotate web application for creating and sharing IIIF manifests and annotations. Libraries, archives, and museums benefit from this workflow as it facilitates metadata generation, is built on W3C web standards in IIIF for sharing online scholarship, and generates static web pages that are lightweight and easy to preserve and harvest. Scholars and the public benefit as the workflow leverages IIIF and the web to allow users to re-present AV artifacts made available by institutional repositories. Examples in the session will include how to annotate and present AV materials made available online by SpokenWeb partner institutions.

4:00 pm -4:15 pm – Nutrition Break

4:15 pm – 5:30 pm – Hybrid Event – 4th Space

Planning Meeting: Launching SpokenWeb Front-End Development to Swallow Project with Jason Camlot, Tomasz Neugebauer, and Francisco Berrizbeitia

In this planning meeting we will take a step back and consider what we have learned about our metadata through three years of cataloguing our collections in Swallow as a first step towards articulating what we would like the front-end, public-facing interface to SpokenWeb collections to do and be.  Drawing upon our experience from some recent experiments in interface design for the Archive of the Digital Present (Pandemic Period) project, that draws data from selected fields from Swallow, and laying out key categories for planning the development of a front end to Swallow, Jason, Tomasz and Francisco will present concepts that will be useful for gathering information from the SpokenWeb network about requirements and functionality for the SpokenWeb portal interface.  Key concepts to be explored and discussed in this planning discussion include: Requirements (Functionalities), Faceting (Search), Browsing, Visualization (and Output Formats).  This presentation will be delivered with the aim of generating lots of discussion and feedback.

5:30 pm – 7:30 pm – To the Pub! 


THURSDAY, 19 MAY 2022

10:00 am – 11:30 pm – In-Person Event – 4th Space

Working Session: Lesson Play—Creating and Practicing Lesson Plans, with Carlos A. Pittella and Salena Wiener

This workshop is a part of the SpokenWeb student-led event series, Lesson Prompts, Practice, and Play: Sound Pedagogies (or Lesson Play for short). Lesson Play offers a space where students and postdocs who are teaching with sound or interested in exploring sound pedagogies can come together and receive peer feedback on their lesson plans and teaching approaches. We invite interested students and postdocs to prepare a 15-min lesson plan to present at the session and receive thoughts and feedback from those in attendance. All SpokenWeb members are welcome and encouraged to attend and offer feedback. Workshop duration: 1 hour.

12:00 pm-1:00 pm –  Lunch (off campus) 

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm – Hybrid Event – LB 205

Workshop: Making Research Data Public: Data Curation for the Spoken Web Partnership with Marjorie Mitchell (UBCO); Felicity Tayler (uOttawa); Pascale Dangoisse (uOttawa)

Do you know what to do with all your digitized audio files, oral history recordings, and descriptive data sets? This workshop will provide an overview of the different aspects of data curation and management best practices for the Spoken Web Partnership. Whether you are a co-applicant leading a lab at your local campus, a postdoctoral affiliate, a research assistant, or a community partner, we will get you started on thinking about how to integrate best practices into your projects, such as: consent and intellectual property in data collection; transforming data into scholarly and creative work; publishing and archiving your data. We will also discuss how project management is supported by a Data Management Plan.

This workshop was originally developed and delivered at the 2019 Spoken Web Symposium: Resonant Practices In Communities of Sound. It draws significantly upon cases and RDM processes developed and in continued development, across the SpokenWeb research network. Workshop participants will follow a Data Primer, collaboratively co-authored by over 30 Digital Humanists that outlines how a Data Flow and Discovery Model helps digital humanists assess and plan their data curation and management needs as an iterative process that can be conducted throughout the life of their research project. The best practices outlined here can be applied across the broad spectrum of digital humanities (DH) methodologies.  This publication of this data primer was funded by the SSHRC Research Data Management Capacity Building Initiative.  

2:00 pm – 2:30 Nutrition Break

2:30 pm- 4:00 pm – Hybrid Event – LB 205

SpokenWeb Manifesto Writing and Performance

SpokenWeb Trivia Game

4:00 pm- 4:30 pm – Thanks, farewells, and planning for Field Trips

6:00 pm – 8:00 pm – Student Dinner (Off Campus)


Friday, 20 May 2022

Field Trip 1: 11:00 am – 12:00 pm

Morning visit into the dark world of Nick Cave. For those interested in attending the exhibition, we will meet just outside L’Astral venue (305 Saint-Catherine St W, Montreal, Quebec H2X 2A3) at 10:45 am. We will purchase tickets on site and then head up to see the exhibition as a group.

Nick Cave, The Exhibition

 

Lunch: 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm – Lunch wherever you like!

 

Field Trip 2: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Visit and Guided Tour of Musée des Ondes Emile Berliner

Please meet up at 1:45 in the ground floor lobby of the RCA Building, where the MOED is located, (1001 Rue Lenoir, Montréal, QC H4C 2Z6).  This building was the first recording studio in Canada, and we will receive a tour from an architectural historian of how the building was used, as well as a visit to the warehouse holdings of old media technologies of the MOEB.

Field Trip 3: 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm

A soundwalk along the Lachine Canal led by Angus Tarnawsky.

