pembroke fb group is a serious community around which people organize their lives and memory. I am not able to take that away from them.
what is my relation to memory? Obviously immediately nana; she is like baba, helping me so much by her own volition - but what else? the fb group... what else?
Maps may be different, but not necessarily disruptive since they come from the same cartographic tradition. Just because it is older, does not necessarily mean it is different.
given machine and impact
I also have to be careful not to get kicked out of the Pembroke group for advertising my page too much; need to give back to community.
I am finding more and more how small my publics are that I interact with.
open access controls narrative: use what I can find based on availability. Pembroke Observer difficult to navigate, ottawa citizen is digitized (not that observer is somehow gold standard or infallible)... -- people help but they also want to see what I've dug up.
It's not the best map; at this point now I could build a better one from scratch. But I learned. And I worked with someone else's code. And I learned how to build up another person's code with my own problems - to add to it
Ethical decision: how do I represent the sound of protests? Will record my own voice and others on a sound background of ambient crowd using pickets from photographs, newspaper articles.
Synchresis: creating a soundscape for memory.
Not entirely accessible. I have failed here.
File Organization and digital preservation - machine and human readable, file types, directories made, etc. Used CDN online instead of local files.
From A relaunch for the Pembroke fibreboard plant “I think tourism and forestry can get along,” he said closing with a stark warning. “If they close Algonquin Park these boards won't be here to supply all over the world.” Reminds me of being in Algonquin park and feeling entirely separate from the world immersed in quiet. When one morning over the ridge, all I hear is a chainsaw and people working. It shook me from my understanding of the land. It gave me an uneasy feeling that those sounds are ominously present. My understanding of the landscape changed immediately. I am not here passing a value judgment through that experience. Rather, I want you to understand the affect sound can have. Sounding ruins: reflections on the production of an ‘audio drift’ describes how sound can change place and bodily movements. However, we risk approaching these as 'historical tourists'. Speaking phenomenologically, I don't know how to get around this - I don't think we can. It is an entanglement in history since our own experience is mapped onto others'.
My map fails to produce sound in a way other than digital output, so sound is not felt, etc as it is in person. There are no rumbles, changes to body and environment the same way.You still get those changes, but I would argue they are minimal.
Mechanical limitation of map: some companies change locations every several years. I would have to rewrite the map source to change that
Affect is in the sound. The text is rather 'factual'. A web page is silent. We don't immediately place sound on images or text (sound is placed differently by the imagination on a computer than real life?). Sound produces affect. I am gathering and employing sound clips honestly. What happens when you turn your sound off? What do you hear in the silences? This project is more a sonification of the past than recreating soundscapes because
I don't have to be the authority. I can say the trail ends here and petition others to help.
Having to rely on school's newspaper database, newspaper free trial, and searching microfilm is not exactly the open access we dream of. Open access should be about easy access to information. Using the observer online is not the best either because I cannot see each article in context. The graphical artefact has its meaning changed on a computer screen, being called by a server, presented in a new context with new styles, etc. Now, too I do not see ads or what others may see because of how my browser is set up. It is not just the information we are grabbing from these papers, but the context.
Maybe an Aboriginal Soundscape would not even focus on industry. Maybe that would not be as high priority as I have given it. The industrial history is not even as high a priority for many. However large that Facebook group is, only a small minority of the people interact with the group, and they are even a specific public within that community. The Facebook page has become about them.
I have realized that this soundscapes project reflect the theory of sound studies - sound is not isolated nor alone. It is entangled in perception. That is why I use it - though carefully - not in recreating a 'soundscape' but to trigger memory. My project focuses on memory and sound rather than acoustics of space and sound (explain sound bash) because I focus explicitly on producing affect related to memory. Not that acoustics and space cannot produce affect, but it is geared for a different experience of space over memory. To produce the same affect, I would have to create a sound walk in accessible places, triggered by geolocation.
Strikes not front page news in Pembroke newspapers. Newspapers are not the best sources, but in the records I have, they are some of the best. I piece together this history with photos, newspapers, government documents, maps; I begin to locate sound in space; yet this is all an act of historical imagination. I didn't find the neat history I was looking for of newspapers mentioning "the sounds of strikers were heard around the town today". It's not bad for historians to have assumptions - that is how we find patterns in our sources. However, historians cannot rely on assumptions. Assumptions can help us begin our work, but we cannot fit our history into those initial assumptions.
This project is not an attempt to recreate 'the' industrial soundscape of Pembroke. That is why I can apply ideas like synchresis. Rather, this project performs the past through sound to elicit memory and thus create community engagement. The framework was built to serve a community purpose: the code is all open; files, photographs, and sounds are all available to be viewed. I don't expect to 'get the sounds right'. I want, rather, to use this as a tool to begin exploring Pembroke's history. Thus it remains a very particularly crafted project.
In part, the representation of an industrial soundscape is a product of necessity and accessibility. I believe in the new sound studies practice of using sound within space to understand the environment rather than attempting to reconstruct a 'soundscape', as if hearing is a distinct reality attained solely through perceiving noise through one's ears. But these spaces are unavailable. And the factories that remain are inaccessible to me. I could still attempt a sound study of space, akin to a sound bash. For the spaces without factories nevertheless have distinct markings of task and are understood as places of dwelling (See Ingold: taskscape). But I want to study the relationship between sound and memory with my Pembroke stakeholders in mind. I do not want an abstract sound project, but a deliverable accessible to and with input from my stakeholders (much of that input being implicit in the Facebook group, talking to people, understanding my audience) that 'forefronts' sound to understand how listening impacts memory, and retains the potential to grow and change as people interact with the website. Ultimately, and with great aspiration, this project could be a practical pedagogical tool.