This post is ultimately about questionnaires. We need to develop two kinds. One for feedback from researchers and one for historical contextualization.
1. I have begun to send the link and password to the SpokenWeb site to several literature scholars, so we can begin to collect feedback on the site as it stands, and as it continues to develop. So far I have provided access to the following scholars:
Lianne Moyes (U de M)
Judith Herz (Concordia)
Karis Shearer (Concordia)
Nick Mount (U of Toronto)
Alessandro Porco (SUNY, Buffalo)
Catherine Leclerc (McGill)
Gillian Lane-Mercier (McGill)
Martine Emmenuelle Lapointe (U de M)
Julie Fredette (U Sherbrooke)
Gregory Reid (U Sherbrooke)
Jane Moss (Colby College)
Nick’s initial response to the site:
This is an amazing resource, Jason. I’ll play around with it more, but for now about the only thought I have is that I would have liked even a brief paragraph on the home page on the history of the SGW series. Perhaps that’s still to come.
If you know the room or even building locations of the individual readings, it would be great to provide them at the top of the transcript bottom, maybe even a photo of the room then or now. I’d like to be able to imagine them reading in a place, instead of from the digital clouds.
Wonderful.
Nick
Interesting that Nick’s first thought was to try to spatially locate the voices he hears. I think it’s a good idea. While we don’t have information on the venues of all readings, we can certainly work on getting as much of that info as possible, and especially on getting some archival (or contemporary) images of the rooms used for the readings.
I would like to develop a common “feedback” questionnaire to send to all of the scholars and teachers we invite to visit and use the archive. What questions (maybe 5 max) would we want on such a questionnaire. Things like:
What features are missing from the interface as it presently exists that you would like to see added. Why?
Please submit your ideas for feedback questions to Deanna, and we’ll hammer that out at our next meeting.
2. I was talking to John McAuley yesterday. He is the first poet to have received an MA degree in Creative Writing from Sir George Williams University (just before it became Concordia), and he was a student when the series was taking place. I’ve invited him to look at the web site, with the goal of getting a different kind of feedback from him than I’d like from the literature scholars. I asked him to look and listen around in preparation for an interview about his memories of the reading series and any particular events he attended. I’ve mentioned this before, but I think a valuable addition to the archive will be taped interviews with series organizers and attendees. I’d like to develop a questionnaire template for these interviews. While I believe it will be fine if each interview is distinct, in certain ways; I think it will be useful to make sure we ask a set of the same questions all interviewees, so we can build a structure of parallel narrative accounts of the series. I’m thinking of an oral history like Please Kill Me (interviews around specific events that tell the story of early Punk in the US) as an example of parallel narrative accounts. It might be interesting to do these interviews in video and I could check with Elena about using the digital/oral history lab facilities for this purpose.
Some of the people I’d like to have interviewed (and I’m thinking that Deanna and Celyn [when she’s back] can conduct the interviews, include:
Students during the period [we can add to this list]:
John McAuley
Simon Dardick
Endre Farkas
Michael Harris
Former SGW Faculty during the period:
Richard Sommer
George Bowering
Margaret Atwood
Howard Fink
David Sheps
Henry Beissel
Michael Gnarowski
Lewis Poteet [not sure if still alive]
Edward Pechter
Frank Davey (visiting writer in residence)
and others…
Local writers during the period:
Peter Van Toorn
What 5-10 questions should be common to all interviews? Another agenda item for our next team meeting.