Sound, Sound(s), Sound(ings): Walking and Listening on the Lachine Canal
The Lachine Canal is located in the southwest portion of Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) and was the first canal in so-called Canada. The land where it is located was once a frequent meeting place for many different Indigenous peoples, including the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) and Anishinaabe. Reconfigured over time by fourteen-and-a-half kilometres of industrial canal infrastructure, it is now filled with residential condo buildings and interconnected urban green spaces. It should not be forgotten that both the canal itself, along with newer developments, are built on stolen Indigenous land. While the visual realities of this takeover are immediately apparent through the alteration of the spatial landscape, settler modifications have also shaped the sonic environment. These changes might be perceptible in audible or sonic forms, but sometimes, the changes are not explicitly apparent. For this soundwalk, organized as part of the 2022 SpokenWeb Institute, participants will be led by artist and researcher Angus Tarnawsky. They will witness both individually and together “who” and “what” can be heard on the Lachine Canal. Participants will be able to work though these points while walking and listening, and at the conclusion of the outing, there will be a group discussion on perspective and positionality.

Field Trip 2: 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm

TBD: Record Listening and snacks at GotSoul Listening Café


 

Participants

Workshop and Working Session Facilitators

Francisco Berrizbeitia (Concordia U) is a programmer and developer with over 15 years of experience working in web and multimedia projects as developer and project leader and 7 years of teaching web and multimedia development at university level. Francisco has developed the Swallow Database System used by SpokenWeb for curating its metadata about archival literary recordings.

Jason Camlot is Professor and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies in the Department of English at Concordia University in Montreal. His recent critical works include Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford 2019). and the co-edited collections, Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books (with Jeffrey Weingarten, WLUP, 2022), Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums (with Martha Langford and Linda Morra, Routledge, 2022), and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Katherine McLeod, McGill Queen’s UP, 2019).  He is also the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, Vlarf (McGill Queen’s, 2021). Jason is principal investigator and director of the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb research partnership <www.spokenweb.ca> that focuses on the history of literary sound recordings and the digital preservation and presentation of collections of literary audio.

Tanya Clement (U Texas at Austin) studies the dynamic interplay of digital information systems and scholarly research in literary study by considering how the data, algorithms, software, platforms, and networks that comprise digital information systems are co-constructed with the services, practices, policies and theories that govern literary scholarship. Often working collaboratively, she leads teams to build and analyze digital information systems in the humanities, and uses the findings these activities generate to advance theory in critical cultural studies.

Pascale Dangoisse (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Communication at the University of Ottawa, researcher on the LGLC project and on the Spoken Web partnership. Her research focuses on the study of liberal political discourses on the topic of feminism and women’s rights in Canada. She started to work as a research assistant for the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project in the summer of 2018 and for Spoken Web in 2020. She thoroughly enjoys searching through Archival documents and inputting all the new-found data into Excel and TEI-XML or discussing the Lesbian liberation movement’s struggles and political perspectives

Miranda Eastwood is a Montreal-based transmedia artist studying towards her master’s degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at Concordia University. Focused on sound design, she is developing a radio drama for her thesis, and is the audio engineer for the SpokenWeb Podcast.

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

Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, where her research and teaching focus on the intersections of publishing and social change. As the co-director of the Amplify Podcast Network, she is committed to building the infrastructure for podcasting as a form of scholarly communication, while also making her own podcasts, including Witch, Please (with Marcelle Kosman), Secret Feminist Agenda, and Bad Choices; she also hosts the collaborative SpokenWeb Podcast. She is the co-editor of the book Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Book*hug 2018) and the author of the forthcoming A Sentimental Education (WLUP 2022) as well as two more books in process, one about podcasting and one about dinosaurs.

Katherine McLeod researches archives, performance, and poetry. She has co-edited the collection CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Jason Camlot, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). She is writing a monograph (under contract with Wilfrid Laurier University Press) that is a feminist listening to recordings of women poets reading on CBC Radio. She was the 2020-2021 Researcher-in-Residence at the Concordia University Library and, at present, she is an affiliated researcher with SpokenWeb at Concordia, where she is the Principal Investigator of her SSHRC Insight Development Grant, “Literary Radio: New Approaches to Audio Research” (2021-2023).

Kate Moffatt is an incoming PhD student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on women in the book trades in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the supervising producer and project manager of the SpokenWeb Podcast, project manager of the Women’s Print History Project, and co-host and co-producer of the WPHP Monthly Mercury podcast.

Marjorie Mitchell is the Copyright, Scholarly Communications, and Research Data Management Librarian at UBC Okanagan UBC’s Okanagan Library, and a co-applicant on the SSHRC-funded Spoken Web partnership. She works with a wide range of faculty and graduate student researchers across the disciplines to design research data management plans with the goal of helping researchers apply best practices to their data collection, storage, and sharing. She’s also responsible for helping researchers deposit their articles, conference presentations, and reports into cIRcle, UBC’s Institutional Repository. Marjorie has been at UBC Okanagan since 2005.

Andrea (Annie) Murray (U Calgary) is Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian in Archives and Special Collections. She curates books and other special materials for Special Collections and the Glenbow Library Collection. She is currently overseeing the completion of a multi-year project to migrate and preserve audiovisual recordings from the EMI Music Canada Archive, sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is also a co-applicant in the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership to identify, preserve, share and integrate literary audio recordings more deeply into the study of literature.

