Recorded Poetry: University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Voca Archive Adds More Than 12,000 Caption Files to Recordings Dating to 1963

From the U. of Arizona:

The University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Voca archive of recorded poetry readings is now accompanied by digitized captions, making one of the world’s major poetry audiovisual archives fully accessible and searchable.

The project, started in 2021 with a $135,000 Mellon Foundation Public Knowledge grant, has created one of the largest captioned digital poetry archives in the English language, with more than 12,000 caption files. The archive includes audio and video recordings by more than 1,000 poets who have participated in the center’s Reading & Lecture Series, a campus poetry reading series, since 1963.

The Voca collection features recordings from four Nobel Laureates, 28 U.S. Poets Laureates, 45 Pulitzer Prize winners and 40 National Book Award winners, as well as a broad range of voices, including Indigenous, Black, Asian American, Latino, LGBTQIA+ and other writers. The Poetry Center, part of the College of Humanities, started Voca in 2012, making new readings accessible online and, over time, digitizing the entire collection of historical recordings as well.

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During the project, several “lost” recordings, previously unknown to center staff, were discovered, Kortemeier said. Archivist and outreach librarian Julie Swarstad Johnson even discovered, digitized and uploaded an extra recording of a reading by poet Ai in 1972 that had previously gone undigitized due to a dating error on the original media.

The transcription and captioning took tens of thousands of hours of work by Poetry Center staff, student interns, professional transcribers and web developers, who redesigned the Voca website from scratch to include caption and transcript functionality.

Learn More, Read the Complete Announcement

Direct to Voca

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Awards, Funding, Lecture, News, Video Recordings