Institutes

Presenter Bios: 

Dr. Nicholas Beauchesne (he/him) completed his PhD in English Literature at the University of Alberta in 2020, specializing in twentieth century occult literary networks and modernist “little magazines.” Nick is an aspiring skáld, a teller of runes. He is also a vocalist and synthist performing under the pseudonym of Nix Nihil. His visionary concept album, Cassandra’s Empty Eyes, was released on the spring equinox of 2022 (Dark StarChasm Noise Theories Records), and his forthcoming EP, “The Algo-Rhythms Quartet: A Companion Piece to the SpokenWeb Podcast” will be released on the Spring Equinox of 2025. For a comprehensive overview of Nick’s and Nix’s academic, professional, mystical, and musical services, with links to his various social media, see: www.nixnihil.net 

Francisco Berrizbeitia, Eng, MSc is a software developer at Concordia University Library. He designs, implements, and maintains in-house software for various applications. Recently, he led the development of the Swallow metadata management system for the SpokenWeb project. His research interests include linked open data, knowledge graphs, and applied artificial intelligence. 

Dr. Michael A. Bucknor is Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Global Studies at the University of Alberta. He currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals and is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of West Indian Literature. He carries out research on the African Diaspora, Austin Clarke, Caribbean-Canadian writing, Black Canadian cultural production, postcolonial literatures and theory, masculinities, sexualities, and popular culture. He is co-editor with Alison Donnell of The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (2011, 2014). His most recent publication is the book chapter, “Austin Clarke’s ‘Out-a-order Poetics and the Archiving of Black Lives,” in The Routledge Handbook on Black Canadian Literature (2024) and the monograph, Olive Senior, is forthcoming in The Caribbean Biography Series, UWI Press, 2025. 

Dr. Jason Camlot is the principal investigator and director of SpokenWeb, SSHRC-funded Partnership that focuses on the history of literary sound recordings and the digital preservation and presentation of collections of literary audio. His critical works include Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford 2019), Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic (Routledge 2008), and the co-edited collections, CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Katherine McLeod, McGill Queen’s UP, 2019) and Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (Véhicule 2007).  He is Professor of English and Concordia University Research Chair (CURC, Tier I) in Literature and Sound Studies. 

Dr. Kristine Dizon is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow (2024-2026) at Concordia University–Montréal in the Department of English and a Carlos Miguel Prieto Fellow at OAcademy (2025). She is an acclaimed clarinetist, conductor, and entrepreneur. Kristine has taught and performed worldwide, served on international juries, and released award-winning albums. Holding a PhD in Cultural Studies from Universidade Católica Portuguesa, she is also a Fulbright and FCT Scholar. Visit her website at www.kristinedizon.com 

Dr. Klara du Plessis is currently the SpokenWeb postdoctoral research fellow at UBC Okanagan’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, affiliated with Dr. Karis Shearer’s Audio Media Poetry Lab. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Concordia University and her ongoing research extends across sound studies, curatorial studies, archival studies, and research creation. Klara’s current interests include curatorial structures in the event-formation, performance, and archiving of twentieth century and contemporary literature, and listening as critical method. Klara is also the author of five books of poetry and literary criticism.  

Dr. Emily Fedoruk is the SpokenWeb Postdoctoral Fellow in the Multimedia Archive at Simon Fraser University. Most recently, she has been teaching at the University of British Columbia and she completed her PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2019. Her current book manuscript, Poetry, or Elsewhere: Literature and Public Life in the Twenty-First Century investigates the role of poetry in everyday life, and she is also at work on a second project that will identify a constellation of radical postsecondary classes in the arts from the 1960s forward, beginning with Prof. Warren Tallman’s 1963 UBC class ENGL 410: Poetry Writing, which is known more infamously as the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference. 

Dr. Deanna Fong directs the digital archive of Canadian poet Fred Wah (fredwah.ca). With a team of student researchers and Systems Librarian Tomasz Neugebauer, she is working on visualizing the site’s social metadata, which represents the roles and activities that go into literary production. With Cole Mash, she is the co-editor of a collection of essays, interviews, and art titled Resistant Practices in Communities of Sound (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024). Her book of interviews, Concern and Commitment: Seven Oral Histories with Innovative Vancouver Women, is forthcoming with Talonbooks. She is the literary editor at The Capilano Review. 

