SpokenWeb
Montreal

ARW

Archives Research Workshops

Developing archival research skills is essential to the study of literary and cultural texts—and yet, there are few venues by which to prepare students in archival practices, methods, and theory, or for researchers and archivists to gather and share archival research concepts and strategies with each other.

The Archives Research Workshops (ARW) is a three-day series of plenary lectures, hands-on workshops, and panel discussions designed to provide training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in archival research and to build a lively forum for researchers and archivists to share methods and concepts that frame their scholarly work. Supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Connection grant, and funding from Concordia University and Bishop’s University, these events bring students into vital conversation with scholars and archivists about the best practices in relation to archival endeavours and its uses in ethical practices around, and application to humanities research. Scheduled for September 14-16 across both campuses of Concordia University in Montreal, the events will consist of two workshops situated in Concordia’s Special Collections, five presentation and discussion panels featuring fifteen established scholars and archivists, and two public plenary lectures. All scheduled activities promise to engage participants in the consideration of an exciting array of considerations concerning archival research, methods, and questions.

Put your white gloves on and let’s get them dusty!

Territorial Acknowledgement

We wish to acknowledge that Concordia University, the site of this year’s Archives Research Workshops, is located on unceded Indigenous lands. We recognize Kanien’kehá:ka Nation as the custodians of the lands and waters on which our events take place. Tiohtià:ke/Montréal is historically, and continues to be, a gathering place for many First Nations.  We respect the continued connections with the past, present and future in our ongoing relationships with Indigenous and other peoples. We are sensitive to the diverse ways in which knowledge may be preserved, transmitted, and brought to light through a careful engagement in the use and consideration of archival institutions and practices.

Registration

The Workshop Sessions (Friday, September 15, 10am-2pm) are available with limited capacity to students at Concordia University and Bishop’s University. If you are a student and wish to participate in the workshops (attendance at all other events is also required) please email your request to Jason Camlot and Linda Morra at: sfuarchivesfeb18@gmail.com

To register for plenary lectures and public panels, please do so via the ARW eventbrite page. Registration for all of these public events is free.

The Archives Research Workshop organizers are grateful to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The Concordia University Library and Special Collections, Bishop’s University, the Concordia University Vice President Research and Graduate Studies,   The Concordia University Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies, The University of British Columbia (Okanagan) Principal’s Research Chair – “Reconstructing the Past in the Archive”, and The SpokenWeb research network.

Schedule

Thursday, 14 September 2023

6:15 pm - Welcoming Remarks - Jason Camlot and Linda Morra

6:30 pm - Plenary Lecture - Ann Laura Stoler, Room: VA-114, Visual Arts Building, 1395 René-Lévesque Blvd W, Montreal, Quebec H3G 2M5

"On Archiving as Politics and Praxis"

In this keynote lecture, Ann Laura Stoler will address the changing terrain of archival labor and the transformed processes that inform it. She will focus on what she sees as the "conceptual methodologies" that can address new ways of approaching those documents and objects already collected and, as importantly, the principles and practices brought to the project of gathering new materials, of archives in formation. Thinking about archiving as always an unfinished process and project, these two kinds of initiatives each have political potential and force of their own.

7:45 pm - Opening Reception, Room: VAV Gallery, Visual Arts Building, 1395 René-Lévesque Blvd W, Montreal, Quebec H3G 2M5

Friday, September 15, 2023

(All events on this date will take place on Concordia University's Loyola Campus 7141 Sherbrooke St. W. Montreal, Quebec, Canada H4B 1R6. Limited access workshops will take place in the Vanier Library Building, 1st floor (VL). Afteroon panels and book launch/reception will be in the Loyola Jesuit Hall, RF-100 and adjacent rooms.

Students who will be participating in the hands-on workshops are asked to visit the Concordia University Special Collections website and browse the many informative pages that discuss what archives are and how to use them, in particular the series: What are archives? and  Visiting Special Collections.

10:00 am – 11:30 am - Morning Workshop Session A: Archives 101 (Workshop Facilitated by Natalia Diaz, with the assistance of Jason Camlot, Linda Morra, Nathalie Cooke), Room: VL-126

Offered twice, this workshop will induct students into the fundamentals of how to approach working with archival materials, raising the most elemental questions and concerns that arise in this context.

