Blackwood talk in celebration of Folklore's 40th

by Janet Harron

David Blackwood, one of Canada's most respected visual storytellers -- and an honorary degree recipient from Memorial -- will give an illustrated public lecture on Thursday, Nov. 20, at 7 p.m., in the Great Hall of Queen's College at Memorial. During the talk, Dr. Blackwood will discuss how growing up in outport Newfoundland has shaped his work and his life. His talk is in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Department of Folklore at Memorial.

"David Blackwood is a dominant and charismatic force, not only within Canada but also in the international art scene," said Dr. Paul Smith, a professor in the Folklore department. "His work translates the sagas of Newfoundland's traditional culture and commemorates a way of life quite foreign to the majority of Canadians, let along the rest of the world. I speak for all my colleagues in folklore when I say we are thrilled that he is giving this talk in honour of the 40th anniversary of the founding of our department."

Dr. Blackwood's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with over 90 solo shows and scores of group exhibitions. He has been the subject of two major retrospective exhibitions and the National Film Board's Academy-Award nominated documentary film Blackwood.

His work may in found in virtually every major public gallery and corporate art collection in Canada, as well as in major private and public collections around the world, including the collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (at Windsor Castle) and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.

Seating for the Nov. 20th event is limited. To reserve a seat, please contact the Department of Folklore by calling 737-8402 or e-mailing folklore@mun.ca. Parking is available in Lot 19 in the front of Queen's College and on meters in adjacent parking areas.

Wooden Boat Building, continued

The Wooden Boat Building Conference in Winterton at the start of the month was a great success, but the committee has not been resting on their laurels. They have identified three key areas where work needs to continue:

1. Documenting the boatbuilding life of Mr. Henry Vokey.
2. Action as an Advocacy Group for the preservation of our forest resource and rights of bona fide boat builders to harvest boatbuilding timber.
3. Preserving the secrets locked up in the aging boats strewn across the province by creating an army of helpers through a Field Documentation Course specifically addressing the challenges of traditional wooden boats.

The third goal dovetails nicely with the training and standards goals of the ICH strategy, so keep tuned for future developments on that front.

You can see the Wooden Boat News, Issue 3 in pdf here.

Music in the Wrong Place: Disco Music in Quebec

Memorial University welcomes noted author and editor Dr. Will Straw for the second in this year’s Music, Media and Culture Lecture Series. He’ll deliver a special lecture on Thursday, Nov. 20, entitled Music in the Wrong Place: Disco Music in Quebec.

Through an analysis of artists and recordings, Dr. Straw will show how disco music found its place within a culture marked by an intense debate over language and its political meaning.

“In the late 1970s, the music industry trade magazine Billboard called Montreal one of the three international capitals of disco music,” said Dr. Straw, the author of more than 60 articles on film music, media and cultural studies and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Popular Music.

“Dance music flourished in Quebec during the late 1970s. I will focus on the career of Pierre Perpall, a disco recording artist sometimes called the ‘first Afro-Quebecois star’.”

The lecture begins at 7:30 p.m., in the Music, Media and Place Gallery in the Arts and Culture Centre, which is located in the northeast corner of the building.

The lecture is sponsored by the Memorial University’s Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media and Place (MMaP). The series showcases diverse research areas, approaches, and presentation styles in the field of music. The event is open to the public and is free of charge.

Parking is available in the Arts and Culture Parking Lot.

Dr. Straw is a professor in the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University. He is the author of the forthcoming book Popular Music: Scenes and Sensibilities, as well as more than 60 articles on film music,media, and cultural studies.

He is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Popular Music and serves on the editorial boards of numerous journals, including Screen and Theory and Critique.

His current research focuses on New York tabloid culture of the 1930s. Media agencies are invited to send representatives to this event.

The Memory Booth

Dale Jarvis and Chris Brookes murmur about Water Street

On November 13th, folklorist/storyteller Dale Jarvis and radio documentary producer Chris Brookes are turning the Crow’s Nest Officers Club into a memory booth for this November’s Storytelling Circle.

Just like a photo booth records photos, a memory booth will record memories! In this instance, we’ll collect your personal memories of Water Street. Pleasant, poignant, historical, hysterical, smelly, or sensual, we want them all. Do you have a memory of a taste, a vision, a shared kiss, a late night conversation, a holiday gift, a loss, a love, something that happened on Water Street? Come share!

We’ll be setting up a few mics, and recording whatever memories you want to share as part of bringing the fantastic [murmur] project to St. John’s.

What is [murmur]? Just listen…

[murmur] is a documentary oral history project that records stories and memories told about specific geographic locations. We’ll collect and make accessible people's personal histories and anecdotes about the places in their neighborhoods that are important to them. In each of these locations we’ll install a [murmur] sign with a telephone number on it that anyone can call with a mobile phone to listen to that story while standing in that exact spot, and engaging in the physical experience of being right where the story takes place. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze.

The stories we will record will range from personal recollections to more "historic" stories, or sometimes both -- but always are told from a personal point of view, as if the storyteller is just out for a stroll and was casually talking about their neighbourhood to a friend.

$3 at the door, listeners welcome!

Time and Place Date: Thursday, November 13, 2008
Time: 7:30pm - 9:30pm
Location: The Crow's Nest Officers Club
Street: Just beside the War Memorial, Duckworth Street
City/Town: St. John's, NL

Check out:

http://murmurtoronto.ca/ [murmur] Toronto

http://galway.murmur.ie/ [murmur] Galway

http://edinburgh.murmur.info/ [mumur] Edinburgh

Hooked on Digital Transcription

Back in August, I blogged about the possibility of using a USB footpedal and transcription software for doing transcriptions of digital material. You can read that blog post here

I found several online sources for the Infinity USB foot control, which I ended up purchasing through www.PCDictate.com. It retails for $58.50USD plus shipping (and plus another charge at customs) which brought it to around roughly $100CAD or so. I could find only one retailer locally, who did not have it in stock, though it was roughly the same price as having one shippped to Newfoundland from PCDictate.