Alyssa L Frick-Jenkins is a 3rd year PhD student in the African & African Diaspora Studies department at the University of Texas at Austin. With an emphasis in African-American U.S. and Fracophone African/Carribean contexts, Alyssa researches Black languages, linguistics, registers, expressive culture and performance, technologies of sound, geographies and soundscapes. Taking object in the post-Soul era until the new millennium (1970s-early 2000s, Alyssa’s focuses on sites of the Black LGBTQ+ ballroom community, dj culture, performative traditions in music-making and Black literacies of sound historically and globally. Her goal is to make use of digital archives as legitimate pedagogical resources in and out the classroom and within the community. 

Xiaoxuan Huang (she/they) is a writer, scholar, & educator working in hybrid poetics & autotheory. Her full-length publications include Love Speech (Metatron Press 2019,) and the forthcoming All the Time: Poems Letters Effulgences (Metatron Press 2025.)  Xiaoxuan holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus.) She currently teaches English Literature & Creative Writing at Capilano University. She is a 1.5 generation Shanghainese-Canadian who is living on the traditional and unceded territory of the xʷmə โ θkʷəyəm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səlílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) people. 

Dr. Kedrick James is the Director of the UBC Okanagan School of Education. He works in language and literacy education, focusing on digital literacy and automation. He is known for glitch pedagogy and his work in transmediation. He is also a software developer and as Director of the UBC Digital Literacy Centre (2015-2023) he created an educational social media platform called PhoneMe for place-based spoken poetry sharing. His literary career spans 40 years, and he practices various art forms from music to media arts. He has served as a University Sustainability Fellow and he studies discourse ecologies and creativity. 

Dr. Sonnet L’Abbé is an award-winning author of three collections of poetry, A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, and Sonnet’s Shakespeare, and of the chapbook, Anima Canadensis. L’Abbé is on the poetry editorial board of Brick Books and The Malahat Review, and also sits on the board of the Nanaimo Blues Society. They currently write and perform at the intersection of poetry, jazz, blues and spoken word while teaching Creative Writing and English at Vancouver Island University. 

Dr. Michelle Levy is a professor of English at Simon Fraser University. She is the co-editor of the Broadview Reader in Book History (with Tom Mole, 2014); the co-author of Broadview Introduction to Book History (with Tom Mole, 2017); and is a contributor to the Multigraph Collective’s Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (2018). Her most recent monograph, Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), describes how the practices of manuscript production and circulation interacted with an expanding print marketplace to nurture and transform the period’s literary culture. Michelle also directs the Women’s Print History Project, 1750-1830, a comprehensive bibliographical database of women’s books. 

Daphne Marlatt grew up in Penang, Malaysia before immigrating to Canada in the 1950s. While studying at UBC in the 1960s, Marlatt was one of the editors during the second phase of TISH. Marlatt has written over twenty collections of poetry and prose including Steveston (1974), The Given (2008), and Reading Sveva (2016). In 2006 she received the Order of Canada. Marlatt lives in Vancouver. 

Dr. Cole Mash is a poet, scholar, and community-arts organizer from Kelowna, BC. He has performed poetry locally and nationally for over 10 years, and his creative work has been published in magazines and presses throughout Canada. Cole’s critical work has been published in Scholarly and Research Communication and the SpokenWeb Blog, and he co-edited the collection of essays Resistant Practices in Communities of Sound from McGill-Queen’s University Press. He holds a PhD in English from Simon Fraser University, is co-founder of non-profit arts organization Inspired Word Café, and teaches English and Creative Writing at Okanagan College. 

Dr. Katherine McLeod is an Assistant Professor, Limited Term Appointment, at Concordia University. As a co-applicant of SpokenWeb, she researches poetry, performance, and archives and she has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Canadian Literature, Feminist Modernist Studies, and Mosaic. She is the principal investigator for her SSHRC-funded project “Literary Radio: Developing New Methods of Audio Research” and she has co-edited the book CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (2019). She is the co-host of The SpokenWeb Podcast, for which she has produced a five-season mini-series about archival audio, ShortCuts. 

