Briefly, these are: 1) employing content-based discovery tools 2) making scalable networks 3) offering transcripts and/or context-rich metadata and 4) developing and integrating web-based digital audio workstations (hereafter, DAWs). ![]() At the paper’s conclusion, I outline four best practices for the design interface of digital audio archives. There are certainly other lines along which to theorize the relationship of text to audio, such as content, genre or geographical location, though these remain outside the scope of the present article. Modularity, situatedness and constellation are here presented as three emergent models of audio-textual relations however, most audio archives employ a mix of aesthetic and technological strategies that puts them somewhere in between. The effect of the constellatory archive is to reconcile the temporal paralysis of the audio artifact – the product of an irretrievable, singular event – with an ongoing, processual notion of history. Its discrete, constitutive units – in this case, either “single” or “record”-length audio artifacts – are grouped into taxonomic categories: authors, reading series, playlists, events and anthologies. Finally, the constellatory archive makes meaning via the articulations between texts, interpretive communities, and systems of circulation. Where the situated archive’s textual mooring facilitates sustained, yet controlled engagement with the audio artifact, the modular archive’s textual vacuum favours user-directed listening and discovery. Audio is tethered to the text, which provides extensive contextualizing and biographical information, transcripts and metadata. The situated archive focuses on a specific historical subject: author, location, community or event. The audio artifact, in playback, is often divorced (in both streaming and downloaded formats) from any fixed textual components and there is no consistent format for the presentation of text and in playback. ![]() Often born-digital and in an ongoing process of curation, the modular audio archive’s dominant aesthetic is bricolage. These models can be broadly termed modular (UbuWeb), situated (SpokenWeb) and constellatory (PennSound), and refer to both the particular archive’s organizational structure and its aesthetic ethos. While digital archivists can imagine ideal users and tailor their sites’ interfaces with them in mind, opening archives to the online environment means allowing that environment to shape – and be shaped by – the unpredictable swerve of user communities.ĭrawing from a survey of over 70 online digital audio archives, over half of which are of sounded poetry, 2 I will propose three models of audio-textual relations, each using a paradigmatic example as a case study, that illustrate varied responses to the problem of integrating sound and text in an online environment. These two sets of research questions are imbricated as researchers and designers contend with such questions as: how much text should be supplied and where should it appear in relation to the audio? How are digital audio files indexed, searched and organized using tools that are predominantly suited to text-based environments? How do content management systems and software mediate audio-textual relationships, and which allow for a dynamic experience with the audio artifact? The answers to these questions depend on who’s asking digital audio archives are inflected by a shifting set of cultural and technological relations, and the Web’s rhizomatic structure always creates unforeseen and productively aberrant users and uses of technology. The co-emergence of these two scholarly trends was no accident in the literally enunicative audio recording, speech and silences are concretely rendered, allowing scholars to sound with greater precision the edges of the archives that contain them.Īs collections of audio recordings enter the online environment and increasingly become viable resources for researchers, audio-textual relationships are foregrounded, on the one hand, by questions of design and functionality, and, on the other, by literary questions that interrogate a recording’s semantic and aesthetic value in relation to text-based analogues. Michel Foucault, who substantially contributed to the theoretical framework of this turn, described the archive as “the general system of formation and transformation of statements,” an entity whose speech and silences delineate “the law of what can be said.” 1 Concurrently in literary studies, an interest arose in recordings of poetry, largely owing to a literary critical re-evaluation of performance as essential to, even constitutive of, a poem’s meaning. ![]() The “archival turn” of the mid–20th century produced a conceptual shift away from the archive as a mute, transparent repository, toward viewing it as process or system.
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