Tomasz Neugebauer is the Digital Projects & Systems Development Librarian at Concordia University, where he participates in the development of research and library applications such as Swallow Metadata Ingest System and Spectrum Research Repository. His research interests include information visualization, linked open data, and open source software systems used for digital curation and preservation.

Michael O’Driscoll is Professor, English and Film Studies at U Alberta. His research interests include critical and cultural theory, material culture studies, archive theory, intermedia studies, oral literary performance, literary sound objects, radical poetics. He is a Governing Board member of SpokenWeb and brings to the research network needed expertise in archive theory, poetry and poetics, and material culture studies and strong leadership and organizational skills from extensive administrative experience as a journal editor, national association executive member, project leader, and major conference organizer.

Carlos Pittella (Concordia U) is a Latinx poet and MA student in the creative writing. Having lived in Brazil, Portugal, & the US, he now studies creative writing at Concordia University, Canada. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tint, Feral, Moist, & the VS Podcast.

Karis Shearer is Principal’s Research Chair in Digital Arts & Humanities, Associate Professor of English, and director of the AMP Lab. She leads the UBCO branch of the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant, on which she is a Co-Applicant. Together, she and collaborator Deanna Fong (Concordia U) are pursuing research on gender and affective labour in the Vancouver literary community of the 1960s and 70s, a collaboration which has resulted in a recently published a piece called “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts” and Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch (Talonbooks 2020).

Angus Tarnawsky is an artist, musician, educator, and researcher who is currently pursuing a PhD in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Building on his background as a composer, improviser, and performer, his research examines the social and political dimensions of everyday listening practices through site-specific sonic projects in locations such as building foyers, hallways, and stairwells, as well as street corners, civic squares, and urban green spaces. In addition this, he serves as a research assistant for Concordia’s Landscape of Hope initiative, and SpokenWeb partnership. In these collaborative settings, he organizes soundwalks, facilitates workshops on various topics, coordinates archival material, and makes lathe cut records.

Felicity Tayler (MLIS, PhD) is the Research Data Management Librarian at the University of Ottawa. As a member of the National Training Experts Group at the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, she specializes in Digital Humanities data. 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.

Kayleigh Voss is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is pursuing a master’s in Information Studies and a master’s in English literature. In addition to working with SpokenWeb, Kayleigh is a graduate research assistant at UT’s Harry Ransom Center. She’s interested in promoting access to and greater understanding of archival material, especially with digital tools.

Salena Wiener is a poet and Masters of Arts student in English Literature at Concordia University. Her research interests include women’s writing in the Romantic period and archival studies. For SpokenWeb, she primarily works on the Archive of the Present and Archive of the Digital Present projects, and is currently serving as a Student Representative on the Governing Board. She is a former Prose Editor for Soliloquies Anthology Magazine, and her poetry appears in Honey & Lime Magazine’s poetry blog Oceans & Time, Pulp Poets Press, Peculiars Magazine, Cauldron Anthology, and elsewhere. Instagram: @salenaw_poems.

Travel

Travel 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

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

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

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

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

Local Entertainment listings searchable by date: 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 (yoga near Concordia): https://ensoyoga.com/

Montreal Gazettehttps://montrealgazette.com/


 

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The SpokenWeb Sound Institute (SSI) 2021

Due to restrictions surrounding in-person meetings due to COVID-19, this year’s SpokenWeb Sound Institute (SSI) will be comprised of a series of asynchronously delivered, online events during the months of May, June and July 2021, hosted virtually from Concordia University in Montreal. Participation in SSI workshops and events is open to all members of the SpokenWeb network.

As with all of our planned Institutes, this year’s SSI will provide opportunities to reflect on the past year, solidify the work of each of the SpokenWeb Task Forces, share tools and knowledge, and plan the year ahead. For SpokenWeb members who are not yet affiliated with any Task Force, this will also be a great opportunity to see how you might like to get involved in collaborative projects during the 2021-2022 academic year.

Full SpokenWeb Sound Institute (SSI) 2021 Program

  • Wednesday, May 26, 1:30-3 pm EDT: Workshop #1 on Oral History Workshop with Deanna Fong and Mathieu Aubin
  • Thursday, June 3, 2-4 pm EDT: Workshop #2 on an Introduction to IIIF with Peter Binkley
  • Thursday, June 17, 2-4 pm EDT: Workshop #3 on AudiAnnotate in the Classroom with Tanya Clement
  • Tuesday, June 29, 1-3pm EDT: Workshop #4 on Scholarly Podcasting with Hannah McGregor, Judith Burr, and Stacey Copeland
  • Monday, July 26, 7-8pm EDT: Workshop #5 on Podcasting Transcription
  • Tuesday, July 27, 3pm EDT: Workshop #6 on Rights Management with a SpokenWeb Task Force
  • Wednesday, July 28, 1-3pm EDT: Workshop #7 on Audio Cleanup with SoX
  • Thursday, July 29, 2-4pm EDT: Workshop #8 on Research Showcase and Workshop
  • Thursday, August 12, 2-4pm EDT: Workshop #9 Community Task Force Documentation Draft Discussion

