After more than seven years of work—conceptualization, digitization, metadata creation, not to mention myriad symposia and institutes, performances and listening practices (as well as the occasional Zoom, close-listening bingo match)— across a host of collaborating institutions, the searchable SpokenWeb front end is finally live! We at the AMP Lab would like to take a moment to celebrate, reflect, and imagine what comes next.
As a way of beginning, the authors of this post – Karis Shearer and Cole Mash — sound the heartiest of congratulations to the long list of people that worked on the SpokenWeb project, including but not limited to our fearless leader Jason Camlot, the research leads at all the partner institutions, the governing board, collaborators, current and former students, as well as the numerous writers and voices captured on the tapes themselves: thank you. The website’s front end, which can be found here, represents an astounding achievement for literary sound studies, and one of the most comprehensive collections of archival literary audio in the world.
While the first phase of the SpokenWeb project is now complete, we at the UBC Okanagan AMP Lab continue our own work with the literary audio we contributed to SpokenWeb: our transient little box(es) of tapes known as the SoundBox Collection. The SoundBox Collection (a presentations site which can be found here) contains literary audio recordings representing British Columbian and Canadian literary and cultural heritage. Originally coming to me (PI Dr. Karis Shearer) as a box of reel-to-reel tapes, the collection grew to over 500 tapes thanks to donations from Canadian poets. Itwas digitized and described by the UBCO team in the AMP Lab as part of the SpokenWeb Project. The SoundBox Collection contains poetry readings, interviews, literary lectures, speeches, and recitations all collected and recorded from the 1960s to present on the West Coast of North America. The SoundBox website does not contain digital copies of every tape in the collection; instead, it acts as a digital edition situating, interpreting, and presenting the collection in a critical framework. In particular, the apparatus of the website aims to amplify IBPOC, 2SLGBTQIA+, and women’s voices so often silenced in similar literary histories and interrogates the gendered division of labour in the communities they represent.
As we reflect on the work the SpokenWeb Partnership and the UBCO SpokenWeb team have completed, and each website has become available to potential users, an important question must be asked: what can we as students, researchers, teachers, or afficionados do with this these collections of literary audio?
I (Shearer) approached this very question a few years ago in a blog post for the AMP Lab website entitled, “Copy, copy, copy! Community-building through reproduction and circulation,” which can be found here. In February 2021, I wrote:
“Today I find myself excited about the network of copies SpokenWeb’s SWALLOW audio metadata ingest system will allow us to trace (at least within university collections) and what it will allow us to say about community-building that took place in the 1960s and 70s through the copying and sharing of audio artefacts, and what was at stake in those activities.”
In that post, I was imagining the future (the now): what might we learn about literary communities of production and reception through SpokenWeb when the searchable metadata becomes available?
Now, in 2026, we would like to suggest that, in addition to understanding historical literary communities of production and reception more fully, the benefits and uses of the SpokenWeb searchable metadata and the Soundbox Collection website are:
- Linked data! The project has taken a number of collections housed individually as separate institutions, and linked them based on shared criteria, such as poets, places, and years. The artifacts are now connected, not just with an individual archive, but in a host of networked archives across the country and the continent.
- The project provides a model for other such AV archives to learn from and replicate to digitize, collect, and connect archival material across media, field, and borders. This includes digital preservation and aggregation techniques; asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access, research techniques and tools; as well as visualizing, analyzing and enhancing critical engagement. Additionally, replication of our methods has been made easy due to SWALLOW, the SpokenWeb proprietary metadata ingest system, and SpokenWeb’s vast array of documentation made available via the website, blog, and podcast.
- The SpokenWeb website makes the JSON for all collections available to be downloaded and worked with. Similarly, the Soundbox Website makes both the JSON and the CSV available. This data might be used as a finding aid of sorts, but it may also be used for a host of other scholarly experiments and pursuits, including digital mapping, visualization, and other forms of distant reading.
