PROJECTS COORDINATOR
THE SPOKENWEB:

Conceiving and Creating a Nationally Networked Archive of Literary Recordings for Research and Teaching
CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY, Montreal, QC

NOTE: This posting represents a one (1) year full-time Research-Associate contract position, with the potential of renewal.

SCOPE

Reporting to Jason Camlot, the Principal Investigator of The SpokenWeb Partnership Grant research team (a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada), the incumbent is responsible for the planning and execution of projects and activities associated with all aspects of the multi-partner, collaborative program of research, digital development, pedagogy and events.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Oversee project timelines and keep projects on task; update documents and other items as needed throughout the project lifecycle, including databases, text documents, and spreadsheets; report on and coordinate reporting on projects as needed.
• Oversee and maintain budgets pertaining to SpokenWeb projects for use by project stakeholders, and for reporting purposes.
• Manage communications pertaining to the partnership, including minutes at project team meetings, email communications, and the writing of project process and protocol documents.
• Prepare and disseminate public communications about project activities.
• Help develop, monitor and maintain a data management platform for SpokenWeb projects; troubleshoot and problem solve research data management issues as needed.
• Conduct surveys on behalf of SpokenWeb and map current activities in teaching, learning, research and community outreach relevant to the project.
• Establish timelines and workflows for project activities. Track and report progression of tasks throughout duration of projects.
• Investigate potential stakeholders for projects.
• Prepare, process and track project related expense reports, research assistant contracts, and other financial documents.
• Communicate with various departments such as the Office of Research, Payroll, Human Resources, University Communication Services, Hospitality Concordia, Student Services, etc… to implement logistics and to meet strict deadlines with expenses, contracts, design proofing, event planning, student registrations, etc…
• Establish a network of strong relationships both internally to the SpokenWeb partnership and externally with individual stakeholders and institutional or community partners at the local, national and international level.

REQUIREMENTS

• Master of Arts degree in a humanities, social science or business administration field, or Master of Library or Information Studies degree (including data management), and one to two years of experience in project coordination, budget management, communications and/or event planning.
• Two years of experience and proven record of successfully leading & coordinating projects
• Ability to gather and analyze information through qualitative and quantitative research methods
• Strong problem-solving skills with proven success at identifying and resolving issues
• Very good knowledge of spoken and written English and French.
• Outstanding organizational and logistical abilities; capacity to manage competing priorities and meet deadlines under pressure
• Proven ability to take initiative, coordinate and carry projects to completion with minimum supervision
• Excellent interpersonal skills including the ability to work respectfully and inclusively with diverse stakeholders and to build working relationships
• Good knowledge (intermediate level) of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
• Detail-oriented, creative and discrete.

Please email your PDF curriculum vitae with a covering letter by June 18, 2018, with the subject heading SPOKENWEB PROJECT COORDINATOR, to the attention of Jason Camlot, Principal Investigator, The SpokenWeb: <jason.camlot@concordia.ca>.

See below for a brief description of the SpokenWeb project.

Salary

$50,000-$70,000.00 per annum, depending upon experience.

Concordia University is committed to Employment Equity and encourages applications from women, aboriginal peoples, visible minorities, ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities.

The SpokenWeb:
Conceiving and Creating a Nationally Networked Archive of Literary Recordings for Research and Teaching

There is an entire world of literary life and activity that has yet to be discovered. Since the introduction of sound recording technologies in the last decade of the nineteenth-century, and especially since the 1950s with the introduction of portable tape recording, writers and artists have documented their performances of literary works, events and conversations with creative abandon. The SpokenWeb partnership aims to identify, preserve and render this extensive body of valuable cultural heritage material available and useful for research, teaching, artistic transformation and wide-spread enjoyment. Digitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, in Canada most local audio archives with recordings that document literary performances and events remain inaccessible and are in peril of imminent decay, or, if digitized, are still largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, this partnership aims to develop a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings from across Canada and beyond.

The SpokenWeb partnership offers a productive organization and platform for collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists, digital humanists, designers, and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners. The primary aims of our Partnership are to pursue through knowledge and resource-sharing the development of 1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken audio materials of literary and historical significance; 2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings; 3) techniques and tools for searching, visualizing, analyzing and enhancing our critical engagement with corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and 4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical, performative and public contexts.

This agenda will be achieved by means of annual face-to-face research and planning meetings; a national series of research symposia, workshops and community events organized at a different partner location each year; and intensive local development, research, training and teaching that will benefit from regular collaboration across the partner network.

From a range of relevant perspectives–including literary, media and sound studies, digital humanities, library and archival science, computational analysis and design, oral history, pedagogy, and event curation–The SpokenWeb program will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical and creative use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general. Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways, and by mobilizing humanities methodologies into new directions of interdisciplinary transformation.

The SpokenWeb partnership is comprised of over 12 institutional and community partners including, Concordia University (hosting institution), University of Alberta, University of British Columbia (Okanagan), University of Calgary, University of Toronto, University of Victoria at University of Toronto, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas at Austin, and over 40 researchers across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities, archival and library science, computational humanities, and others.