Abstract

Launched in 2005 and rebooted in 2022, the Fred Wah Digital Archive is a digital web project that intends to act as a living archive of the work of Fred Wah, including a new interview with the author. As a consequence of the poet’s interest in the sonic and phonetic aspects of language, the archive is uniquely reliant on audio archival as a means of preservation, and circulation. Highlighted in this recent interview, the relationship between audio and text records within mixed and multimedia preservation is interdependent. Audio records of an author’s performance of their own text are an opportunity to preserve not only a unique instance of a poetic performance, but to also be a reference for a poem’s otherwise ambiguous cadence and sound, similar to music’s relationship with sheet music. However, relative to text archives, audio archives necessitate an increased amount of labour in order to be made accessible. Limiting the most valuable preserved media to only an audience with the time and ability to parse long audio recordings of varying quality for those nuggets of information which they would find valuable is an obstacle not only to research, but to general public engagement with the archive. As such, the financial interests which intersect with this living archive must interrogate the degree to which the expenses of this increased labour are outweighed by its ultimately altruistic returns.