Workshop #1: Provenance and Informational Interviews

Offered by: Deanna Fong and Mathieu Aubin
Date and Time: Wednesday, May 26, 2021, at 1:30-3pm EDT

Workshop Description: This workshop led by Deanna Fong and Mathieu Aubin will introduce participants to SpokenWeb’s Oral Literary History protocol, with special emphasis on conducting provenance and informational interviews. Provenance interviews gather contextualizing information about a collection, either at the moment of its acquisition, or shortly afterwards. Informational interviews gather information about a recording or collection of recordings, and/or the events they document. The workshop is intended to provide foundational information for any students, faculty, or professionals within the SpokenWeb network who wish to conduct interviews about their collections. We will also engage in a more general discussion of Oral Literary History and its ethics, methods, and outcomes. All levels of experience are welcome to attend.

Workshop #2: An Introduction to IIIF

Offered by: Peter Binkley
Date and Time: Thursday, June 3, 2021, at 2-4 pm EDT

Venue: Zoom Link Here

Workshop Description: This session will introduce the principal components of the IIIF suite of APIs, with examples of their use in online services. The topics covered will be:

1. The Image API: deep-zoomable images
2. The Presentation API: complex multipage objects with metadata
3. Annotations: published or user-generated
4. Reuse of IIIF services: I is for Interoperability
5. Other Formats: incorporating A/V and 3D resources

Participants should come away with a general understanding of what benefits IIIF can bring to a research publication, and what options exist for producing and sustaining a IIIF-based web resource.

Workshop #3: AudiAnnotate in the Classroom

How to Teach Annotation with Difficult Collections

Date and Time: Thursday, June 17, 2021, at 2 – 4 pm EDT
Offered by: Tanya Clement (University of Texas)

Venue: Zoom Link Here

Workshop Description: This workshop introduces a lesson plan around a publicly-accessible 1964 recording of a Civil Rights activism event in the John and Barbara Beecher Collection at the Harry Ransom Center. While this recording highlights the voices of community activists, it also includes racist slurs, descriptions of imprisonment of Black highschoolers, and testimonies from concerned parents. The presenters consider how to empathetically present this audio without replicating oppression, practicing trauma-informed pedagogy.

Workshop #4: Scholarly Podcasting

From Pitch to Production

Date and Time: Tuesday June 29, 2021, at 1 – 3 pm EDT
Offered by: Hannah McGregor and Judith Burr

Venue: Zoom Link Here 

Workshop Description:In this workshop, SpokenWeb Podcast host and Amplify Podcast Network co-director Hannah McGregor, SpokenWeb supervising producer Judith Burr, and Amplify supervising producer Stacey Copeland will introduce participants to the process of developing and pitching a podcast idea, and then turning that idea into reality. The first half of the workshop will focus broadly on the skills involved in developing a scholarly podcast, and will be open to all practicing or aspiring scholarly podcasters. The second half of the workshop will be a focused pitch workshop, in which participants will start to develop their pitches for SpokenWeb Podcast episodes. All skill levels welcome!

Workshop #5: Podcasting Transcription in SpokenWeb and Beyond

Date and Time: Monday, July 26 2021, at 7 – 8 pm EDT

Venue: Zoom Link Here 

Workshop Description: Are you interested in the collaboration and decision-making that goes into academic podcast transcriptions? Are you looking for guidance on transcription best practices, style guides, and technology? Across the SpokenWeb community, we have a wealth of knowledge and experience working through transcriptions that we’re excited to share. Then we can build upon this knowledge together.

Join us on July 26th at 4 PM PT/7 PM ET for an hour-long transcription workshop to learn what your fellow audio scholars and podcasting production team members are working on, and connect to others in your field.

Participate in our ever-evolving understanding of:

  • The ethical and accessibility responsibilities of transcriptions
  • Academic use-cases for transcriptions
  • Challenges and surprises the SpokenWeb community has encountered while doing transcription work

We’re an academic podcasting community but we’d love to learn from those doing transcription work in other capacities! All are welcome to register.

Structure:

  • Short presentation on key transcription processes and considerations
  • Discussion between transcribers Megan Butchart (UBCO) and Kelly Cubbon (SFU)
    • Key learnings, current questions, common challenges
  • Listening exercise: how would you transcribe this?
  • Q&A feeding into broader group discussion

Please bring your transcription questions!

Workshop #6: Rights Management Task Force Case Studies

Date and Time: Tuesday, July 27 2021, 3 pm EDT
Offered by: SpokenWeb Rights Management Task Force

Venue: Zoom Link Here 

Workshop Description: SpokenWeb’s Rights Management Task Force responds to case studies of collections held from across the SpokenWeb network. The Task Force will discuss how we can make the digitized audiovisual materials being processed in our collections openly available to the public, whether that is legally possible and/or ethically advisable, and what we would need to do in order to satisfy our legal and ethical standards before opening these materials up for public access.

Workshop #7: Audio Cleanup with SoX

Date and Time: Wednesday, July 28 2021, at 1 – 3 pm EDT
Offered by: Chelsea Miya, Sean Luyk, and Geoffrey Rockwell

Please Register here. 

