By: Kelly Chia, Staff Writer
Listening to a story read out loud can engage your emotions. SpokenWeb is a podcast program that presents archival recordings of stories and talks listeners through those feelings. It’s is a network composed of multiple researchers, institutions, collections, and other community members. They take long forgotten tape recordings from literature readings, conversations, and events. Researchers then analyze them for a contemporary audience. Each episode, released monthly, is about 45 minutes long. The Peak interviewed Judith Burr, project manager and supervising producer for SpokenWeb about what it means to navigate literature through sound.
Burr explains researchers will often find a topic or a sound clip in their institution’s archive that interests them and produce an episode on it. She talks about one of their episodes focusing on Canadian writer Mavis Gallant. The episode centres around Gallant reading her short story, Grippes and Poche, at SFU in 1982. Produced by SFU scholars Michelle Levy, Kate Moffatt, and Kandice Sharren, the three researchers examined the recording found in the SFU archives. Burr says they were all prompted to ask questions based on the circumstances of the recording and Gallant’s voice.
Then, the researchers found two people who attended Gallant’s reading, and discovered so much more.
Burr exclaimed they found “all of these hilarious and interesting things about the author, the piece of writing, and the recording because they had this sonic piece of history!” For many, listening to the background sounds and the emotion in the speaker’s voice changes the way they engage with their work. SpokenWeb aims to guide listeners through the same journey of discovery and magic.
Burr encourages any students interested in being involved in the podcast to reach out to researchers at their institution who are in the SpokenWeb network. A list of participating scholars can be found on SpokenWeb’s team page. Burr explains getting involved is a good way to get exposure to different areas of research and find interesting recordings in university archives. Additionally, anyone involved can produce an episode.
Burr wants SpokenWeb to be accessible to people who don’t have a lot of experience with audio production. That way, scholars gain a new medium for supplementing their research and showcasing their work to a wider audience. This also allows the podcast’s episodes to be more diverse.
“I think we do want to feature voices that have traditionally not had a platform or voices that have been silenced in traditional academia,” Burr says. “We have a diversity of episodes and voices that we produce and we’re dedicated to having even more.”
SpokenWeb episodes can be found on their website, spokenweb.ca. SpokenWeb also hosts listening parties every first Monday of the month via Zoom, where listeners will listen to an episode and discuss it.