- Researchers, professors, students, and afficionados can search and access these collections, and activate them in a number of ways, including: pedagogical contexts (for example, teaching university courses with the literary audio); performative contexts (for example, offering ghost readings, or remixing materials as part of new creative or critical work); public contexts (for example, fans of Daphne Marlatt might be able to access literary recordings of hers in their own home in ways they might not have was they were only available onsite at a university archive).
- Learning about citational practice of materials existing across media.
These examples are just the beginning and represent the opportunities for public and institutional literary studies to grow and shift alongside an increasingly digital world.
Karis Shearer: Cole, you’ve been part of this project at UBC Okanagan since basically day one, when it was just a box of tapes and there was no SpokenWeb yet. Now that the searchable metadata for the different collections has been published through the SpokenWeb front end, what are you most excited about in terms of its potential for your own research?
Cole Mash: I think the possibility that most excites me most about the collection hasn’t changed since I started on the project, which is its application for teaching. My research the last few years has focused on how we teach performance poetry, and Spoken Word, in particular. I have thought a lot about how we can read and approach literary forms that exist across media, with the goal of creating new resources for the critical classroom. As the study of literature continues to adapt and expand to digital contexts, audio and video present so many exciting opportunities for our students to think about literature in contemporary, media-specific ways. While much of the audio SpokenWeb has digitized is not directly available online yet, there are some materials available through SFU, Concordia, and The Soundbox Collection here at UBCO. Having access to these repositories of digitized materials to search and potentially bring into the classroom opens up so many possibilities not only for expanding our notion of readable texts beyond the print codex, but also to engage students in myriad ways, offering contemporized skills in critical thinking, media literacy, narrative, and more. Whenever I teach from the Soundbox Collection, SpokenWeb, or other mediatized literary materials, I find that there is a vigor and excitement from the students: it offers variety to their reading practice, asks them to think of the oral/aural elements of literature, and, importantly, meets them at their own skillset and interests. This is a generation of students who have potentially been working with Instagram, TikTok, Google Classroom, and other digital platforms since they were in elementary school; therefore, they have an entirely different skillset and relationship to media than previousgenerations. Repositories of video and audio, like SpokenWeb, allow for the literary classroom to engage these students with this contemporaneous relationship to media in mind. In this way, I think, even 8 years later, this work is so innovative—I’m excited to watch the long term impacts it has on our field.
What are you most excited about, Karis?
KS: Teaching with these recordings definitely shifts the field in important ways. The focus of my research is on the role poets played (and play) in the production, circulation, interpretation (including teaching!), and reception of texts, so, to be honest, I’m still excited about the copies. Thanks to the searchable metadata, a network of copies is now more discoverable than before. An interesting next step would be to create network visualizations that allow us to see who, for example, had copies of the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference recordings that Fred Wah made. We know, for example, that Warren Tallman, Frank Davey, Robert Hogg, Michael Davidson, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov had copies – but who else did? And, is there something gendered about how these copies circulated and whose voices are amplified through that circulation? I’m also excited by what the copies can reveal about poets as listeners. It’s kind of like looking into someone’s personal library. Continuing the theme of poets-as-listeners, I’m also looking forward to digging into the recordings they were making – of each other, off the radio, of events. And from there we get into poets-as-recordists. I’ll confess I was initially unenthused about the number of recordings that were taped off the radio – the content had been widely broadcast already and we can’t online those digitized recordings because of permissions issues – but the metadata nevertheless tells us something about how poets sampled audio and what audio captured their attention. So those are just a few of the possibilities I see for my own research. I can’t wait to see what other researchers and artists do!
BIOS
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. With Deanna Fong, she is co-editor of Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch (2020).
Cole Mash (he/him) is a writer, spoken word artist, and community arts organizer who lives on unceded Syilx-Okanagan territory, where he teaches English and Creative Writing at UBC Okanagan and Okanagan College. He has performed poetry locally and nationally for over 10 years and his creative work has been published across Canada, including in CV2 and NōD magazine. He is the co-editor of Resistant Practices in Communities of Sound from McGill-Queen’s University Press and his lyric-memoir, What You Did is All it Ever Means, was published with Broke Press in 2021. He is the co-founder and Executive Director of Kelowna-based non-profit arts organization Inspired Word Café.