Research, Training & Collaboration : Workshops

Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities:
World Oral Literature Project 2010 Workshop

Friday, 10 December and Saturday, 11 December 2010
Location: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), 17 Mill Lane, University of Cambridge

This workshop explores key issues around the dissemination of oral literature through traditional and digital media. Funding agencies, including our own Supplemental Grants Programme, now encourage fieldworkers to return copies of their work to source communities, in addition to requiring researchers to deposit their collections in institutional repositories. But thanks to ever greater digital connectivity, wider internet access and affordable multimedia recording technologies, the locus of dissemination and engagement has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a diverse constituency of global users, such as migrant workers, indigenous scholars, policymakers and journalists, to name but a few.

Call for Papers:

When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital archives holding linguistic and cultural content, their involvement raises interesting practical and ethical questions. We welcome proposals that address some of the following issues:

  • What kinds of political repercussions may result from studying marginalised languages or from working with the custodians of endangered oral traditions?
  • How can online tools help ensure responsible access to sensitive cultural materials?
  • Who should control decisions over how digitised heritage material is to be accessed, curated and understood?
  • How can researchers remain true to the fluidity of performance over time and avoid fossilisation in the creation of their digital documents?
  • When archives become primary sites for interaction and discussion rather than static repositories of heritage data, how do relationships between collections and their users change?

Building on discussions around orality and textuality, we hope that participants will reflect on the politics of ownership of cultural recordings that are increasingly born digital or even birthed directly into an archive. We welcome ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians and our project's own grantees to exchange ideas at this second workshop.

Click here to download a PDF of the poster advertising the workshop [5.6 MB].

Professor John Miles Foley (W.H. Byler Chair in the Humanities; Curators Professor of Classical Studies and English; Director, Center for Studies in Oral Tradition; Director, Center for eResearch and Editor, Oral Tradition) from the University of Missouri has kindly agreed to be our keynote speaker and principal discussant.

Submission Guidelines and Considerations:

If you are interested in presenting at the workshop, please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short biography, in Word, RTF or PDF format, to Imogen Gunn <ilg22@cam.ac.uk> by Friday, 30 July 2010. Abstracts will be reviewed and assessed, with notification of acceptance by 31 August 2010. Online registration will open in September and a provisional programme will also be made available at that time.

Accepted abstracts will be included in the conference programme which will be made available online. Abstracts and presentations should be in English. Individuals may submit no more than one proposal each. Registration fees will be waived for participants whose abstracts are accepted and who present at the workshop, and the costs of two lunches and one dinner will be covered by the organising committee. Please note that presenters are responsible for their own travel and accommodation fees. The workshop convenors are grateful to CRASSH for providing logistical and financial support, and for the cooperation of the new NWO Multimedia Research and Documentation of African Oral Genres network.

World Oral Literature Project 2009 Workshop
with a focus on collections from the Asia-Pacific

Tuesday, 15 December and Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Location: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), 17 Mill Lane, University of Cambridge

This two-day workshop, organised by the World Oral Literature Project, brought together established scholars, early career researchers and graduate students with indigenous researchers, museum curators, archivists and audio-visual experts to discuss strategies for collecting, recording, preserving and disseminating oral literatures and endangered narrative traditions. In view of the diversity of current research initiatives on the oral literatures of the Asia-Pacific, and the geographical strengths of Cambridge-based scholars, the workshop had a broad focus on this region. Specific sessions were held on the Himalayas (India and Nepal), High Asia (China, Mongolia and Tibet) and the Pacific (Vanuatu).

The workshop provided a collaborative environment for scholars to present, discuss and be exposed to new techniques and fieldwork methodologies. Topics included the ethical responsibilities of researchers, their engagements with local communities as partners, the place of western universities as archival repositories of living traditions and sites of interaction for indigenous communities, and the role of local digital archives and community cultural centres in knowledge transfer, teaching and research. All of the workshop presentations and abstracts have now been archived to DSpace@Cambridge. To access them, please click on the links below.

In parallel, we hosted the second meeting of the ‘Ritual Speech in the Himalayas’ working group, participants of which presented on their research and publishing projects to those attending the World Oral Literature Project workshop.

Workshop presenters and participants included:

Professor Peter Austin (SOAS) [abstract] [video]
Katey Blumenthal (University of Virginia) [abstract] [video] [streaming media]
Dr Lissant Bolton (British Museum) [abstract] [video]
Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey (Publisher and Archivist)
Elin Stangeland (DSpace, University Library, Cambridge) [abstract] [video]
Professor Ruth Finnegan (Open University) [abstract] [video]
Professor Martin Gaenszle (University of Vienna) [abstract] [video]
Dr Stephen Hugh-Jones (King’s College, Cambridge) [abstract] [audio]
Dr Christopher Kaplonski (MIASU, University of Cambridge) [abstract] [video] [streaming media]
Professor Alan Macfarlane (King’s College, Cambridge)
David Nathan (Director, Endangered Languages Archive, SOAS) [abstract] [video]
Professor Michael Oppitz (University of Zürich) [abstract] [video]
Dr Carole Pegg (University of Cambridge, Inner Asian Music & 7-Star Records) [abstract] [video]
Dr Judith Pettigrew (University of Limerick) [abstract] [video]
Gerald Roche (Griffin University/Qinghai Normal University) [abstract] [video]
Dr Anne de Sales (CNRS, Paris) [abstract] [video] [streaming media]
Dr Sara Shneiderman (St Catharine’s College, Cambridge) [abstract] [video]
Alban von Stockhausen (University of Zürich) [abstract] [video] [streaming media]
Professor William Sutherland (Zoology, University of Cambridge) [abstract] [video] [streaming media]
Yarjung Kromchai Tamu (Chief Advisor, Tamu Pye Lhu Sangh) [abstract] [video]

This workshop was made possible by generous support from C-SAP, the Onaway Trust and the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research.