Way’ (hello). My name is Coralee Miller. I am a syilx/Okanagan woman and a Westbank First Nation member. I have always loved to draw, paint and sculpt and use digital art as a way to express myself. I utilize aspects of my culture like storytelling and my own interpretations of being syilx as a way to share my heritage, often through a lens of humor. I am most inspired by our oral stories, nature and my own wonderfully talented, funny and resilient community, to which none of my growth and success as an artist, would be possible without them. I have completed my Bachelor of Fine Arts at UBCO in 2021 and now work full time as a Docent at the Sncewips Heritage Museum. Although I work full time, I still do my best to find space to create and incorporate my creativity into whatever I am doing. limlimt (thank you). 

Marjorie Mitchell is a seasoned librarian who has worked on research data management since 2015. She has presented at conferences nationally and internationally on this topic and likes to include bon mots in all her talks designed to put researchers more at ease with what might be an unfamiliar task. Also a master of the unlikely analogy, she recognizes how important it is to take technical jargon from the mysterious world of libraries, put it into the human generative intelligence processor, and to come out with something far more approachable, sensible, and achievable for most researchers. 

Dr. Chelsea Miya is currently an assistant professor at the University of Guelph. 

Dr. Linda Morra is Full Professor at Bishop’s University and the host, writer, and producer of the award-winning literature podcast, Getting Lit With Linda, which is being supported by a Canada Council for the Arts Grant in 2025. She is a former Craig Dobbin Chair (2016-2017) and the Jack & Nancy Farley Visiting Professor at SFU (2022-2023). Her publications include Moving Archives (2020, Winner of the Gabrielle Prize), On the Other Side(s) of 150 (with Dr. Henzi, 2021, Winner of the CSN Best Co-Edited Collection Prize), and the Routledge Introduction to Gender and Sexuality in Literature in Canada (2023). 

Dr. Deanna Reder (Cree-Métis) is a Professor in Indigenous Studies and English at Simon Fraser University.  She is one of the founding members of the Indigenous Literary Studies Association (2013), the Indigenous Editors Association (2019), and has been a co-Chair of the Indigenous Voices Awards since its inception in 2017.  She is the research lead for “The People and the Text: Indigenous Writing in Lands Claimed by Canada” (see www.thepeopleandthetext.ca). Her monograph, Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina won the 2024 MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures and Languages, and the 2024 Canada Prize. 

Jack Riordan is a 2nd Year PhD student in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of Texas at Austin. My research focuses on independent filmmaking in Cuba, particularly in regional productions beyond Havana. I explore the cultural and political significance of these films, as well as the challenges of archiving cinema in countries with weak infrastructure. My work incorporates archival research, film analysis, and engagement with filmmakers to examine how independent and community media preserve local voices and histories. Through this workshop, I aim to share my knowledge on how to use AVAnnotate effectively. 

Dr. Geoffrey Martin Rockwell is a Professor of Philosophy and Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta. He presently holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and has published on subjects such as artificial intelligence and ethics, philosophical dialogue, textual visualization and analysis, digital humanities, instructional technology, computer games and multimedia. His books include Defining Dialogue: From Socrates to the Internet (Humanity Books, 2003) and Hermeneutica, co-authored with Stéfan Sinclair (MIT Press, 2016). Hermeneutica is part of a hybrid text and tool project with Voyant Tools (voyant-tools.org), an award-winning suite of analytical tools. He recently co-edited Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene (Open Book Publishers, 2021) and On Making in the Digital Humanities (UCL Press, 2023). 

Dr. Jentery Sayers (he / him) is Director of Media Studies and Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, where he also directs the Praxis Studio. He’s edited three books, including *Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities* (open-access, with Davis, Gold, and Harris) for the Modern Language Association. 

