The University of Alberta and CKUA Radio have struck a partnership to explore the history of “literary radio” in the province.
Because Canada’s oldest public radio station was founded by the U of A in 1927 with an educational mission to “bring the university to the people,” much of its early content was literary, consisting of interviews with authors or lectures by professors of literature.
After the provincial government took over CKUA in 1945, the university continued to provide content for the station, mainly through its Department of Radio and Television.
Supported by a federal Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, U of A digital librarian Sean Luyk and Michael O’Driscoll of the Department of English and Film Studies plan to digitize, document, analyze and make available an archive of analogue literary radio recordings broadcast by CKUA between 1970 and 1994.
“CKUA’s early educational mandate had a big impact on the station we love today,” says O'Driscoll. “It remains a non-commercial broadcaster with an emphasis on a rare mix of entertainment and education.” The station celebrates its centenary next year.
Starting with CKUA as a case study, the researchers hope to later examine the role of Canadian campus and community radio programming in producing literary content — including interviews, expert opinion and analysis, discussions and performances of literary works — during the late 20th century, say O’Driscoll and Luyk.
Notable examples of historical literary radio programming at the U of A already available online include Voiceprint, a show on “speech, language, communications technology and literary arts in a changing world,” and Paper Tygers, which provided advice to “creative and working writers” and featured guest interviews and readings by iconic authors such as Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies. Both shows ran on CKUA in the early 1980s.
In 1983-84, historian Jars Balan hosted Celebrations, a year-long series of interviews with past writers-in-residence, who had gathered in Edmonton to celebrate the university’s 75th anniversary.
Digitized radiogenic programming — a term describing “literature written for radio, influenced by radio or ‘born radio’ in its deliberate exploitation of the medium” — will join a treasure trove of recorded lectures, interviews and live performances, all previously digitized and time stamped through a SSHRC-funded national partnership called SpokenWeb. Other historical AV files can be found on the U of A’s Aviary site.
The funding for SpokenWeb has now come to an end, says O’Driscoll. But over eight years it has led to the creation of a national network of literary sound archives, all available through an online portal called Swallow that provides the opportunity to search for about 7,000 hours of literary sound across the country.
“To date, scholarly treatments of literary radio in Canada are limited,” he says, adding that by tapping this historical resource, he and Luyk hope to diversify the range of voices represented in Canadian literature and ensure that content available to listeners, learners and researchers across the country is as inclusive as possible.