Venue: Zoom Link Here 

Workshop Description: This workshop will teach participants how to clean up audio collections, using the Sound eXchange (SoX) command line tool. Known as the “swiss army knife of sound processing programs,” you can use SoX to analyze and edit audio files with simple text-based commands. We’ll start by getting comfortable with the command line environment, showing you how to navigate directories, create files, and load programs. Then, we will run through some basic SoX commands, including how to:

  • Play audio files
  • View metadata
  • Trim silence
  • Adjust volume
  • Filter noise
  • Visualize sound with a spectogram
  • Combine effects
  • Batch process multiple files

We will work with real audio files from the SpokenWeb archives, using examples of problems that you are likely to encounter when digitizing analog collections. You will also have a chance to test out what you have learned on your own files.

Workshop #8: Research Showcase and Workshop

Date and Time: Thursday, July 29 2021, at 2 – 5 pm EDT
Offered by: SpokenWeb members, students, and affiliates

Venue: Zoom Link Here

Workshop Description: Presenters will have the opportunity to present research, art, or other Spoken Web related activities in a low-stakes way and benefit from supportive audience feedback and discussion. We are open to a variety of formats, including conference-style presentation, workshop ideas, syllabi or lessons, research, critical writing, or creative output. Topic is open.  Presenters will submit their work in the form of video, audio, or text.

The format will be a variation on the traditional lightning talk. Audience members will have access to the submissions for 2 weeks prior to the event. Prior to the event the audience members will have read, watched, or listened to the presentations. At the event itself there will be no presentations, rather the time will be spent on question and discussion period.

The goal is to provide SpokenWeb members with an opportunity to put their work out to the greater network in order to receive feedback or facilitate discussion in a safe and supportive environment.

Workshop #9: Community Task Force Documentation Draft Discussion

Date and Time: Thursday, August 12 2021, at 2 – 5 pm EDT
Offered by: SpokenWeb members, students, and affiliates

For all workshop events, we respectfully acknowledge that Concordia University is located on unceded Indigenous lands, with the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters. Tiohtià:ke/Montréal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations. We respect the continued connections with the past, present and future in our ongoing relationships with Indigenous and other peoples within the Montreal community.

The SpokenWeb Sound Institute (SSI) 2020

Due to restrictions surrounding in-person meetings due to COVID-19, this year’s SpokenWeb Sound Institute (SSI) will be comprised of a series of asynchronously delivered, online events during the months of May, June and July 2020, hosted virtually from Concordia University in Montreal. Participation in SSI workshops and events is open to all members of the SpokenWeb network.
As with all of our planned Institutes, this year’s SSI will provide opportunities to reflect on the past year, solidify the work of each of the SpokenWeb Task Forces, share tools and knowledge, and plan the year ahead. For SpokenWeb members who are not yet affiliated with any Task Force, this will also be a great opportunity to see how you might like to get involved in collaborative projects during the 2020-2021 academic year.
This summer’s SSI program includes practice-based training in workshops with experts in Computational Approaches to working with spoken audio collections, Podcasting Production, Oral History Methods, and Data and Metadata Curation. Each workshop will consist of an intensive session with the introduction of key concepts and principles followed by focused activities. Workshop sessions will last between 2-3 hours, depending on the planned activities. In addition to these themed workshop sessions, the SSI includes a 3-hour workshop session of Student Lightning Talks where SpokenWeb students will present short talks on ideas, activities and research they have been pursuing and receive feedback and discussion from the wider network..

Full SpokenWeb Sound Institute (SSI) 2020 Program

  • Thursday, May 28, 12-2 pm CST: Workshop #1 on AudAnnotate Virtual Workshop with Tanya Clement and Brumfield Labs
  • Thursday, June 25, 1-3 pm EDT: Workshop #2 on Podcasting with Hannah MacGregor and Stacey Copeland
  • Thursday, July 9, 2-3:30 pm EDT: Workshop #3 on Oral History methods with Steven High, Mathieu Aubin and Samuel Mercier
  • Friday, July 17, 1-5 pm EDT: SpokenWeb All Team Meeting (with a focus on collections processing)
  • Sunday, July 19, 8 pm EDT: SpokenWeb Words and Music Show (a variety show, all team members are invited to participate)
  • Wednesday, July 22, 2-5 pm EDT: SpokenWeb Sound Institute Workshops Sessions: Student Lightning Talks
  • Thursday, July 23, 4-7 pm EDT: SpokenWeb DH2020 Sessions

Workshop #1: AudiAnnotate Virtual Workshop

Offered by: Tanya Clement (U Texas at Austin) and Brumfield Labs
Date and Time: Thursday, May 28, 2020, at 12-2pm CST

Workshop Description and Agenda: This introductory workshop will include basic information about the AudiAnnotate project, about using IIIF and the IIIF specifications for AV, how we are using Audacity to annotate audio files, and how we are using static sites, Jekyll, and GitHub to manage editing and publishing IIIF manifests and annotations.

