Since 2016, the “Where Poets Read” online listing of literary events in Montreal (curated by Dr. Katherine McLeod) has posted details of close to 700 readings. The last “live” event listed on the site was for the Épiques Voice: Bilingual Poetry Show held at La Vitrola on 10 March 2020. Between 12 March and 29 March the listing shows a series of notices for “cancelled” or “postponed” shows; and then, on 30 March we see a listing for “The Words and Music Show ONLINE!” Since that date the reading events site lists 53 literary events that have been hosted from locations across the country using platforms such as Zoom, Facebook Live, Crowdcast, Instagram and YouTube.

Archive of the Digital Present is a pilot project to explore and establish descriptive processes, interface designs, and tools for discovering and presenting born-digital AV (audio and video) recordings of literary events online. This user-centered exploration will focus on literary events that have been forced to move online (via teleconferencing platforms) since March 2020, due to restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Public readings represent a significant form of literary communication, dissemination, circulation and community-building.

The SpokenWeb project has been focused on preserving, describing and studying archives of historical (1950-1990), analogue-born documentary recordings of literary activity in Canada as a way of mobilizing mute and hidden cultural heritage materials, and of unarchiving new narratives about literary history.

Emerging from that archival research and development, this new project proposes to engage with current literary organizers and communities with a focus on developing solutions for the discovery, description and digital presentation of literary events that have been produced, broadcast and preserved using a range of digital teleconferencing platforms.

By focusing on an intensive body of digital documentation from a short (and still ongoing) period of time – online events of our current pandemic period – we will be able to repurpose the backend database, called Swallow, that we have developed for metadata creation of the historical SpokenWeb collections, and develop a new set of protocols and beta tools for discovery and use of recent, born-digital entities.

Our research will begin to establish a new archive of the online literary event. Solutions for the creation of such an archive are necessary if we are to understand the new meanings of digital presence (both temporal and existential) that inform and characterize literary (and, potentially, other forms of) performance since COVID-19.

We propose an innovative digital development project as a means of establishing and sharing a new open-access digital archive for interdisciplinary research. Our practical objectives are to yield new awareness among literary curators and practitioners of the importance of creating linked open data for the AV documentation they produce.

We will also map out a set of descriptive processes, beta systems and interfaces that will incorporate this linked data into a grassroots, archival, discovery and presentation system of wide impact and use. We aim to provide the archival structure and methods necessary to make this important phase in the history of literary performance available for study by curators, artists and researchers.

The current Swallow metadata ingest system provides a user-friendly interface for cataloguing and aggregating metadata describing diverse audio-visual document types held at multiple sources. A pared down and adapted version of schema fields will function as the data collection backend for the user-testing, training and interface design we will pursue.

Through SpokenWeb we have identified required functionalities that need to be developed, namely: i) a public search interface, and ii) a public access Application Programming Interface (API) to be used for ingestion of Swallow metadata by content management systems that facilitate the discovery and web presentation of the metadata and related audiovisual media. We will pursue a multidisciplinary human-centered design approach to developing these extensions of Swallow.