Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity

The SpokenWeb Podcast

Transcriptions of podcasts provide visual renderings of audio that increase accessibility. But what are the best practices for transcribing a podcast, specifically a podcast about literary audio? In this episode, Katherine McLeod of ShortCuts and Kelly Cubbon, transcriber of The SpokenWeb Podcast, explore the role of transcription in the making of podcasts and how responsible transcription unfolds through collaboration and conversation. In fact, their episode uncovers just how much transcription is collaboration and conversation.

Part One starts with reflections from Katherine and Kelly about how they came to the work of transcription and key concepts that have influenced their thinking throughout the process of making this episode, such as accessibility and ableism. This section also features an interview with Dr. Maya Rae Oppenheimer, a studio arts professor at Concordia University and a regular user of podcast transcripts.

Part Two consists of an interview with Judith Burr, the Season 3 SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer and project manager, about generative challenges that have come up during collaboration on podcast transcription for the podcast and how decision making has evolved over time.

And Part Three is an interview with Bára Hladík, a poet, writer, and multimedia artist, about the convergence of disability, accessibility, technology, and poetics. Here, Bára discusses the healing possibilities of sound and the creative potential of transcripts.

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:

Katherine McLeod @kathmcleod researches archives, performance, and poetry. She has co-edited the collection CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Jason Camlot, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). She is writing a monograph (under contract with Wilfrid Laurier University Press) that is a feminist listening to recordings of women poets reading on CBC Radio. She was the 2020-2021 Researcher-in-Residence at the Concordia University Library and, at present, she is an affiliated researcher with SpokenWeb at Concordia, where she is the principal investigator of her SSHRC Insight Development Grant, “Literary Radio: New Approaches to Audio Research” (2021-2023).

Kelly Cubbon is a recent graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Master of Publishing program. She is a content marketing specialist and perpetual history nerd who is passionate about the transformational power of storytelling in environmental, disability, and social justice.

Featured Guests:

maya rae oppenheimer (phd) @mayarae is a daughter, sister, aunt, plant-mother of Icelandic and Canary Islander descent who receives financial remuneration as a writer/researcher /educator. She was born in Treaty 1 territory and spent over a decade living in London (UK). maya is now an uninvited guest on Kanien'kehá:ka territory where she preoccupies herself with writing as a social practice and the tangles of narratives that inform our worldviews. Structures of institutional knowledge formation and validation are often the focus of her projects, from museum narratives to histories of social psychology and laboratory experiments. Experimental writing, performance, radical pedagogy, open-access publishing, DIY tactics and rogue archival gestures make up her tool-kit. maya joined the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in September 2017 as Assistant Professor in Art History. She now works across the Department of Studio Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies in Fine Arts and is the founder of OK Stamp Press.

Judith (Judee) Burr is a MA Candidate in the IGS Digital Arts & Humanities theme at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan. Her research uses audio media and storytelling tools to examine the complexities of human culture in fire-adapted landscapes, connecting to the rich world of the digital environmental humanities. She has worked as an environmental researcher and writer on projects including the Value of Rhode Island Forests report and the Forestry for RI Birds project. She also co-founded the live lit reading series Stranger Stories in Providence. She graduated with a BS in Earth Systems and a BA in Philosophy in 2012 from Stanford University, where she contributed to the podcasts Generation Anthropocene and Philosophy Talk.

Bára Hladík is a Czech-Canadian writer and multimedia artist. Born in Ktunaxa Territory, she received her Bachelor of Arts in Literature from the University of British Columbia in 2016. Her work can be found in Contemporary Verse 2, Carte Blanche, EVENT Mag, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Bed Zine, Empty Mirror, Cosmonauts Avenue and elsewhere. Bára’s first book New Infinity is published with Metatron Press. She is now a guest in Esquimalt, "B.C."

SHOW NOTES & RESOURCES

‘About Us’, Queer ASL

AIM Lab: an experimental research hub concerned with disability, access, and affordances, based at Concordia University.

Alt Text Poetry Project by Shannon Finnegan and Bojana Coklyat. Plus, the Alt Text work at the Banff Centre for the Arts: Distinct Aggregations.

Amanda Monthei’s Life with Fire podcast

Bara Hladik – poet. artist. Facilitator.

• Place an order for Bára’s first book New Infinity published June 2022.
• Listen to Bára’s ambient electronic album Cosmosis here on Bandcamp.
• Join Bára for Dreamspells (@dream_spells), a collaborative project with Malek Robbana (@melekyamalek) with a monthly new moon dreamspells event
  • registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMpc-ygqTouHtaiP7HfwXvhxLi-GXljKu8o

Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life (BIT)

Carmen Papalia, An Accessibility Manifesto for the Arts

Daniel Britton on typeface design

Disability Art is the Last Avante Garde with Sean Lee, Secret Feminist Agenda S4E22

SoundBox Signals podcast (UBCO)

SpokenWeb Podcast Transcription Style Guide

Talila A. Lewis, “Working Definition of Ableism January 2022 Update”

‘Terminology’, Critical Disability Studies Collective, University of Minnesota

“The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic” produced by Jason Camlot for The SpokenWeb Podcast

“The Voice That is the Poem, ft. Kaie Kellough” produced by Katherine McLeod for ShortCuts on The SpokenWeb Podcast, 03:10.

Transcription Tools

Descript (audio and video editing through text, paid), https://www.descript.com/

Express Scribe (speech to text, free), https://www.nch.com.au/scribe/index.html

Otter AI (speech to text and real-time transcription, paid), https://otter.ai/

TEMI (speech to text transcription, paid), https://www.temi.com/

Music Credits

• “Wavicles” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)
• “Erudition” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)
• “Atmosphere” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)
• “Scarlett Overpass” by Kajubaa via Blue Dot Sessions
• Cloud Cave by Kajubaa via Blue Dot Sessions
• Pacific Time by Glass Obelisk via Blue Dot Sessions

Sound Effects

“campfire in the woods” by craftcrest, ​​https://freesound.org/people/craftcrest/sounds/213804/

“Page turn over, Paper turn over page turning” by flag2, https://freesound.org/people/flag2/sounds/63318/

“Wall clock ticking” by straget, https://freesound.org/people/straget/sounds/405423/

“Mechanical Keyboard Typing” by GeorgeHopkins https://freesound.org/people/GeorgeHopkins/sounds/537244/