Meeting Report: March 31st, 2020
by Amy Thiessen (Project Manager)
Welcome to the first in a recurring series of short posts that will highlight the work being done by our UBCO SpokenWeb team. Since September 2019 our team has been primarily focused on collection digitization and podcasting. Due to Covid-19 we have had to move away from digitization and onto other forms of remote research, but thankfully are able to continue releasing SoundBox Signals podcast episodes. Our next episode release date is April 22nd with an episode featuring an archival recording from 1970 made on the occasion of a memorial reading for American poet Charles Olson.
What else have we been up to?
With much of our collection now digitized and metadata entry well on its way, our team has been thinking and talking about AI, ethics, and literary/cultural history archives. This is an important issue for us to consider before we move into any kind of machine learning or data visualizations.
Meanwhile, since we can’t celebrate our 2nd year of SpokenWeb research in person, we have embarked on a new mini-project where we will record and post “living letters” to one another as a recognition and celebration of each other’s work this past year. The idea is inspired by the living letters we have in our collection recorded on mini reel-to-reel tapes from the Robert Hogg fonds. The concept of the living letter is simply a recorded spoken letter addressed to another person and “mailed” to them. The team thought this would be a fun and creative way to end our term as a kind of virtual celebration.