Audio Objects

A highlight of the summer so far has been the presentation of this talk to Concordia Library’s faculty and staff:

Listening to the Library Coffee Break with Katherine McLeod 

Wednesday July 7 2021, 2-3 pm, online

Concordia Library’s 2020-2021 Researcher-in-Residence Dr. Katherine McLeod has been working on a project called “Listening to the Library.” As a presentation of her work-in-progress, Dr. McLeod will share her research based on a series of interrelated questions about the status and circulation of audio objects within library collections: namely, what happens to the uniqueness (and even usefulness) of the audio artifact when it finds its way into a library collection as a copy? As online access and interlibrary loans redefine where “the library” begins and ends, audio is a medium that easily moves between library collections and yet audio is also a medium that can solidly remain tied to place and to its collection. Dr. McLeod’s talk will explain how the question of how audio moves between collections started by listening to what she calls fugitive radio – recordings of CBC radio that have found themselves in library collections – and she will then turn to other recordings within Concordia’s Library as case studies for listening to what we can learn from audio artifacts that find themselves outside of and/or moving between the archival structures that would otherwise contain them.

Dr. Katherine McLeod researches poetry, sound, and archives. She has co-edited the book CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (MQUP, 2019). She is currently writing a book that is a feminist listening to recordings of women poets reading on CBC Radio. She is affiliated with Concordia’s SpokenWeb research team (Department of English) and she produces the monthly series ShortCuts for The SpokenWeb Podcast. http://katherinemcleod.ca/

The voice of Gwendolyn MacEwen, as recorded on Canadian Poets (CBC Learning Systems, 1966).

At the end of the talk, I invited everyone to submit recommendations for what to listen to in the library. You are welcome to respond to this survey HERE – and I look forward to sharing the findings at the end of the residency.

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