Archives, Intimacy, Embodiment: Encountering the Sound Subject in the Literary Archive
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Archives, Intimacy, Embodiment:Encountering the Sound Subject in the Literary Archive Julia Polyck-O'Neill (bio) It is february 2022. I am working in Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University (sfu), newly reopened after a long closure due to the global covid-19 pandemic. It is my first time physically in an archive since well before March 2020 when most physical institutional spaces were closed as part of widespread public health measures. The space is quiet and quite warm, as the entire floor is enclosed, externally enveloped in a white waterproof, protective membrane defending against the pervasive Vancouver rain. This makes the space feel even more alien and isolated from the rest of campus, which itself is much quieter than usual due to the pandemic. The microclimate is womblike and slightly oppressive in its lack of air circulation; a pervasive sense of stillness and envelopment heightens the experience of being in this space. These effects dramatize my activity in the chambers of the collections and allows for a sense of sharpened focus. I am looking at the Lisa Robertson fonds in person for the first time. More importantly, I am listening in the Lisa Robertson fonds for the first time. The addition of sonic, vocal layers in the form of sound recordings to an archival collection contributes meaningfully to what Linda Morra calls the "affective economies" (after Sara Ahmed) of the archive, which are [End Page 47] "shaped by the effects of encounters … and by reorientation(s) between subject and object" (2). As Jason Camlot observes in Phonopoetics, hearing a recording of a subject in an archival setting can also be a "strangely real" encounter, developing "an experience of real-time processing" that few other media can reproduce (3). The sensory aspects of sound in the archives have the potential to create a sense of proximity not commonly found in conventional textual archives, which are generally imagined to be near-silent spaces for monastic contemplation. Additionally, sound, as an aural medium, has a unique relationship to performance, which registers a form of embodiment for the listener and leads to a sense of intangible and nuanced, embodied reception. Building a sense of closeness and immediacy between the archive-user and the research object or subject, sound recordings generate new forms of intimacy and connection, enabling the user to access nuanced details otherwise obfuscated or overlooked in conventional literary archives. Considering the archive according to Julietta Singh's proposition that "the archive is a stimulus between myself and myself" (26), this essay will reflect on my time spent working with Lisa Robertson's archives. Recounting recent theorizations of sound as both object and material for the archive, I consider how the addition of sound recordings enables archive-users to access and reconsider the literary research subject as a "subject," a complex being that exists beyond the confines of texts and textual records. This allows for further examination of how what Katherine McLeod terms "a proximity to voice" (128) enriches the experience of encountering the subject in the archive by unconcealing aspects of embodiment while adding affective and uncanny dimensions to the encounter. Special Collections To look at and listen to the Lisa Robertson fonds in sfu's collections, I first needed special permission from Robertson. Within the fonds description, the "Terms of Governing Access" (2022) state that "With the exception of published materials and related ephemera, and proofs and page proofs of subsequently published manuscripts, access to papers and notebooks is restricted to researchers who have obtained permission from Lisa Robertson, as long as she is still living" (Fortier, Zerkee, and Wieland 4).1 Seeing as we have worked together in the past and are on amicable terms, she granted permission readily, even offering to accompany me in my journey [End Page 48] through her materials as needed from a distance, although she warned me, as warmly as possible, that some of the materials I had been hoping to examine are confidential and off limits to all, possibly until well after her death, or possibly forever. This made sense, as she is only sixty years of age, and many of the documents in her files represent intimate ties...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".