Erin Scott (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar who works in time-based mediums, including writing, performance, and video/audio. With publications and performances across forms, they have made spoken word albums, books, exhibitions, drag performances, Fringe shows, scholarly articles, social and community art, videopoems and more. As a PhD student at The University of British Columbia Okanagan, her research enquires about the relationship between land, language, and belonging, noting the parallels and divergences between Scottish Gaelic people and Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. Using research-creation methods for Gaelic language revitalization, their dissertation proposes complex questions of belonging from a colonized and colonizer perspective. With a focus on the importance of language for diasporic and national Scottish and Canadian identities, her work asks: ‘where do you belong?’. Erin lives on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Syilx Okanagan peoples. Find more here: www.erinhscott.com 

Dr. Karis Shearer is an Associate Professor in English & Cultural Studies at UBCO where her research and teaching focus on literary audio, the literary event, the digital archive, book history, and women’s labour within poetry communities. She also directs the AMP Lab, is a Governing Board member and lead UBCO Researcher for the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant. She held the 2010-11 Canada-U.S. Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at Vanderbilt University. Karis led the development of the Digital Arts & Humanities Theme of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies program in collaboration with colleagues from multiple departments across two UBC faculties. 

Michael V. Smith works across many creative genres. A writer, filmmaker and performer, he has been publishing books, doing drag, and making videopoems for over twenty-five years. An improv artist, Smith pulls magic out of the moment to bring people together, whether as a drag queen on stage, a writer or literary VJ hosting live online, as a popular MC, or even in filmmaking where Smith leans into the moment, taking a cue from his great love Agnes Varda. A full professor in the interdisciplinary department of Creative Studies at UBC’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna, BC, Smith teaches poetry, fiction, spoken word, editing and publishing, and writing with digital media. 

Dr. Felicity Tayler’s research interests include metadata modeling, data visualization and the print culture of literary and poetic community. She is the Outreach Director of the Data Literacy Research Institute and a Research Associate of the Humanities Data Lab at uOttawa. Currently a co-applicant on the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb Partnership, which foregrounds a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study and digital development, with diverse collections of spoken recordings from across Canada and beyond. As a member of the Digital Research Alliance RDM National Training Expert Group, she was the lead author on the bilingual OER, Data Primer: Making Digital Humanities Research Data Public / Manuel d’introduction aux données : rendre publiques les données de recherche en sciences humaines numériques. Also a visual artist and curator, she has produced exhibitions and published scholarly writing exploring co-publishing relationships in literary and artistic communities. 

Sharon Thesen was born in Tisdale, Saskatchewan. She spent most of her early years in Kamloops and Prince George, eventually moving to Vancouver to study and teach. In 2005 she joined UBC Okanagan where she is now Professor Emerita. Thesen is the author of 11 books of poetry including a number of chapbooks. Her books have been finalists for a number of prestigious awards including the Governor-General’s Award and the Dorothy Livesay Prize; her book of poems A Pair of Scissors won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She currently lives in Lake Country, BC. 

Amy Thiessen (she/her), is a grade 7 teacher in School District 22, Vernon BC. She graduated from the Okanagan School of Education in 2021 and has been teaching at the middle school level since then. In 2020 Amy graduated with a B.A English (Honours) from UBCO. During her time at UBCO Amy worked as an undergraduate research assistant at the AMP Lab on the SpokenWeb research team. She was the local project manager, participated in digitizing the Sound Box collection, and did work on the Sound Box Signals Podcast. She is also an amateur poet and musician. Amy is grateful to live and work in Vernon BC, on the ancestral territory of the Syilx peoples.

Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Fred Wah was raised in the interior of British Columbia and received his BA in English from UBC. He was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter Tish, the editor of Sum magazine (1963-65), and later co-editor with Frank Davey of SwiftCurrent (1984-1990). Wah is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975), Loki is Buried at Smoky Creek: Selected Poems (1980), Music at the Heart of Thinking (1987), and Diamond Grill (1996). In 2018, he and poet-activist Rita Wong co-authored beholden: a poem as long as a river. Wah’s critical work includes the award-winning Faking it: Poetics & Hybridity (2000). 

