Fwd: Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities: Call for Papers

[Nick Thieberger]

Subject: Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities: Call for Papers
To:


Dear Colleagues,

Please find the details of this year's project workshop below, along
with paper submission guidelines. Feel free to circulate to others as
you see fit. Apologies for cross posting.

***

Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities:
World Oral Literature Project 2010 Workshop
<http://www.oralliterature.org/research/workshops.html>

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.

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 at cam.ac.uk> by Friday, 30 July
2010. Abstracts will be reviewed and assessed, with notification of
acceptance by 31 August 2010.

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.

<http://www.oralliterature.org/research/workshops.html>

Mel Rouse
Collections Assistant
World Oral Literature Project

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
University of Cambridge
Downing Street
Cambridge CB2 3DZ
United Kingdom

email: mhr27 at cam.ac.uk
phone: 01223 333504

http://www.oralliterature.org