FYI Workshop Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities, Cambridge, December 10-11

The World Oral Literature Project is pleased to announce that online registration has opened for our 2010 workshop: Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities.

Friday, 10 December 2010 to Saturday, 11 December 2010, Location: CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge, United Kingdom

This workshop will explore 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.

Building on discussions around orality and textuality, presenters will address some of the following issues:

What kinds of political repercussions may result from studying marginalized languages or from working with custodians of endangered traditions? How can online tools help ensure responsible access to sensitive cultural materials? Who should control decisions over how digitized heritage material is to be accessed, curated and understood? How can researchers remain true to the fluidity of performance over time and avoid fossilization in the creation of 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?

We welcome ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians and our project's own grantees to exchange ideas at this workshop. A provisional programme will be online shortly.

Please visit the following website and follow the link on the top right to Online Registration if you are interested in attending:

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1327/

We hope to see you in December.

Mark Turin

World Oral Literature Project
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
University of Cambridge
Downing Street
Cambridge CB2 3DZ
United Kingdom