Student and Faculty Surveys on Digital Humanities Labour and Training

Appendix A is the collated results of Faculty Researchers Survey carried out for the article "Student Labour and Training in Digital Humanities." Digital Humanities Quarterly 9.2 (Spring 2015). Appendix B is the collated results of  Student Researchers Survey carried out for the article "Student Labour and Training in Digital Humanities." Digital Humanities Quarterly 9.2 (Spring 2015)

Student Labour and Training in Digital Humanities

This article critiques the rhetoric of openness, accessibility and collaboration that features largely in digital humanities literature by examining the status of student labour, training, and funding within the discipline. The authors argue that the use of such rhetoric masks the hierarches that structure academic spaces, and that a shift to the digital does not eliminate these structural inequalities. Drawing on two surveys that assess student participation in DH projects (one for students, and one for faculty researchers), the article outlines the challenges currently faced by students working in the field, and suggests a set of best practices that might bridge the disparity between rhetoric and reality

A Taxonomy of Ghosts

A Taxonomy of Ghosts is a collection of poems based on the journals of Archibald Menzies (1754-1842), Scottish surgeon, botanist and naturalist outfitted to the exploration voyage of the HMS Discovery and Chatham, under the command of Captain George Vancouver from 1791 to 1795. Using kernels of the original journal text as a point of departure, these poems employ a variety of techniques to intervene and expand them outward; they venture into the less documented territory of Menzies’ domestic life, turning the botanist’s keen observational gaze toward matters of the heart—love, loss and longing. The second segment of the book is the poet-as-speaker’s reflection on her encountering both the Vancouver voyage and the coastal landscape that bears its imprint. In dialogue with both the original journals and other historical and literary representations of the Vancouver voyage, A Taxonomy of Ghosts is a meditation on the powerful force of names and naming, the representation of history and one’s own personal connection to the past

What Makes Oral Literary History Different?

Oral Literary History (OLH) is one of the primary research axes of the SpokenWeb project. This post offers an overview of what we perceive to be unique about OLH as a discipline, with attention to its theoretical underpinnings, ethics, and methods

Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Recordings

This article emerged from the “feminist close listening” methodology we devised together during a collaborative listening session in Montreal, December, 2017. We began the practice of listening to recordings together, in real time, as a way of attuning ourselves to the related inquiries that our archives of interest shared. For Karis, this archive is the SoundBox Collection, housed in the AMP Lab at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, where she serves as Director. For Deanna, this archive is the Roy Kiyooka Audio Archive, housed in the Contemporary Literature Collection at Simon Fraser University. The archives share the same media formats (reel-to-reel and compact cassette tapes) as well as the common generic features of recording spontaneous, candid conversation, often voiced in contexts that are considered domestic, intimate, and private. Our listening sessions aimed to collaboratively outline questions, approaches, and best practices toward this unique subset of literary recordings. The article that follows is one concrete example of how those conversations unfolded

Retrospective Resonance on Listen Deep: Poetry, Sound and Multitudinous Remix

Two years ago today, we participated in the event Listen Deep: Poetry, Sound and Multitudinous Remix, curated by Margaret Christakos and hosted at the University of Toronto on 8 March 2019. What follows is a brief description of the event’s activities, and then a transcription of a conversation that we had shortly after the event. We met at the Hinnawi Bros. Bagel Café across from Concordia’s Hall Building (hard to imagine a work date at a coffee shop these days), and discussed our immediate reflections on the day. Playing with Friedlaender’s idea that all spoken words remain in the world as vibrations that are imperceptible to the human ear—vibrations that can be picked up and made audible with the right imaginary amplification device—we wish to discover what other frequencies our past spoken words might tune us into. If you attended and/or participated in the event, we invite you to add your thoughts, memories, and reflections to a Google Doc version of this post using the “insert comment” feature; these comments will be transcribed and added as footnotes to this post on SWB (please let us know if you would like to be named or remain anonymous in your comment). We hope to continue the practices of listening and responding initiated in the original event in this written medium—that is, at least until our voices can sound together again

Decolonizing “Mayakovsky”: Listening to Listening

The following pieces expand upon oral responses given at the SpokenWeb event “From Reel to Reel: Animating the Archive” on February 11, 2021. The cultural object at the heart of this discussion was the poem “Mayakovsky,” performed by the Canadian avant-garde sound collective The Four Horsemen

Desire Lines : Making a Network of Relations Visible

"The Desire Lines series began with the proposition that we could see communities formed around print production in Toronto, between 1978 and 1988, by drawing network visualizations from the metadata describing magazine issues. This final panel in the series brings together different perspectives on the ethics of working with collective mapping practices and metadata to make visible relationships in archives and periodicals, which may or may not resonate in human hearts. What are the ethics of working with metadata? Do these algorithmically-derived relationships resonate in human hearts? How do we address the absences in these networks?" -- Publisher's website

Tales of the tape: The ontological, discursive, and ethical lives of literary audio artifacts

Tales of the Tape: The Ontological, Discursive, and Ethical Lives of Literary Audio Artifacts argues for the importance of listening as a theoretical and methodological practice in the study of literature. In addition to forms of listening that direct themselves toward a literary work’s aesthetic qualities in performance, this text also listens to and for the social subtext of literary production. Drawing on audio artifacts from a diverse range of production scenarios—home recordings, literary performances, sound-based poetry, and oral history interviews—Tales of the Tape demonstrates how listening remaps literary histories differently than those that focus on print-based production. For one, audio recordings make audible the significant amount of labour that goes into building and maintaining communities as sites of cultural production. This labour is affective and immaterial in nature and is unevenly distributed along gendered lines. For these reasons, it has been overlooked traditional forms of literary history. Audio recordings, especially those that are candid and conversational in nature, make that labour audible so that we can recognize, compensate, and distribute that labour more equitably. Audio recordings can also be mobilized toward a political aesthetic in poetry, as it is in the sounded works of contemporary poets Jordan Abel and Jordan Scott. In these works, recorded sound acts as a layer of mediation that disrupts the normally transparent processes of representation and symbolization. In confronting us with an absent speaker, as well as the distortions, cuts, and alternate temporalizations of recorded sound, these works foreground the twinned structure of lack and excess at the heart of every act of signification. A formal emphasis on lack carries forward to the content of these works, intervening in the symbolic systems of racialization and political subjectivity. Overall this text meditates on the lacking ontology of auditory media, carrying that structure forward in analogous ways to speech, subjectivity, and political reality