 So I am, as Lucy just said, a senior lecturer at QCA in Brisbane, I'm also in that capacity I'm coming out of a career as an artist and designer in the U.S., so my terminal degree in the U.S. is an MFA. I'm also currently getting a Ph.D. at Griffith in museum studies, so moving sort of closer into the institutional back end of this field. My previous work has been around largely artistic or design installations working with museums or independently on activating and making affective local history for local audiences. Right now what I'm working on through the State Library in Queensland is working more with the catalogue, with the archive of the John Oxley collection there, and working on the back end to make those existing materials and any future materials they might collect more accessible, more described, and more usable by a wider variety of Queensland audiences. So the Middle House of Scholarship in Residence was founded just a couple of years ago to develop new ideas, tools and strategies and services to benefit GLAM and the State Library of Queensland, so no pressure. The phrase that I cut describes me as a thought leader, which I thought I would cut because I hate that phrase, but I do have thoughts. So what I'm going to do in this talk is just sort of speed walk through a sort of conceptual framework or why this seemed to me to be an interesting research area and why I think the catalogue, as I've encountered it as an independent researcher, can benefit from some redesign in accessibility and in description. So when I was applying for the Middle Houser, I of course talked to a bunch of people there, and Robin Hamilton, who's the lead of collection building, in other words acquisitions, said something that has been stuck with me, basically I've thought about this every day since. The collection is only as accessible as the way we describe it. The John Oxley collection at SLQ funds several different fellowships, some of whom, like me, are working on sort of the back end strategies and concerns, some of whom are researching historical stories to find what materials are in the John Oxley collection and bring those forward to the public. And what the SLQ staff, curators and archivists often say is we want you to tell us what's in our collection. Because often all they know is the tiny bits of metadata that came with whatever acquisition details they have. Nobody's looked in these boxes for 50 years in some cases. They want to know, they want interested and educated people to find out what's there and make not just the materials, but the descriptions of the materials more effective. So again, just going to sort of speed walk through the base concerns that I think most everybody in the room is aware of. Creating a museum experience or front end experience that includes more affect as well as information to create an interface for objects so that the context between the public, between the viewer and the object itself has its own immediate vibrancy in life. Object that's most basic can be described primarily in sound culture as the way the two bodies interact with each other. Specifically in sound. A sound is generated from one object and that literally vibrates you, it vibrates in your ear or even in your clothing if it's loud enough. So an affect is the physical effect that an object or an environment has on you. And so what we see in museums often is objects that for very good reasons are cut off, are decontextualized not only from their source, but from the viewer. You're not allowed to touch or interact with objects for their own good, but that also means that you're cut off quite a bit from what makes that object an object, from its tactility, from its weight, from its texture. So one question is how can this affect be reinvigorated in the experience of objects in a collection? Not just about sounds, but about any object. For my own purposes, thinking about affect, which is an intensely personal, physical, individual phenomenon, a first question is how does affect work when you're thinking about events that you weren't there for? This isn't a sense memory that I have of my childhood. This is me looking at an object that predates my birth, something that speaks to a history that I inherit, but that I'm not literally physically a part of. The concept that I use there is Huizinga's historical sensation. Huizinga was a Dutch sociologist who worked on that feeling that we have when we encounter an object of duration, an object that's been there for, let's say, thousands of years, or even just hundreds, and that we suddenly realize, my gosh, this object has been there. This object has existed through all the periods between that time that I've read about and mine, that it's like a dipstick traveling through time, and connecting me physically to a place and a time in the past. I'll try to go on as few tangents as possible, but this is an important one. My parents are archaeologists, which is how I come by this, specifically Near Eastern archaeologists. So my mother spent a lot of her career traveling around the world, reading cuneiform tablets, which I thought was intensely boring. But once I was holding a tablet that she was like, I picked it up and looked at it, and I realized that there was a thumbprint on the side of it, which is not, you don't usually look at, like, you don't see photos of the sides of an object. But there was a thumbprint right where my thumb was, and I thought, what, that 3,500 years ago, somebody held this just like I'm holding it, like another human being occupied the same space around this object that I'm holding it now. And that was an intensely powerful moment for me. That thing became, as another death sociologist, Runia said, alarmingly present. So this is thinking about objects not just as bodies of information about the past, but of, as relics that negotiate affect transactions that create some kind of living awareness of the past. How is it possible to do this in an archival setting? In other words, objects, and I would say this not quite as a definition, but