“SpokenWeb UAlberta revives Edmonton’s literary soundscapes”
Student-led project brings the city’s poetic past to life through immersive storytelling
November 06, 2025
At the College of Social Sciences and Humanities’ first research celebration on October 16, 2025, the SpokenWeb UAlberta team presented SpokenWeb UAlberta in 360°, an immersive audio-visual project by research assistants Natasha D’Amours and Sarah Freeman. Using virtual reality to revisit archival poetry recordings from the 1960s to 1980s in their original Edmonton venues, including the University of Alberta, the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium, and the Art Gallery of Alberta, the project explores how technology can renew our understanding of sound, memory, and place. Many attendees lingered to rewatch the piece, remarking on how powerfully it brought to life the voices of poets such as Dorothy Livesay, Douglas Barbour, and Stephen Scobie, and how vividly it recreated the atmosphere of the city’s literary past.
View Natasha’s SpokenWeb UAlberta in 360° video and Sarah’s accompanying pamphlet, or read the related story on The Quad.
“U of A professor leads research team to recover lost audio and video recordings”
Peris Jones
The Gateway, December 8, 2023
University of Alberta professor Michael O’Driscoll is working to restore a collection of lost audio and video recordings, through the SpokenWeb project. His goal is to integrate them into the discipline of literary studies.
“Vast digital trove of off-the-cuff remarks from Canadian literary lions nears completion”
Bob Weber
National Post, November 4, 2023.
SpokenWeb is not only a literary resource but an invaluable repository of cultural history. Most of the writers it documents were in the first generation of Canadian writers to achieve any kind of a national and international audience. SpokenWeb is the sound of CanLit being born.
CBC Radio Interview with Sean Luyk and Michael O’Driscoll
Mark Connolly, Tara McCarthy
CBC Radio November 1, 2023
University of Alberta experts are on a mission to save sounds buried deep in library archives. They’ve already found recordings of some of Canada’s most important literary figures. Sean Luyk is a digital curation librarian, and Michael O’Driscoll is a professor at the U of A’s English and Film Studies department.
“Lit sounds: U of A experts help to rescue treasure trove of audio cultural history”
Professor and librarian team up to salvage tens of thousands of lost recordings across North America
Geoff McMaster
University of Alberta Folio, October 27, 2023
Michael O’Driscoll is on a mission to restore sound to its rightful place in literary studies. Apart from shifting his own students’ attention on poetry from the printed page to a “close listening” of the spoken word in the classroom, the professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of English and Film Studies is helping to rescue thousands of lost audio and video recordings — on reel to reel and cassette tape across Canada.
“A New Frontier of Literary Engagement”
SpokenWeb’s network of digitized audio recordings brings new life to Canada’s literary heritage
Donna McKinnon
Faculty of Arts, 03 August 2018
When portable recording technology became widely available in the 1960s, people recorded everything from crying babies to private conversations. Across university campuses, literary events and author readings were recorded on reel to reel tapes and (later) audio cassettes, boxed away and for a variety of reasons, largely forgotten.