Dr. Wendy H. Wong is a professor and Principal’s Research Chair in the Department of Economics, Philosophy, and Political Science at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan campus). In 2024, she was recognized as UBC Okanagan Researcher of the Year. A distinguished political scientist specializing in International Relations, her research encompasses global governance, technology, human rights, and NGOs. Dr. Wong has secured over $2.2 million in funding for her qualitative studies from prominent organizations, including SSHRC and the Canada Research Chairs program. Her recent book, We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age (MIT, 2023), merges her expertise in human rights with insights from Big Data and AI, advocating for digital literacy with public libraries as essential community hubs. The book has received notable recognition, including the Balsillie Prize for Public Policy. The book was also a finalist for the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize and was highlighted by CBC’s The House and the Journal of Democracy. Dr. Wong frequently contributes to media discussions on technology and societal issues. Previously, she directed the Trudeau Center for Peace, Conflict, and Justice, and served as Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute at the University of Toronto. 

Paper Abstracts

Panel 1. Institutions, Archives, and Data: Critical Issues 

Jason Camlot, “All Institutional Archives are Community Archives”

This brief talk reflects on the past seven years of archival collections development pursued by the SpokenWeb research network through the conceptual categories of Institutions, Archives, and Data. Since the 1990s, the concept of archives has broadened beyond traditional models of appraisal, arrangement, and provenance to be rediscovered as a wide range of actions and processes. Feminist and Black studies scholars have played key roles in calibrating our understanding of archives as sites of ideological recognition, authorization, and as ideational troves documenting the formation of individuals and communities that challenge the “timeless, homogeneously unraced microcosm of the Canadian regional imaginary” (Karina Vernon). 

The conception of “archives” for the work of the SpokenWeb partnership has come to be defined as a relation between AV materials to their original and subsequent communities of production and use. Literary AV collections, whether deposited in institutional archives, or held by communities or individuals, are material traces both of events (AV content) and of the desires and actions of individuals or groups to document a community’s cultural work, texture and significance, including its shared interests, experiences, and its distinct voices. With reference to moments from the vast work of SpokenWeb team members in developing collections of literary recordings by producing metadata and making AV data accessible, this talk will consider how our network’s commitment to participatory archives frameworks has offered a powerful way to engage with literary and user communities as they extend the concept of usability beyond basic, instrumental use into deeper involvement and participation in redefining archival processes and creating archives that are meaningful in the present. 

Deanna Fong, “Visualizing Literary Social Networks in the Fred Wah Digital Archive”

This presentation offers an introduction to the possible applications of social network visualization to literary analysis, drawing upon visualizations generated from metadata in the Fred Wah Digital Archive. I will provide an overview of the metadata schema used to describe the social relations represented in the archive and the workflow used to prepare the data for visualization. I will also offer some preliminary observations and interpretations of the output, and discuss the ethical implications of abstracting a complex social network of literary contemporaries.

Deanna Reder, “Recording Indigenous Writers for Open Learning in the late C20” 

In 1993, before Canadian universities taught Indigenous literatures, instructor Patty Hartford interviewed several Indigenous writers over the telephone, asked them to read from their work, and then created cassette tapes for students enrolled in “Composition in Native Indian Literature 1” at the Open Learning Agency in Kamloops, BC.  I will examine the ways in which the creation of these audio curricular materials, rather than the inclusion of these writers in elite events such as literary festivals, was more effective at building the careers and the audience of these authors (e.g. Brant, Maracle), and subsequently the field of Indigenous literary studies. 

Wendy Wong, “Integrating Human Rights with the AI Era” 

Dr. Wong is interested in human rights and the politics of governance, including the emergence of disruptive technologies and ideas. Wong’s work explores emerging technologies such as AI, arguing that the pervasive datafication of modern life has serious implications for human rights. She argues that as we generate data through daily activities, we are perceived as “subjects” or “sources” of data to be harvested by companies and governments. Wong advocates for the extension of human rights to digital identities, arguing that we need to view ourselves as stakeholders in the digital world so we may advocate for safeguards in a data-intensive world. 