Workshop #2: Pitching Your Podcast Idea with The SpokenWeb Podcast

Date and Time: Thursday, June 25, at 1:00 – 3 pm EDT
Offered by: Hannah MacGregor and Stacey Copland (SFU)
Venue: Zoom link https://concordia-ca.zoom.us/j/132863636

Workshop Description: Excited about making a podcast episode, but don’t know where to start? Join SpokenWeb Podcast host Hannah McGregor and podcast project manager Stacey Copeland for a workshop on taking your podcast idea to the next level. We’ll introduce you to The SpokenWeb Podcast and then walk you through developing a podcast idea, from concept to pitch to execution. No prior podcasting experience necessary, but participants should come with some episode ideas germinating!

During this workshop, you will be working with your peers on one activity, where you will participate in different teams. Please refer to the attached excel sheet to see your assigned team. If you have any concerns with your team or would like to be re-assigned, please let us know in advance of the workshop. You can also find instructions for the workshop activity below, which we’ll also review during the workshop itself. The other attached document, the Pitch Template, will be help you complete this activity.

Activity instructions will be emailed to all registered participants in advance of the workshop meeting.  Please review the activity instructions and have the handout ready before you join the workshop.

Workshop #3: Oral History Methods and Oral Literary History

Date and Time: Thursday, July 9, 2-3:30 EDT
Offered by: Steven High, Mathieu Aubin and Samuel Mercier (Concordia U)
Venue: Zoom (link to be sent to the network via email)

Workshops Description: The first part of this workshop will introduce foundational concepts and methods from oral history.  The workshop will then proceed into the presentation of clips, case-studies and scenarios for all-group discussion with the goals of 1. collaboratively defining a SpokenWeb Oral History protocol for engaging in interviews around collections of literary sound recordings, and 2. advancing our understanding and definition of the idea of “oral literary history”.

SpokenWeb All Team Meeting: Reviewing and Refining Description and Processing of SpokenWeb Collections

Date and Time: Friday, July 17, 1-5 pm EDT
Offered by: An all SpokenWeb Team event

Description: This all team meeting will function as a collaborative collection processing summit discussion at which we will pursue focused discussion of the approaches we have been taking to describing and processing our diverse audio collections with the SpokenWeb metadata schema and Swallow, the metadata management system.  Discussion will focus on particular fields of description, including the Creator/Contributor field and the Contents field.  We will also receive a demonstration of methods that have been used to export metadata collected in Swallow for web design and presentation of audio collections.

SpokenWeb Words and Music Show

Date and Time: Sunday, July 19, 8 pm EDT
Venue: Zoom (link to be sent to the network via email)
Offered by: Ian Ferrier (host of Words and Music), and Jason Camlot for participation of all interested SpokenWeb team members

Description: For the past three months, Ian Ferrier, host for twenty years (and running) monthly Words and Music Show, and the 2019 SW Curator in Residence, has collaborated with Jason Camlot (Director of SpokenWeb) in running the online version of the Words and Music Show.  While Words and Music usually takes a vacation in the month of July, Ian has graciously agreed to run a special SpokenWeb edition of the Words and Music show, open to SW team members only.  Think of this as a virtual cabaret, variety show, open mic, and team party.  All members  are invited to sign up to deliver a set of 3-5 minutes that may be a poetry reading, musical performance, visual presentation, pet trick, or anything else you wish to share for the enjoyment of your friends and colleagues across the SpokenWeb network.  Please sign up to perform at the show (signup deadline is midnight 17 July 2020) using this SpokenWeb Words and Music Show Signup Sheet.

Workshop #4: SSI Workshop Sessions – Student Lightning Talks

Offered by: An all SpokenWeb Team event
Date and Time: 22 July 2020, 2pm-5pm EDT
Venue: Zoom (link to be sent to the network via email)

Workshop Description: These sessions of the SSI are designed for student researchers to present ideas, experiences, and research they have been pursuing for feedback and discussion from members of the wider SpokenWeb network. Each presenter will talk for a maximum of five minutes and show a maximum of three slides. Following each “lightning talk,” we will open things up to ten minutes of feedback and discussion by using the chat function of Zoom and by sharing organized spoken comments. Presentations will be loosely clustered into themes or areas of interest, but the main goal is to devote time for feedback following each individual presentation. We will schedule breaks periodically throughout the sessions to provide time for more casual exchanges across zoom (with or without breakout rooms) and/or time to step away from the screen for a few moments. Each set of sessions will be moderated by a student or faculty member whose role will be to keep time, to bring comments from the chat into the conversation, and to call on members of the network to share their ideas and questions with the presenter.

The list of scheduled presenters is as follows:

  • Manami Izawa (Concordia U): Visual Translation—Designing a listening environment as a graphic designer at SpokenWeb
  • Lauren St. Clair (UBCO): TBD
  • Bindu Shankara Reddy and Manami Izawa (Concordia U): SpokenWeb Timeline Design as Circuitry: Collaborative design project by using analogue and digital electricity.
  • Sadie Barker (Concordia U): Noise in Postcolonial Literature
  • Andrew Roberge (Concordia U): Spoken Word (in the Words and Music archive?)
  • Amy Thiessen (UBCO): Audio Digitization and Badgr
  • Yasaman Lotfizadeh (UBCO): Concept to Completion Badgr
  • Ahlam Bavi (UBCO): Digital Arts and Humanities Research
  • Ali Barillaro (Concordia U): Practice to Paper: Listening to Horror Sounds
  • Emma Telaro (Concordia U):  Fleabag as Confessionalism (OR Podcasting Margaret Atwood)
  • Stacey Copeland (SFU): Queer Feminist Radio and Podcasting
  • Klara du Plessis (Concordia U): Questions surrounding Deep Curation

AudiAnnotate Workshop

Offered by: Tanya Clement (U Texas at Austin), Brumfield Labs, AVinDH SIG, DH2020 online
Date and Time: Wednesday, July 22, 2020 11-1pm EDT
Venue:  For more information and registration, please go to

Registrants will be sent a zoom link on the day of the workshop.

