Elliston Project Digital Archive Workshops

The audio archive of the Elliston Poetry Room is an astonishing set of recordings going back to the mid-1950s, housing recordings of visiting poets, especially those brought to UC as Elliston Poets in Residence. As all of these recordings were in the now relatively inaccessible format of audio cassettes, the English Department, partnering with the UC Libraries, began a digitization effort, ultimately creating an online archive of poetry readings and lectures.

In May of 2013, we received a UC Faculty Development Council Grant to run a series of five workshops in order to help us determine the best ways to use this digital audio archive for instruction and research.

The five workshops will focus on the following topics:

Theory – mapping the conceptual significance and possibilities of The Elliston Project and of digital audio archives more generally
►Workshop leader:  Jerome McGann
►  Date:  September 21, 2013

Pedagogy – understanding how this digital audio archive can function in the literature classroom and the poetry workshop
►Workshop leader:  Kenneth Sherwood
►Date:  October 5, 2013

Scholarship – exploring research opportunities for scholars of poetry and digital archives
►Workshop leader:  Tanya Clement
►Date:  November 9, 2013

Poetics –  examining creative opportunities for poets and others writers
►Workshop leader:  Michael Hennessey
►Date:  March 8, 2014

Technology– training in a variety of digital tools for the productive use of digital audio archives
►Workshop leader:  Lori Emerson
► Date:  April 5, 2014

The workshop model we are using draws some inspiration from recent successes in crowd-sourcing.  Put another way, our workshops will engage scholars and poets alongside digital archivists from UC Libraries – faculty and students representing quite distinct areas of expertise – to innovative collaboratively while exploring and developing new skills.

Each full-day workshop will be held in a computer classroom in Langsam Library. For more information, or to inquire about the possibility of attending any of these workshops, please contact Jay Twomey.

Learn More about The Elliston Project, and follow upcoming Events sponsored by the Elliston Poetry Fund.