Tucson Standard

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 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 started Voca in 2012 to make new readings accessible online and digitize historical recordings over time.

"I am thrilled to be able to announce the completion of this comprehensive captioning program for Voca. By captioning the entire historical archive, as well as all new recordings going forward, the Poetry Center will help to set a new standard of web accessibility for literary archives," said Sarah Kortemeier, the Poetry Center Library director. "This was an urgent priority for the Poetry Center Library and an important step forward in our work toward greater equity of access to library collections. I am deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their partnership on this project and their commitment to justice-oriented projects like this one."

About six million words were added to the archive in plain-text .vtt files. Search engines index such files, allowing items in the Voca archive to appear in search engine results. The .vtt file syncs with recordings via either captions or an auto-scrolling transcript.

At least 25 languages are spoken on Voca. Poetry Center staff and docents assisted with transcriptions in Italian, Chinese and Spanish; Kortemeier consulted native speakers for Hebrew, Czech and Arabic; she also used her own language training for German, Japanese, French, Latin and classical and modern Greek translations.

During the project several "lost" recordings previously unknown to center staff were discovered. Archivist Julie Swarstad Johnson found an extra recording of a reading by poet Ai from 1972 that had gone undigitized due to a dating error on the original media.

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

The Poetry Center is reportedly the first among its peers to attempt such a comprehensive transcription and captioning project for a historical literary audiovisual archive according to Tyler Meier, executive director of the center.

"The most exciting thing about this captioning project is the way in which it welcomes everyone into the archive. It helps us tell the broadest possible story about 20th- and 21st-century poetry in an extraordinary new way," Meier said. "Access and excellence have always been hallmarks of the Poetry Center's work. The next strategic direction at the Poetry Center will focus on belonging; this project braids together those three threads."

Voca also presents new possibilities for digital humanities research according to Kortemeier.

The center's Poetry Centered podcast began during the pandemic to share poetry recordings while live readings paused; it has evolved into an ongoing tour of the Voca archive where guest poets curate poems from it each episode.

Amanda Kraus executive director of Disability Resource Center commended these efforts: "Captions will enable anyone to access these important works without needing to request an accommodation," she said. "The completion of this major undertaking is a true testament to universal design."