objects have the capacity not just to articulate meaning, but to embody it. And so the issue becomes how do we mediate and provide access to that object in a productive way to create that sense of effect, in particular, in a lot of collections, objects are tangible echoes of the past, but we can't touch them. This is an image from a show at Queensland Museum in 2016 called This Is My Heritage, in which Indigenous Queensland artists were invited as investigators into the Queensland Museum's archives of objects, of Indigenous objects, to find one that spoke to them and to then speak about, to tell the story of what this meant to them, what memories or knowledge or history derived from them, for them out of this object. This is Shenoa Demol holding a fire stick and talking about the intense sense memories that it gives her of her childhood, of the smell of sitting around the fire, of talking with her grandfather or her grandfather teaching her to make fire sticks. And it's a very effective story, but another affective thing for me just about this image is, of course, the white gloves, because she's not allowed to touch this object that is giving her such intense sense memories. So what we often say is that these objects are representing the past, so they're serving a certain imaginative function, and our function in museums is to find a way to activate the imagination, even the physical imagination, the affective imagination that can come across with these images. And there is both a promise and a danger in using digital tools to do this. This is Plymouth Rock, or in theory, it's a part of Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock is one of America's founding mythical objects. It's where the pilgrims supposedly landed in the 17th century. There are lots of questions around whether every piece of rock that claims to be from Plymouth Rock is a piece of Plymouth Rock. It would be the size of Manhattan if that were true. Did the pilgrims actually land there? Nobody mentioned it until about 50 years later, et cetera, et cetera. But you look at this rock and you think, oh, Plymouth Rock, this is America right here. This is a tangible that I can't touch, but it's a tangible section of America's founding myth. And digital technology on the face of it, at least, and we all know this stuff, I hope, allows us more and greater interactions through a more apparently accessible sort of mediation. So this is a high-res 3D scan done by the British Museum of the Rosetta Stone so that anybody can look at it and rotate it around. You can, as I did with that cuneiform tablet, look at the side and look at the back. You can see lots of different aspects of the Rosetta Stone that, like, even most people don't have access to the front of the Rosetta Stone except in maybe a bad print illustration from a childhood textbook. Now you can see the back. You can see the sides. You can see it well. You can't really see the bottom because there's some digital damage there that happened with the scanning technique. So on the one hand, this seems like a very powerful access tool. You can zoom right in and see the texture up to a point. On the other hand, and this is the criticism, of course, of digital reproduction and digital accessibility, you're still not touching it, right? And the materiality that you're seeing here is the digital materiality. The digital materiality has its own nature, its own sense. And so what I'm seeing here is like this stuff. What I'm seeing here is where the sides don't quite match up and you get this kind of very digital 3D landscaping sort of effect. So on the one hand, a powerful access tool. But on the other hand, creates its own interface, creates its own blockage between the artifact and the person. So not as transparent as previous or as some evangelicals, digital evangelicals would like to claim. So how can we navigate these digital tools in a way that's productively creating affect? One group of people or one set of investigators who have tried to hammer on this are contemporary artists and particular installation artists who have been reacting to what Hal Foster, the art critic, calls the archival impulse. The impulse in a lot of contemporary artists to look at archives, to use archived materials and collections as their material and not just to make work that reacts to that material like painting a historical figure, but making work out of the archive, like just literally posting investigative materials on the walls of the gallery. You'll see this kind of strategy more and more. So there's a big move now in contemporary art to take the archive, to take our intense feeling that more and more information around us is archived and collected and is available in large data sets and to figure out what to do with that. How can we make all of that information creative and interpretable in an art context? Part of what I'm wondering is, can we take a look at those strategies that I, for instance, have been working with in the past few years and return them to the archive and say, is there a way to take some of these strategies and move them back into working specifically with the archive? I'll leave Baruch alone for a minute. But what strategies, in other words, can make the edges of the archive more porous without damaging objects or without damaging the things that are there in the archive? How can we make those objects at least somewhat more accessible and more affective? Now, I haven't talked about sound yet, which is the basis of my research, and that's partly because sound is a relatively new concern of mine. I got into sound because it seemed like a very pragmatically useful way to think about history, to think about what we can access about the past and what we can't access about the past. Sound is an immediate affective memory trigger. Everybody has had the experience of hearing something or, better yet, of smelling something and being suddenly transported back to the past. It doesn't just remind you of the past. It seems to erase that boundary between you and the past and casts you