10:00 am – 11:30 am - Workshop Session B: Working Between Digital and Physical Archives (Steven High and Martha Langford), Room: VL-122

Also offered twice in a day, this session is a more complex version of Archives 101. Introduced and facilitated by archivists and a scholar, it will serve as a hands-on exercise about how to handle materials, and about the kinds of research questions one might formulate in relation to what one finds in an archival box.

11:30 am – 12:30 pm - Lunch Break, Loyola Jesuit Hall, RF-120

12:30 pm – 2:00 pm - Afternoon Workshop Session A: Archives 101 (Workshop: Jason Camlot, Linda Morra, Natalia Diaz), Room: VL-126

12:30 pm – 2:00 pm - Afternoon Workshop Session B: Working Between Digital and Physical Archives (Steven High and Martha Langford), Room: VL-122

2:00 pm – 2:15 pm - Break, Room: Loyola Jesuit Hall, RF-100

2:15 pm – 3:45 pm - Panel: Working with Audio-Visual Materials Co-moderated by Jazmine Aldrich and Jody Robinson, (Patrick Feaster, Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, Annie Murray), Room: RF-110

This roundtable will present the various layers of complexity in dealing with materials that are not in paper form but are archives of time-based media, such as sound and video recordings. How does one plan to engage with materials that one must play to activate? How does one work to situate and contextualize analog media artifacts with adjacent documentation and materials? What are the implications of digitization for such collections?

3:45 pm – 4:00 pm - Break, Room: RF-110

4:00 pm – 5:30 pm - Panel: Reconstructing the Past in the Archive (Linda Morra, Karis Shearer, Eli MacLaren), Room: RF-110

This panel will involve four scholars using their own research to instruct students about how to approach and probe past materials, to consider problems of representation and research, and to suggest how archives are also generated from one's own research.

5:30 pm – 7:00 pm  - Book Launch & Event Reception, Room: RF-100

Launch of Collection Thinking: Within and Without Archives, Libraries, and Museums (Routledge 2023), edited by Jason Camlot, Martha Langford and Linda Morra, followed by a reception.

Saturday, 16 September, 2023

(All events on this date will take place on Concordia University's downtown Sir George Williams campus, on the 11th floor of the Engineering and Visual Arts (EV) Building, 1515 Saint-Catherine St W, Montreal, Quebec H3G 2W1.

9:30 am – 11:00 am - Plenary Lecture, Karina Vernon (University of Toronto), Room: EV-11.705

"Encounters with the Black Prairie Archive"

Dr. Vernon's keynote lecture will address what editorial and archival practices are necessary for working respectfully and ethically in Black archives. Her talk will weave together first-person narrative accounts of her archival research on the Black prairies and her encounters with members of that community, and integrate these with primary creative writing by Black authors meditating on archives in order to theorize key issues of permission, relationship, and responsibility in Black archives.

11:00 am – 11:15 am - Nutritional Break, Room: EV-11.725

11:15 am – 12:15 pm - Panel: Ethics In and Outside of the Archives (Monika Kin Gagnon, Felicity Tayler, Deanna Reder, Michael Nest), Room:  EV-11.705

Four scholars experienced in matters related to Indigenous or independent communal archives will speak to the specific kinds of preparation and the research methods and protocols necessary for these kinds of archives. They will highlight the ethical and moral considerations that bear upon such research.

12:15 pm – 1:30 pm - Lunch Break. Off campus, please enjoy lunch on your own at one of the numerous restaurants and cafés in the immediate area.

1:30 pm – 2:45 pm - Panel: A Start-Up Guide to Working Archives (culminating event), Room: EV-11.705

This last panel of the ARW events will involve all scholars and archivists to provide and highlight the top ten practices they consider essential to working in archives and how to prepare in advance for such research.

2:45 - 3:15 pm - Closing Remarks and Thanks, Room: EV-11.705

Participants / Abstracts

ARW Organizers

Jason Camlot is Professor of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His recent critical works include Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford 2019), and the co-edited collections, Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums (with Martha Langford and Linda Morra, Routledge, 2023), Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books (with Weingarten, WLUP, 2022), and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with McLeod, McGill Queen's UP, 2019), all of which are concerned with questions about archives as they relate to media and history. He is also the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, Vlarf (McGill-Queen's UP, 2021). He is principal investigator and director of the SSHRC-funded Spoken Web research partnership www.spokenweb.ca that focuses on the history of literary sound recordings and the digital preservation and presentation of archival collections of literary audio.