Panel 2. Sound Pedagogy: Collections in Classrooms 

Michael Bucknor, “Sound Decolonial Pedagogies & the Black Sonic Fantastic”

TBA 

Emily Fedoruk, “An Ideal Reader: Warren Tallman Teaching in the Audio Archive”

In her talk “History and Contemporary Poetics,” Evie Shockley suggests that “we work through and against the archive for finding what we need to survive the present and future.” It was Harryette Mullen, she describes, who offered her “an expansive way of thinking about readers”: most are not yet born. The pleasure in writing, then, is that the reader inhabits a future that the poet will not live to see. My paper takes inspiration from Shockley in reading a pedagogical “history and contemporary poetics” in Prof. Warren Tallman’s tapes. To quote another poet, teacher, and friend of Harryette Mullen, Roy Miki, I am interested specifically in “this guy here who’s been writing this critical prose for years and years and years and he’s been talking about this character, almost a fictional character, right: the reader, this guy who sits and listens and listens to writing throughout this whole century and tries to articulate its presence.” In this future, what does Tallman teach us about teaching poetry today? How does a spoken poetry and poetics articulate still new positions for “readers”? Like Miki, “I’m interested in this guy here,” seeking expanded possibilities for readers on and off the page. 

Kedrick James, “Sound Pedagogy”

Brief introduction to sound pedagogy, asking “what does it means to be of sound mind and body?” Sound pedagogy adopts an approach to learning that emphasizes listening and dialogical engagement in contrast to vision-centred learning, ideologies, and worldviews. This concept of health is identified as a function of deep listening, a concept similar to deep ecology and amplified as an educational imperative in times of declining mental health among youth, climate anxiety and geopolitical turmoil. Becoming of sound mind and body involves a pedagogy of persons (latin, per / of, son / sound) in tune with human and more-than-human worlds. 

Cole Mash, “Shake the Dust: Towards New Methods for ‘Reading’ Mediatized Spoken Word Poetry”

Contemporary Spoken Word poetry has seen little scholarly attention because the current tools and methods of literary study and pedagogy are inadequate to the formal richness of the mode. In this paper, Mash will first theorize this richness, including the multitextuality and plural existence of Spoken Word poetry across media, then analyze Anis Mojgani’s “Shake the Dust” as a case study for the development of new methods for the formal and hermeneutic study of Spoken Word poetry, which may allow the underserved mode to more fully enter into the economies of research and the classroom. 

Panel 3. Research-Creation: Collections in Communities 

Klara du Plessis, “Listening as Method: Composing Poetry alongside Daphne Marlatt’s Reading of Leaf Leaf/s” 

Listening can never be perfect. It is impossible to attend to, retain, and recall every sound and every word engaged with through the ears. Listening can also stimulate a strong response, so that the listener is led to wander in creative and critical directions of their own, listening to their thoughts as much as to sounds. One can thus think alongside Salomé Voegelin’s statement that “listening does not pursue the question of meaning, as a collective, total comprehension, but that of interpretation” (Listening to Noise and Silence 4-5). Listening is selective, self-produced, and also generative. In this presentation, I will discuss a research-creation project that I am initiating that harnesses this practice of imperfect listening as method, to engage generatively with a digitized 1969 reel-to-reel recording of Daphne Marlatt reading from her book, Leaf Leaf/s. Here I navigate the gaps inherent to listening experience to create new poetry that functions as an active archive of the recording, but also a new, relational engagement across time and media.

Xiaoxuan Huang, “The Mover’s Affects: Re-Sounding Daphne Marlatt’s Leaf Leaf/s Through Research-Creation”

Leaf Leaf/sounds)) is a multi-track sound piece remixing a digitized 1969 reel-to-reel recording of Daphne Marlatt reading from her book, Leaf Leaf/s. Marlatt’s voice is re-sounded alongside ambient guitar drones and field recordings captured by the artist Xiaoxuan Huang between 2021-2022. What becomes hyper-visible are various tensions that arise out of the acts of re-sounding – references to specific dates emerge like history re-establishing itself in the contemporary moment; the interior space of Warren Tallman’s living room clash against footsteps walking over leaves, people swimming outdoors; and of course Marlatt’s voice is interrupted by, then talks over again, other vocalized sounds – coughs, laughs, sighs – captured by Huang’s field recordings. Following Linda Morra’s insightful unpacking of the term “moving” in the world of archives, this paper will also discuss how this act of re-sounding is entangled with the subjective editorial influence and orientations of the mover’s affects.