This virtual, introductory workshop will include basic information about the AudiAnnotate project including using IIIF and the IIIF specifications for AV. We will share how to use Audacity to annotate audio files and to use the AudiAnnotate tool with Jekyll and GitHub to manage editing and publishing IIIF manifests and annotations for audio collections.

SpokenWeb DH2020 Sessions

Offered by: SpokenWeb DH2020 Conference Participants
Date and Time: Thursday 23 July 2020, 4pm-7pm EDT
Venue: https://concordia-ca.zoom.us/j/3772249115

Session 1 (4 pm-5 pm EDT)

Moderator: Michael O’Driscoll (U Alberta)

Title: Dynamic Systems for Humanities Audio Collections: The Theory and Rationale of Swallow (25 Minutes)

Presenters: Jason Camlot, Tomasz Neugebauer, Francisco Berrizbeitia (Concordia U)

This paper approaches a system that has been designed, and continues to be in development, for the aggregation of metadata surrounding collections of documentary literary sound recordings, as an object for theoretical and practical discussion of how information about diverse collections of time-based media should be managed, and what such schema and system development means for our engagement with the contents of such collections as artifacts of humanist inquiry.  Swallow (Swallow Metadata Management System 2019), the interoperable spoken-audio metadata ingest system project that is the boundary object for this talk, emerged out of the goals of the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant research network to digitize, process, describe, and aggregate the metadata of a diverse range of sound collections documenting literary and cultural activity in Canada since the 1950s.  Our talk, collaboratively written and delivered by a literary scholar and critical theorist, a digital projects and systems development librarian, and a library developer / programmer, outlines 1) a theoretical rationale for the audiotext as a significant form of data in the humanities, 2) consequent modes of description deemed necessary to render such data useful for humanities scholars, and 3) a rationale for the development of a specific form of database system given the material and systems contexts that inform our national holdings of documentary literary sound recordings at the present time.

Title: Queering the Tape Recorder: Transforming Surveillance Technologies through bill bissett’s Queer Poetic Voice (10 Minutes)

Presenter: Mathieu Aubin (Concordia U)

This presentation reports on my preliminary analyses of a digitized collection of literary audio recordings featuring poetry readings by Canadian sound poet bill bissett. As Canadian literary communities adopted audio recording technologies as part of their cultural practices during the 1960s, bissett developed a unique relationship to the tape recorder. At the time, the RCMP used this technology to listen to queer people’s conversations, including those of bissett, document their activities, and regulate their sexuality in order to ensure the nation’s heterosexual status quo. In the poet’s tape recordings ranging from the 1960s-1980s, we hear bissett read poetry theorizing this queer surveillance, documenting his lived experiences as a gay man, and fighting for sexual liberation. We also hear sonic traces of the location and social dynamics of the recorded event and the technology used to capture this moment. Until recently, when SpokenWeb began digitizing and making them available to the wider public, these recordings were kept in private collections and had limited circulation. Following the recordings’ recent shift towards digital public circulation, this presentation considers how listening to bissett’s queer tape recordings in SpokenWeb’s digital archive amplifies his voice, forges queer ways of listening to literary audio, and fosters new public dialogue about Canada’s gay history.

Title: Stop Words (5 Minutes)

Presenter: Klara Du Plessis (Concordia U)

STOP WORDS is a set of five short poems based on five sets of commonly used stop words gleaned from topic modelling and computational literary studies: articles, pronouns, prepositions, conjugations of to be, and negation. The reading of each poem is recorded and each audio file is transformed using a variety of sound wave visualization softwares, resulting in five visual poems or images. These images function as interpretative graphical material, visualizing literature as simultaneously scientifically accurate, quantitative, and highly affective, qualitative, diagrams. At its broadest, Stop Words is also an intervention in the Humanities / Digital Humanities schismatic debate, digitally supplementing the traditional verbal dimension of poetry while celebrating an interpretative, subjective digitally generated product. Stop Words engages closely with Johanna Drucker’s research on qualitative statistical representation.

SHORT BREAK with optional breakout room conversation (5pm – 5:15pm EDT)

Session 2 (5:15 pm – 7 pm EDT)

Moderator and Timekeeper: Jason Camlot (Concordia U)

Title: Ethical Soundings in Collaborative Digital Humanities Research Projects: Critical Scenarios from The SpokenWeb

Presenters:

(1) Jason Camlot, Professor and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies, Concordia University;

(2) Tanya Clement, Associate Professor, Digital Humanities and English, University of Texas;

(3) Klara du Plessis, Doctoral Candidate, English, Concordia University;

(4) Liz Fisher, Doctoral Candidate, Digital Humanities and English, University of Texas;

(5) Deanna Fong, Postdoctoral Fellow in Literature and Oral History, Concordia University;

(6) Yuliya Kondratenko, SpokenWeb Project Manager, Concordia University;

(7) Emily Murphy, Assistant Professor, Digital Humanities, Department of English and Cultural Studies,

University of British Columbia, Okanagan;

(8) Annie Murray, Associate University Librarian for Archives and Special Collections, University of Calgary;

(9) Michael, O’Driscoll, Professor, English and Film Studies, Vice-Dean of Arts, University of Alberta;

(10) Karis Shearer, Associate Professor, English and Cultural Studies, University of British Columbia, Okanagan.