into a memory. At the same time, sound is one of the least accessible things about the past because it literally does not last. A sound is created, reverberates in the air for a little while, and then unless it's recorded, vanishes. It's gone again. Even if it is recorded, you've got as a recording of a sound which is removed from its original auditory place, from its original space, and so forth. So sounds seem to me to be a very interesting material, both as that immediate physical connection to a past experience and as a reminder of everything that's gone about the past, everything that we can't access, the immediate physical feeling of what the past was like. For instance, one sociologist describes the sound or describes people describing the sound of patents. Patents were the large platforms that women used to wear on their shoes in the 18th century so that they when they were walking through muddy streets to keep their shoes out of the mud. For whatever reason, like long, big platforms like this, for whatever reason, British women wore platins out of metal. So they made this ungodly clattering sound as women, as upper class women were sort of walking around the streets of London, which all foreign visitors mentioned. Like it was sort of one of the sensory associations with London was the sound of clattering women sort of tottering around on these large platforms made of metal and making this strange clanging noise. That's completely gone now. You know, we can hear people describing it, but we have no idea what that actually sounded like, what London in that sense meant to people. So on the one hand, sound is completely violating of boundaries. We can't block it out. You all there, you can look away at your phones, but you can't just decide to stop hearing me. I'm constantly present in your ear. And then on the other hand, that sound does fade away eventually. Now, what I'm primarily interested in then is the sound of everyday life, the sound that objects make, the sound that rooms make when we're in them, the sounds that the outdoors make. And this is not largely the way that sound has been recorded throughout the history of recorded sound and the way it's treated in archives. Usually it's treated either diegetically in historical reconstruction. And we all know those, you know, just sort of like often foleying or using sound effects to reconstruct an understanding of how the past sounded or linguistic in the sense of oral histories, performances, etc. What I was curious about in coming to the State Library, the John Oxley Collection, was thinking about sound experience as historical material in itself, sound as the sounds of the past as objects almost in a curatorial sense. Can we understand them? Can we experience them and can we learn from them in that way? Just a step very quickly through a couple of, very quickly, through a couple of this very quickly because my sound seems not to be working now. Oh, well, oh, there it is. Can you hear that? Just barely. This is one of my inspirations was an old project from the U.S. called the American Dialect Recording Project in which people went around recording people reading things, not not talking, not telling stories, not doing anything. I think just often they chose what to read, but sometimes they didn't choose to read, just had them read a particular thing. So you can just barely hear that. But this is a woman in the 1960s, I think, from Charleston, South Carolina, so low country Carolinas speaking in a way that is immediately recognizable to anybody who's ever been to the Carolinas. And I guess I should say at this point there are many, many more regional accents in the U.S. than in almost any other English speaking country, except possibly Britain, because that's where it all started in terms of English. So there, like I used to work in North Carolina and there were people from the West of the state who would make fun of the accent of people from the East of the state is that it can be that regional. And so this is a sense in which culture is born not by what people say. Culture is born not by what the stories that they have, or their biographies. Culture is born literally by how they sound, what their language sounds like. And if I do have time, I want to mention briefly that idea of the sound of language, how what soundscapes are like in different countries and different, and I'll just mention briefly now, very in a very heightened way because this is the year of Indigenous languages internationally, which languages count as part and get to be part of the soundscape of a particular place. So there are two different kinds of basically the ways that sounds, historical sounds got represented. And I will mention them both very briefly. One is that affective, almost traumatic memory where a sound that you hear reminds you of a sound that you have heard so physically and so immediately that it transports you back to that time. The most obvious example is examples of trauma like World War II air raid sirens. And this is something that actually was true of my grandmother, who is Dutch. She lived through World War II in the Netherlands. And decades later, after she'd moved to the U.S., she heard one siren one time in I think the 70s that sounded exactly like an air raid siren. And the next thing she knew, she had dived under a table. She just could not, like her body could not differentiate between the present time and the past time. So that immediate sense of not just a memory, but a breaking down the barriers of time. But we also of course, often don't have, like she couldn't have, like she couldn't literally reproduce that sound for me. What she did was describe it. And this is often also a way that we describe the past to each other is by describing sounds, by acting them out for each other. Or making that whatever that sound is with our voices. And this, as I've gone along, this has become, if anything, the most interesting part of this sound exploration. I started out thinking, okay, what sounds does a library have? I became much more