Linda Morra is Professor of Canadian and Indigenous literatures at Bishop’s University in Quebec. She was the 2021-2022 Jack & Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar (Simon Fraser University) and the Klara Marie Faßbinder Guest Professor for Women & Gender Studies (Trier University, 2022). She specializes in women’s archives, theories of affect and archives, and women’s writing in Canada. Her edited collection Moving Archives (WLUP, 2020), won the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English (2020), and her co-edited collection (with Dr. Sarah Henzi), On the Other Side(s) of 150 (WLUP, 2021), won the Canadian Studies Network Prize for Best Co-Edited Collection of Essays (2021). Other published works include, Gender and Literature in Canada (Routledge, 2023), Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums (co-edited with Martha Langford and Jason Camlot, Routledge, 2023), and Unarrested Archives: Case-Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women’s Authorship(UTP, 2014). She is the host, writer, and co-producer of the podcast, Getting Lit With Linda (winner of Outstanding Education Series, Canadian Podcast Awards, 2022).

ARW Plenary Speakers

Ann Laura Stoler is the Willy Brandt Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research, founding director of The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry, and founding co-editor of Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon. Her books include Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (2016); Thinking with Balibar, co-edited (2020); Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, ed. (2013); Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009); Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002); Tensions of Empire, ed. with Frederick Cooper (1997); Race and the Education of Desire (1995); and Interior Frontiers: Essays in the Entrails of inequality (2022). As founding director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (www.instituteforcriticalsocialinquiry.org) she is devoted to bringing together fellows from around the world with the work of major thinkers who have shaped the course of social inquiry.

Karina Vernon has an exceptional record in archival theory and practice as a specialist of archives and Black representation therein. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where she researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, Black aesthetics, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous relations. She is editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology (WLUP 2020) and a companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives, which is forthcoming. These works both recover and theorize a new regional archive of "Black prairie" literature, including writing that ranges from work by nineteenth-century Black fur traders and pioneers to contemporary writing of the twenty-first century. She is the co-editor, with Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo) of Call and Response-ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation (MQUP), which offers a Black Canadian theory of reception and relation.

ARW Workshop Leaders and Panelists

Jazmine Aldrich received a B.A. in History and Global Studies, minoring in Indigenous Studies, at Bishop’s University; she went on to complete a Master of Information Studies degree at McGill University. She is Head Archivist of the Eastern Townships Resource Centre, and has worked with other heritage organizations in Quebec and Ontario since 2017.

Nathalie Cooke is Professor of English at McGill and was Associate Dean of McGill's Library (ROAAr -- rare & special collections and archives) 2016-22. She is co-editor of two books that involved extensive archival research: Catharine Parr Traill's The Female Emigrant's Guide, Cooking with a Canadian Classic (2017) and The Family Treasury: A Collection of Household and Medicinal Receipts, 1741-1848 (2015). She has also co-curated three exhibitions showcasing the research potential of archival holdings.

Natalia Diaz is the Collections Librarian and Archivist at Concordia University Library where she contributes with the accessioning, processing, description, arrangement, and acquisition of archival materials. She is responsible of the evaluation and coordination of potential gift-in-kind offers to the Library's general collection and is a member of the Library Exhibition Committee. She previously worked at Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa, where she provided reference services to users, contributed in creating the finding aid for the 1931 census and analyzed over a thousand finding aids of audiovisual collections for preservation purposes. 

Patrick Feaster is a specialist in the history, culture, and preservation of early sound media. A three-time Grammy nominee and co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative, he has been actively involved in locating, making audible, and contextualizing many of the world's oldest sound recordings. He received his doctorate in Folklore and Ethnomusicology in 2007 from Indiana University Bloomington, where he later worked as Media Preservation Specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative. He is the author of Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Audio, as well as numerous album notes and articles on media history and theory, which have appeared in ARSC Journal, Technology and Culture, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Velvet Light Trap, and elsewhere.

Monika Kin Gagnon is a Professor and Chair of the Communications Studies department at Concordia University. She is the author of Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (2000), and with video artist, Richard Fung and eleven artists, 13 Conversations about Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002), translated as Territoires et Trajectoires in 2006. She co-edited Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014) and is co-director of the research group at Concordia and York, CinemaExpo67. Her current research engages cinema, “creative archives” and memory, with a focus on Expo 67 multi-screen films.

Steven High is a Professor of History at Concordia University and the co-founder of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. He has extensive experience working with, and publishing on, textual and digital archives particularly as it relates to oral history. This includes the Living Archives project, funded by a SSHRC Partnership Development grant. He also regularly teaches courses grounded in a single archive. As the current President of the Canadian Historical Association (2021-23), he is engaged in vital questions related to doing archival research in the present moment.

