Re-Sounding Poetries: Collections, Classrooms, Communities.
In May of 2025, members of the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership came together at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, BC for the partnership's final annual Sound Institute, entitled Re-Sounding Poetries: Collections, Classrooms, Communities. For four days, poets and professors, archivists and artists, librarians and researchers, and creatives of all stripes came together for a "summer camp" of immersive literary audio experiences. Information about the Institute and its schedule can be found here .
SpokenWeb UAlberta in 360°
As part of the SpokenWeb Collections Showcase, where each institution was invited to creatively present on their team's collection, the University of Alberta SpokenWeb team presented a 360° video (sometimes referred to as a virtual reality or VR video) entitled SpokenWeb UAlberta in 360°.
A fusion of past and present technology. Literary recordings from the 1960s-80s are played on a 1960s Sony TC-102 portable reel-to-reel tape player, in the same Edmonton locations where they were originally recorded decades earlier. This 360° video was recorded using an Insta360 X4 camera and a Zoom H3-VR ambisonic mic, and can be viewed using a VR headset to visually and sonically place the viewer inside the recorded moment.
Watch the video, with added annotations, here.
This video was created by Natasha D'Amours and Sarah Freeman for the 2025 SpokenWeb Symposium, with assistance from Michael O’Driscoll, Sean Luyk, Michael MacKenzie, Xuege Wu, Robert Montgomery at the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium, and Courtney Higgins at the Art Gallery of Alberta.
The full audio of each recording played in this video can be found at the URLs below:
- Humanities Center L-3, Dorothy Livesay, 1974: tinyurl.com/Livesay1974
- Students’ Union Building, Stephen Scobie, 1971: tinyurl.com/Scobie1971
- Jubilee Auditorium, Shirley Neuman & Doug Barbour, 1986: tinyurl.com/Barbour1986
- Art Gallery of Alberta, Dorothy Livesay, 1969: tinyurl.com/Livesay1969
SpokenWeb Manifesto 2025
At the end of the Sound Institute, the SpokenWeb team came together to record a manifesto. Loosely using the prompt SpokenWeb is..., each attendee was invited to share a thought, a feeling, a micro-poem — any expression of their feelings about SpokenWeb and the past seven years of the partnership.