interested in, okay, what sounds do people talk about when they're talking about the past? And I'll go into that in a bit. Well, I'll go into it right now, in fact. So what I've done is I'm going through all of this John Oxley's audio visual materials. Something that happens when you go through their audio visual materials. So you'll do a search through one search, their Daughty public search engine. I've searched for work, because I'm interested in the sound of work. Audio visual materials in the John Oxley collection and musicals come up, Keith Urban songs come up. Every once in a while, a piece of historical stuff will come up. And it's really up to the vagaries of time whether sound is mentioned in the description at all, whether it says that it has sound. It'll say 16 millimeter, in which case it doesn't have sound because 16 millimeter doesn't bear sound, oh, actually eight millimeter doesn't bear sound. 16 millimeter might, 35 millimeter usually does. If you don't know that, I was a filmmaker long ago. If you don't happen to know that, then you're just like, well, it could have sound. It might not. It's in a box somewhere in the building. I could request it and also request their ancient projector. Somebody will have to blow off dust off of it and I'll have to have somebody sit there and wind up the projector and make it work. So what I found was that a lot of the sound was opaque behind these one line descriptions. So it was impossible to get at whether those field sounds were there or not. So I created what I thought I would do when I started this fellowship in June was to start doing an audit of all of their audio visual materials, all of their sounds, listen to a bunch of stuff and say, okay, this is what this sound has. This is the sound that this film has. These are the sounds that you can hear and so forth. What I ended up doing first was to build myself some software tools to be able to do this. And this is where the nature of the middle house that comes in, really it's about creating methodologies and strategies for other people to work. Rather than working with one search itself which has its limitations, you can tag and things yourself. This allows me to split off my own collection, do some searches and something that I'm, I don't know if any non-researchers will ever think this is as cool as I do. But when you do a search, it highlights for me the results but also keeps showing the non-results. Which is important in the sense of like all of, scraping all of this metadata because sometimes there are edge cases that don't get caught in the basic search that you've done. So I like to see the non-results as well as the results. Having isolated these results, I'm now creating a database where I'm going through, this is a video made by Gary Maloney in the 1990s about his hometown, Palin Creek, about an hour southwest of Brisbane. And identifying basically all of the sounds of different kinds. And I've created a demo which you also will not be able to hear. But this is the more sort of back-end interface where I'm saying, okay, here's where the sound is, here's what it is. This is just playing all of those sounds in order. I went on too long. But the point that I wanna make is that Gary Maloney made this in documentary in the 90s about his home, about where he lived and about the ways that it was changing. And he talks a lot during it. What I've done is cut out all of the interviews, all of the him talking and focused just on the field recording of the sounds as he decided what to play and what to include. And this actually becomes very revealing, I think, to me. It becomes revealing because of its context. And this is an important concept in how to label and record sound. I'm identifying what the area of sound is, what the field recording actually is, and the narrative context that makes that interesting. And I'm able to do this because I'm working from a documentary in this case. The red cedars used to cover the hills around this point. The lumber industry moved in, cut them all down. The lumber industry was a boom industry for about a generation, maybe two. And then all the red cedars were dead. So the lumber industry moved away again. So this is both footage and the sound of the lone red cedar left in the Palin Creek area. They don't grow anymore because of a parasite, a bug that sort of makes them very difficult to maintain. So this, to me, is one example of a sound that is the sound of Gary Maloney remembering. It's the sound of him remembering his childhood, the things that he wanted to show us about his childhood home. It's also the sound of what was missing even then. Like the sound of the red cedars covering the hills is inherently different from the sound of the single red cedar sitting in open plains. And this brings up the last important point, the very, very last important point, which is that I talked about both recorded sounds that was recorded on site and described sound, the way that people describe sound after the fact. There's also a sense of missing sound, the sound that isn't there in, for instance, silent film, and that we can only, or that I can only guess at what it was like. And this, my hope for future rounds of this particular tool is that we move first from me building the tool in order to see, essentially I'm making a research tool by doing the research that the research tool is required to do and seeing what about the research is required for the tool and then I build the tool in reaction. After that, I want to work with specific researchers and say, okay, can we find things, stories to work on? And after that, I want to open it up to the public and say, okay, how can we start to fill in these descriptions? How can we open it up to the public and say, for instance, as in one of the state libraries, other projects, what can you tell us about this? What are the stories? What are the tags? What can you tell us about the sound? Do you, in particular, as an individual, recognize this place and what are the sounds that you can tell us about? Okay. And that's it.