Martha Langford is the Research Chair and Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and a Distinguished University Research Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal. She is also editor-in-chief of Journal of Canadian Art History/ Annales d'histoire de l'art canadien and co-editor, with Sandra Paikowsky, of the Beaverbrook Foundation Series on Canadian Art History of McGill-Queen's University Press. In 2018, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. A long-time member of the Universities Art Association of Canada, she received the UAAC-AAUC Recognition Award in 2020. Her research calls extensively on the archival record, for which she wrote the first comprehensive survey of modern Canadian photographic art. She is currently writing the first book-length history of photography in Canada, with the support of her Concordia University research chair and a National Gallery of Canada research fellowship.

Eli MacLaren teaches poetry, Canadian literature, and the history of books and publishing in the Department of English at McGill University, where he is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director. He is the author of Dominion and Agency: Copyright and the Structuring of the Canadian Book Trade, 1867-1918 (2011) and Little Resilience: The Ryerson Poetry Chap-Books (2020). From 2012 to 2017, he was the editor of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, and, in 2015, he co-organized the annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) in Montreal. He is the director of the Montreal International Poetry Prize, www.montrealpoetryprize.com.

Katherine McLeod is an Assistant Professor (Limited Term Appointment) in the Department of English at Concordia University. She is the principal investigator of her SSHRC Insight Development Grant, "Literary Radio: New Approaches to Audio Research." She has co-edited the book CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Jason Camlot, McGill-Queen's UP) and, most recently she has coedited  with Jason Camlot a special issue of English Studies in Canada on "New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies." She has published chapters on sonic-literary topics in the edited collections, Moving Archives and Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives, and Museums. In 2020-2021, she held the position of Researcher-in-Residence at the Concordia University Library with her project "Listening to the Library" and, now in its fourth season, she produces ShortCuts – a monthly series about archival audio – for The Spoken Web Podcast.

Alexandra Mills is the Special Collections Archivist at Concordia University Library, and, as such, is essential to a presentation that involves directly handling archival materials. She holds an MLIS from the School of Information Studies at McGill University with a specialization in archival studies, and an MA in art history from Concordia University. Her research interests include teaching with archival materials; strategies for increasing community involvement in the archival process; rethinking collection development practices and methodologies; archives, identity and belonging; and encouraging new audiences to engage with and activate primary materials. Her article, "Telling stories from Montreal's Negro Community Centre fonds: The archives as community-engaged classroom," co-authored with Dr. Steven High and Dr. Desiree Rochat and published in Archivaria 89 (2020), won the Association of Canadian Archivists W. Kaye Lamb Prize in 2021.

Annie Murray is Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian at the University of Calgary's Libraries and Cultural Resources, with direct experience related to audio recordings. With Jared Wiercinski, she has published articles on conceptualizing web-based interfaces for scholars to engage more intuitively and successfully with archival audio recordings. She has been a Co-Principal Investigator in a Mellon Foundation funded project to digitize, preserve, and provide online access to the audio and video recordings in the EMI Music Canada fonds.

Michael Nest's first book The Dem. Rep. of Congo: Economics Dimensions of War and Peace (2006; with François Grignon and Emizet Kisangani), drew on archival research to understand the role of mining interests in shaping conflict and peace talks in DR Congo, 1998-2003. Coltan (2011) drew on archival material to understand how activists shaped narratives about conflict in the Congo. Still a Pygmy (2015), co-authored with Mbuti activist, Isaac Bacirongo, is the first memoir written by a Pygmy and involves the transcription of stories from the oral archive. Cold Case North: The Search for James Brady and Absolom Halkett (2020), with Deanna Reder and Eric Bell, relied on archival research, shedding new light on one of Canada's most famous and enduring missing persons cases. He will speak directly to working with archival and Indigenous materials, and the kinds of ethical practices and engagement required when approaching Indigenous subject matter and communities. Nest is particularly well-equipped to speak to ethical practices in archival research when competing interests attempt to shape the research and the narratives that get told.