Sonnet L’Abbé, “Nowherian In Nanaimo” 

The Trinidad calypsonian, the Mighty Dougla, sang about the plight of “douglas” or Afro-Indian mixtures (“I am neither one nor the other,/ Six of one half-a-dozen of the other…”) who, looking for belonging, found themselves rebuked by both identities: “Nowhereian[s], what you come here for?” In my talk, I’ll discuss the fellow-feeling and community-building expectations built into the folk genre, and how writing folk songs about Nanaimo from a “dougla” perspective, raises questions about the possibilities of writing folk that invites listeners to disrupt their colonial ideas of place and belonging. 

Erin Scott, “Research-Creation as Sensory Knowledge”

In this hybrid creative-critical paper, I propose research-creation as a methodological approach to research that positions artistic practice, scholarly inquiry, and the dialogic relationship between the two as sensory knowledge. Favouring practice-led methods and multi-modal outputs, I argue that the formation of knowledge within the institution is bound to the replicable, transferable, and citable domain of written outputs. In contrast, sensory knowledge as enacted through research-creation elicits the intangible, the ephemeral, and the sensorial as vital points of inquiry into complex questions (Loveless 2019; Pink 2021; Springgay 2021). This paper will both articulate the methodological approach of research-creation that positions the ‘lure’ (Loveless) as the research question, as well as proposing multi-modal outputs as expansions of knowledge beyond scholarly articles. I will present videopoetic work as exemplification of sensory knowledge through my own artistic practice and will conclude with invitations to move into embodied knowing alongside intellectual rigour. 

Workshop Descriptions 

Nick Beauchesne and Chelsea Miya, “Re-Sounding Community: A 6-Year Retrospective on SpokenWeb Symposia and Institutes”

This podcast episode will be a retrospective “re-sounding” of SpokenWeb Symposia and Institutes for the past 6 years. Drawing from archival audio, video, and photos, Nick Beauchesne and Chelsea Miya will curate a sonic celebration of events past, punctuated by interviews with SpokenWeb founders, past symposia organizers, and performers. While the archival recordings will be assembled beforehand, Nick and Chelsea’s voiceovers, as well as their interviews with SpokenWeb principals, will be recorded live at the Institute in Kelowna on May 17, 2025 as a conclusion to the festivities. 

Francisco Berrizebeitia, “Thinking About and Using Metadata Schemas and Systems for Archival Research with Literary Recordings”

Since 2018, SpokenWeb has been developing Swallow as an easy-to-use audio metadata cataloguing tool for the cataloguers of audiovisual literary assets across the SpokenWeb partnership and as a searchable database to share aggregated metadata about these literary collections. Both the process of collecting information and applying it to research outputs mobilize metadata as method. This workshop will explain the rationale for the development of Swallow, giving a brief description of its architecture and a live demo. The goal of the workshop is to introduce: 1) the purpose, value, and philosophical implications of metadata fields and ontologies for the description of audiovisual assets, and 2) the metadata and search tools SpokenWeb has developed, and how they may be used to generate fluency in mobilizing new and interdisciplinary research relating to literary sound. The workshop will also reserve time to discuss some of the possible avenues for development of Swallow (including the integration of AI functionality) that may be pursued in the future. 

Kristine Dizon, “Listening Across Boundaries: Exploring Poetic-Musical Connections through Social Justice”

This workshop will guide participants through an exploration of poetic-musical compositions as a medium to connect themes of creativity and social justice. Designed to be interactive, the workshop aims to inspire new perspectives on how sound and text can foster understanding of critical social issues. Through guided listening and an analysis of decolonizing aural methodologies, this workshop will lead participants to create their own poetic-musical compositions. They will select a theme related to social justice, such as gender, race, or class, and craft a short text or poem paired with a suggested musical accompaniment.”

