Stanford Libraries holds the Allen Ginsberg papers 1937-1934 which contains correspondence, manuscripts by Ginsberg and other poets and authors, business records, notebooks and journals, clipping files, books, periodicals, audiotapes, videotapes, photographs, and posters.
Kathryn Winner, a graduate student in the English Department, is starting her dissertation research this summer listening to a series of recordings Ginsberg made while traveling around the country giving readings, developing poems, and capturing the sounds around him. The Stanford Media Preservation Lab and the department of Special Collections, in collaboration with the Allen Ginsberg Estate, have digitized these recordings and made them available in the online catalog.
These blog posts from the Library give a peek into the materials available:
The transcription of these digitized recordings will make them discoverable and analyzable. The recordings significantly hold oral drafts of some of his poems which helps scholars trace the development of Ginsberg's ideas.
Kathryn Winner's research project can help guide the type of identifiers that would be useful to scholars. For example, when Ginsberg was writing poems, he would turn the tape recorder on and off. Winner has found that those breaks, which are audible, often correspond to the lineation of the written poems. And, at a larger scale, there is a quotidien pattern reflected in the recordings over the course of his travels around the country where he would be on the bus recording, stop at a town to give a reading that was recorded, then get back on the bus and record.
About 72 hours of digitized tape recordings. 50+ individual files.
Many of these recordings have multiple voices and background noise.
Scanned handwritten inventories.
Speech to Text transcription of the audio recordings.
Identifying and logging repeated signals in the recording (for example the tape recorder clicking on and off)
Handwriting transcription: The descriptive metadata is incomplete which makes it difficult to find things. Ginsberg's own notes about each tape include rich discovery information that the finding aid does not include.