'The archive is messy and so are we': Decoding the Women and Words Collection

The SpokenWeb Podcast

Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books holds the rich Women and Words Collection, which contains more than one hundred recordings from the Women and Words Conference in 1983, a decade of WestWord writing retreats and workshops, and a number of other readings, meetings, workshops, and events. Although the audio in this collection has a significant paper archive to accompany it, the absence of pre-existing metadata made it difficult to identify the recordings. This episode is framed by how two research assistants, Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt, encountered the collection—one physically, in the archive, and the other solely with digitized audio recordings and scanned print materials—and takes us behind the scenes of their work to make sense of both its depths and the Women and Words Society’s history.

Special thanks to Tony Power, librarian and curator of the Contemporary Literature Collection at Simon Fraser University, and to SFU's Special Collections and Rare Books.

SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.

Episode Producers:

Kate Moffatt is an incoming PhD student in English at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests lie primarily with women's book history and women's writing of the Romantic period. She brings a keen interest in the digital humanities, book and literary history, and archives and archival practices to her work as a Research Assistant for SpokenWeb.

Kandice Sharren is a postdoctoral research fellow at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research focuses on print culture of the Romantic period, and she brings her experience with digital humanities, archival research, and book history to the SpokenWeb project.

Citations:

Beverly, Andrea. “Traces of a Feminist Literary Event.” CanLit Across Media, MQUP, 2019, p. 221, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvscxtkg.15.

"Castor Wheel Pivot." Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/100713

"Dust Digger." Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 27 March 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/99584.

"Flipping through a book." Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/Zeinel/sounds/483364/

Heavenly choir singing sound, "Ahhh." Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/random_intruder/sounds/392172/

"Palms Down." Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 15 March 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/96905

"Record Scratch." Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/simkiott/sounds/43404/

Rooney, Frances. "activist; Gloria Greenfield." Section15, 22 May 1998. Accessed 31 March 2022. http://section15.ca/features/people/1998/05/22/gloria_greenfield/.