Deanna Reder is a Cree-Métis Professor of English and the Chair of Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her SSHRC-funded research project, "The People and the Text: Indigenous Writing in Northern North America up to 1992" collects and gives scholarly attention to often neglected (and archived) works by Indigenous authors. See www.thepeopleandthetext.ca, an anthology of Vera Manuel's corpus, Honouring the Strength of Indian Women (2019), and Reder's recent monograph, Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Metis acimisowina (2022), winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English in 2023. Reder is co-author, along with Michael Nest and Eric Bell, of Cold Case North: The Search for James Brady and Absolom Halkett (U of Regina Press, 2020). Cold Case North relies on extensive archival research founded on Indigenous research methods. In the Fall of 2018 she was inducted into the College of New Scholars, Artist, & Scientists in the Royal Society of Canada.

Jody Robinson obtained her BA from Bishop’s University and went on to pursue Master’s studies in History at the Université de Sherbrooke. Since 2006, she has worked for the Eastern Townships Resource Centre, an organization committed to the preservation of the heritage of the Eastern Townships, first as Head Archivist and more recently as Executive Director. For over a decade, Jody has worked with many heritage organizations in the Eastern Townships on special projects as well as an archival consultant. Jody has also served on the board of directors for a variety of heritage and community organizations and is presently vice-president of the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network.

Karis Shearer is an Associate Professor in English & Cultural Studies at UBC Okanagan where her research and teaching focus on literary audio, the literary event, the digital archive, book history, and women’s labour within poetry communities. She is the editor of All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek (WLUP 2008), and has published essays on Sina Queyras’s feminist blog Lemonhound, George Bowering’s little magazine Imago, and Michael Ondaatje’s The Long Poem Anthology. She is the author of a chapter on gendered labour and the Vancouver Poetry Conference in the book Canlit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (McGill-Queens UP, 2020) and is co-editor with Deanna Fong of Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch (Talonbooks, 2020). She also directs the CFI-funded UBCO AMP Lab and is a Governing Board member and lead UBCO Researcher for the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant. In 2018, Shearer led the development of the Digital Arts & Humanities Theme of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies program in collaboration with colleagues from multiple departments across two UBC faculties.

Felicity Tayler is the Research Data Management Librarian at the University of Ottawa. Her research, artistic, and curatorial interests include art historical metadata modelling, data visualization, and the print cultures of artistic communities. Her pedagogical practice translates the STEM-centric language of research data management into digital and analogue realms of humanities scholarship and metadata description. She is a co-applicant on the SSHRC-funded Spoken Web partnership, which foregrounds a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study and digital development, with diverse collections of spoken recordings from across Canada and beyond. Her critical and scholarly writing has been published widely and related exhibitions have been funded by SSHRC, FRQSC, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Most recently, Tayler edited a data primer collaboratively authored by over 30 Digital Humanists, endorsed by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada.

Information for Participants

Travel

Accommodations

ACCOMMODATIONS

Things to do around Montreal

Arts & Museums

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: http://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/index.html

Musée d’Art Contemporain: https://macm.org/en/

Canadian Centre for Architecture: http://www.cca.qc.ca/

McCord Museum: http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/

Place Des Arts (Montreal Opera, The Montreal Symphony Orchestra, and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens):http://laplacedesarts.com/index.en.html

Centaur Theatre Company: http://www.centaurtheatre.com/

The National Film Board (Events, Screenings and Personal Viewing Stations): http://www3.nfb.ca/cinerobotheque/

Segal Centre for Performing Arts http://www.segalcentre.org/

Théâtre Français à Montréal: http://montrealgazette.com/entertainment/theatre/thtre-franais-montral-french-theatre-in-montreal-where-to-find-it

Dining

Resto Montreal: http://restomontreal.ca/

Montreal Food: http://www.montrealfood.com/

Urban Spoon: http://www.urbanspoon.com/c/67/Montreal-restaurants.html

Attractions, Activities and Entertainment

Botanical Gardens: http://www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/jardin/en/menu.htm

Notre Dame Basilica: http://www.basiliquenddm.org/en/

St. Joseph’s Oratory: http://www.saint-joseph.org/en_1001_index.php

Bell Centre: http://centrebell.ca/en/

Cinema Listings: http://www.cinemamontreal.com/eng

Poetry Readings in Montreal: http://wherepoetsread.ca/

Local Entertainment listings searchable by date (MTL.org): https://www.mtl.org/en/what-to-do/festivals-and-events

Voir (listings en français): https://voir.ca/

Véhicule Press’s “Montreal: A Celebration” site: http://www.vehiculepress.com/montreal/index.html

Enso Yoga (pay by class yoga near Concordia): https://ensoyoga.com/

Montreal Gazette: https://montrealgazette.com/