Spoken Word Project

Learning necessitates classified, authoritative information. Thus libraries are a defining feature of universities - the core of the discourse we call learning. That's where The Spoken Word Project is rooted. A libraries project. But it uses the 'socio-text' capacities of the technologies of the web. Part of an international programme - Digital Libraries in the Classroom - it is funded to exploit the use of remote digital libraries for undergraduate learning.

Every day libraries of new electronic 'objects' - from video to e-journals - are created, and non-digital forms, from great works of art to engineering drawings, are digitized. The Spoken Word starts with 'sound archives' where the limitations of 'traditional' audio formats have been considerable. Taming the immense and growing aggregation of recorded sound is dauntingly difficult and only digital technologies hold the promise of being able to do that.

Scholarly work - from student essays to learned papers - is increasingly digital.  Currently 'word processed' but increasingly 'web edited' it already cites electronic references. But it can cite electronic repositories directly. Here's Clement Atlee, the then (Labour) prime minister in 1948. In my Word document it is 'clickable' and i get a 15 minute talk.

So "gee whiz!"... but it's not yet quite there. I cited you a manageable chunk 'clipped' from an example ready to use. No serious searching and retrieval. And this paper magazine does not play you the audio! Writing "on and for the internet" and in a social context needs more. The Spoken Word group team are working on it in H241. We hope to interest you.