Kedrick James, “Transmediation and the Reinvention of Text” 

This workshop engages participants in exploring how transmediation between different modes, senses, and data types can serve creative and research purposes. This workshop will introduce Singling, a custom-made AI-powered open access software that transforms texts into non-literal soundscapes and use audio-reactive software to visualize the sonic compositions. Special attention will be paid to how accident and error in systems can be used to aesthetic effect, and we will demo and discuss the transmediatic output as an artform that transcends genre conventions. By working between states (analog and digital, visual and auditory, information and data) we explore untapped creative potential. 

Cole Mash and Erin Scott, “Introduction to Spoken Word Poetry”

In this two-part workshop, award winning poets and community organizers Erin Scott and Cole Mash will guide participants through the process of taking a poem from a printed text up through the body to the audience (whether live or mediatized). Through play, practice, and dialogue, participants will explore the fundamental considerations of voiced, embodied, and mediatized poetic performance in order to begin creating and performing works of Spoken Word poetry. 

Katherine McLeod and Linda Morra, “Podcasting Pitches 101 for Researchers and Scholars” 

Join us to learn about the fundamentals of preparing and pitching an episode (or a pilot) — and to create one for your very own podcast (real or imagined). We will consider the key elements of the pitch, demystify the basics of production, and unpack the difference between podcasting for scholars and for the general public. Thinking about starting a research-based podcast? Interested in transforming what scholarship sounds like? This is the workshop for you! 

Marjorie Mitchell and Felicity Tayler, “From Setting up the Tent to the Final Campfire: Research Data Management Lessons into the Future”

SSHRC is nearing full implementation of the Research Data Management Plan requirement for all grant applications and now is the time to reflect on lessons learned by people from the nodes of the SpokenWeb Partnership over the past 7 years. Workshop participants are invited to discuss, first in pairs, then in small groups, structured questions about Research Data Management Plans. If people have a plan or plans they have created, they are welcome to reflect on their experience with them, but this is not necessary for participation or for gaining insights into future Research Data Management Plans.

Geoffrey Rockwell, “Using LLMs to Build a Web Site” 

The newer Large Language Models have the capacity to write code and develop minimal web sites. In this collaborative workshop we will explore how we can develop tools for our research and teaching using LLMs like ChatGPT 4o or Gemini (as embeded in Colab). We will start with a sample project where we explore how an LLM can turn your CV into well-formed XML. We will then work with a LLM to write code that create a minimal computing system to turn your XML CV into a sustainable web site. We will then collaboratively identify other projects we could devlop together. At the end of the workshop we will discuss the dangers of bot generated code including privacy issues. 

Jentery Sayers, “The SpokenWeb Repository for Teaching and Learning Literary Audio”

This workshop will introduce participants to the SpokenWeb repository for teaching and learning literary audio: an open-access collection of pedagogical materials developed across North America. We will cover the practical elements of its design, including its structure and composition. We will also discuss its curatorial dimensions, from metadata and selection to ways the repository can be expanded and enhanced. However, we will dedicate most of the workshop to collaboratively, creatively, and critically repurposing materials for specific teaching and learning situations at and beyond the university. Participants will leave the workshop with those repurposed materials and, we hope, new perspectives on literary audio. 

Alyssa L Frick-Jenkins & Jack Riordan, “AVAnnotate Open Source Application for Audiovisual Digital Exhibits and Editions” 

This workshop will introduce AVAnnotate (https://av-annotate.org/), an open-source application, and a workflow for building digital exhibits and editions with annotated audiovisual artifacts. Researchers, libraries, archives, museums (LAM) professionals, and the public who seek to increase access and discovery with audiovisual archives should attend! This workshop is well-suited for participants who promote standardized modes of accessibility and discovery with AV. AVAnnotate was built using minimal computing principles (Clement et. al 2022), is free-to-use, and leverages open-source resources such as GitHub and IIIF (International Interoperable Image Framework). Engage AV artifacts and create projects in a new way with AVAnnotate.  

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.