This panel draws upon recent and ongoing experiences from the interdisciplinary SpokenWeb <www.spokenweb.ca> research programme to consider the range of ethical scenarios that inform this collaborative network’s engagement with audio archives of literary and humanities-oriented sound recordings, and the communities of practice that generated them. We will consider ethical scenarios through specific projects of the SpokenWeb partnership, a research network that aims to develop coordinated and collaborative approaches to literary historical study, digital development, and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of literary sound recordings from across Canada and beyond. The goals and projects of the SpokenWeb partnership that will serve to focus our discussion of ethical scenarios in large-scale collaborative digital humanities networks include:

  1. rights and access management of digital research data and metadata;
  2. the ethics of archival listening as they pertain to the development of new forms of historical and critical scholarly methods of engagement with the contents of documentary audio archives;
  3. automated techniques and tools for searching, visualizing, analyzing and enhancing critical engagement (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy);
  4. pedagogy, training, mentorship and student labor (the organization of roles and relations across the research network);
  5. innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within performative and public contexts;
  6. project management and governance.

For all workshop events, we respectfully acknowledge that Concordia University is located on unceded Indigenous lands, with the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters. Tiohtià:ke/Montréal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations. We respect the continued connections with the past, present and future in our ongoing relationships with Indigenous and other peoples within the Montreal community.

The SpokenWeb Sound Institute 2019

The SpokenWeb Sound Institute is a two-day interactive event which will take place on the Burnaby campus of SFU, open to the members of the SpokenWeb network.

It is an opportunity to reflect on the past year, solidify the work of each of the SpokenWeb Task Forces, share tools and knowledge, and plan the year ahead.

For SpokenWeb members who are not yet affiliated with any Task Force, this will great opportunity to see how you might like get involved in 2019-2020.

The SpokenWeb Sound Institute is followed by the inaugural two-day SpokenWeb Symposium, Resonant Practices in Communities of Sound, which takes place at Harbour Centre and Woodwards in downtown Vancouver, May 30-31, 2019. Continue reading about the SpokenWeb Symposium here.

We respectfully acknowledge that SFU is on unceded Coast Salish Territory; the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

We are grateful for the support of SFU’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Office of the Vice-President, Research, and the Department of English.

We also wish to thank members of the SFU organizing committee: Rebecca Dowson, Deanna Fong, Jakob Knudsen, Linara Kosolova, Michelle Levy, Cole Mash, Kim O’Donnell, Tony Power, Melissa Salrin. With thanks to Catherine Louie.

Conference Schedule

The program can be downloaded here.

 

Accommodations

The accommodations we have reserved are at SFU Burnaby. To access the online booking form, please follow this link: https://reservations.its.sfu.ca/resbooking.aspx?source=CONF#topofform and select SFU SpokenWeb  (May/27/2019 to May/31/2019) from the drop-down menu.

We have reserved the following rates/room types:

  • $41.00 per room per night plus tax for Private Residence Rooms (19 available);
  • $100.00 per room per night plus tax for Queen Room (5 available);
  • $128.00 per room per night plus tax for Queen Sofa Room (2 available);
  • $178.00 per unit per night plus tax for a Townhouse unit with a kitchen kit (minimum 2 night stay) (6 available, each with 4 bedrooms and two baths, kitchen and living room area). NOTE: One person has to book the entire Townhouse to be shared between multiple people.
  • More information about each room type can be found here: http://www.sfu.ca/stayhere.html

Guests will be required to provide a valid MasterCard, VISA, or Discover Card during the reservation request process. A reservation is not guaranteed until you receive an email confirmation of the booking (typically within 24-48 hours after the booking request form is submitted). Bookings are not guaranteed and are subject to change.

Upon arrival, you will be asked to show your photo ID and the credit card used at the time of the reservation request.

Guests can adjust or cancel their reservation; you will be required to give a full 24 hours’ notice prior to the arrival date. Reservations cancelled within 24 hours of arrival are subject to a one night charge.

For general questions regarding accommodations on campus, please contact

Check-in/out Time: Guests will check-in at the Residence & Housing Front Desk beginning at 3:00pm on the day of arrival. Check-out time is no later than 11:00am on the day of departure.

Please note the Residence & Housing Front Desk is now open 24 hours, 7 days a week.

The online booking form will be available for this group to make their requests until April 26, 2019. All unrequested held rooms will be released after April 26, 2019. Individuals can still request accommodations using the regular online booking system if space is still available but would be subject to regular season rates.

For any general questions regarding the campus accommodations, please contact Deanna Fong at deannaf@sfu.ca