The unit is pretty basic: three pedals and a USB cable. The pedal unit comes with no software of its own, so I installed the free PC Express Scribe Transcription Playback Software from NCH Software. Instructions for configuring the foot pedal using a handy installation wizard can be found on the NCH website.

Plugged in, and software installed, click Options/File Type to set the software to play whatever digital file type you need (I used MP3 for my test), then click the LOAD button on the software to load in your file.

I loaded in a copy of the interview I did with Red Bay, Labrador resident Alice Moores, who I blogged about here and whose interview you can listen to here. I opened up MS Word, and then transcribed a short bit of the interview, as follows:

***

DALE JARVIS: When your mother hooked rugs, what did she use them for?

ALICE MOORES: Traditionally rugs were hooked for the Grenfell mission, and most of the rugs that she did, she did for that, but they also did rugs that they put on the floor as well, just rugs to throw down around. Mostly what I would see my mother make is poked mats.

DJ: OK, so what is the difference?

AM: Well, those two types of mats are very fine as you can see. [ALICE INDICATES MATS SHE HAD PRESENT DURING THE INTERVIEW]. The traditional Grenfell mat is hooked with a silk material, or t-shirts or whatever they could find, but the poked mat was just large pieces of rag poked through large holes in large brin. So they would just take a hook which didn’t have the hook on the top, but was just straight, and they would poke the piece of material through the hole, so that it was tight. It wouldn’t come back, but it would have long pieces of rag on the top. And so that, they would throw on the floor. But those here were more used, or more hooked to be used as displays, or people put it on their chests, or things like that. Sometimes it was used on the floors but not often.

DJ: And where would people get the brin?

AM: The brin I guess was found… I’m not sure where they would find the brin, back then. I guess it was potato sacks and some of it, well, first when the mats were being made it came about because of Sir Wilfred Grenfell, who thought it would be a good way for the women to add to the income of the household, because the men were doing what they could with the fishing, and he found that this was a way that the women could, in the beginning, get clothes for their children. Because what was happening was, people were very poor and it was very difficult to be able to get things for their families. So they would do the mats for Sir Wilfred Grenfell and the Grenfell Mission and in turn they would send in clothes and different things the women could use for their children. Now a little bit later they started to get paid for them. And so he would send in materials and probably in the beginning he was sending in the brin as well, but then as time went on they probably used potato sacks and they would wash those out and clean them up, and they would use that.

***

All in all, a very handy combination of tools for anyone transcribing oral history/intangible cultural history interviews. One note: you do NOT need the foot pedal to use the software. You can load a file into the software, and then use hotkeys in place of the footpedals (F9 for play, F4 for stop, etc). For researchers and students on a budget, you can simply use the software without having to purchase a foot pedal, though for longer transcriptions, I can see where the foot pedal is useful. I got the hang of it very quickly, and know I'll be using it for interviews. The NCH transcription software runs in the background as you type, so you can use whatever word processing/blogging/email software you want to enter your transcriptions into.

Young Storytellers at The Lantern: A Concert of Young Voices Telling Tales

The provincial ICH strategy recognizes, as a guiding principle, that the inclusion of multiple voices, including those of youth, is important in all work relating to Intangible Cultural Heritage. Intangible Cultural Heritage is kept alive and is relevant to a culture only if it is regularly practiced and handed down from one generation to the next. One of the key areas we must address as our work with ICH continues is the inclusion of youth in our thinking, planning, and celebration of our living traditions.

Over the past two years, storyteller Mary Fearon and I have been working on a youth storytelling project at Holy Cross Elementary in St. John’s. In 2008, Mary worked with grades K-3, while I worked with grade 4-6. Students in the younger grades worked with Mary on rhymes, stories and story songs, and then also worked with puppetry intern Darka Erdelji to develop shadow puppet plays based on nursery rhymes.

Students in grades 4-6 worked on traditional folktales and local legends, learning the basics of how to tell a story. For the second year in a row, the usual public speaking competition was replaced with storytelling, as kids competed at the classroom level in their telling of traditional material, from memory.

This past weekend, I gave a workshop on Intangible Cultural Heritage at the annual meeting the Museum Association of Newfoundland and Labrador (MANL) in St. Paul’s, Gros Morne. Concerns were raised about including youth, and what some participants saw as threats posed by new technology.

My response was to talk about the Holy Cross Storytelling project, where kids were introduced to traditional storytelling, but which also made sure that new technologies were embraced. At the end of the project, many of the stories were collected in digital MP3 format, and podcasted on the web. They are available for download at http://holycrosselementary.blogspot.com.

Programs to share traditional knowledge, art and craft with the youth of Newfoundland and Labrador could truly help some of our youth find their passion and make it work for them, and for the good of our communities. Incorporating public performance, digital technology, and new media helps to maintain traditional ways of doing things while keeping it current and more meaningful to youth.

Tomorrow night (Thursday, October 23, 2008), ten youth from Newfoundland, all under 17, will take part in the St. John’s Storytelling Festival, including five of my students from Holy Cross. The young storytellers also include Tamsyn & Naomi Russell, daughters of Newfoundland fiddler Kelly Russell, and granddaughters of the late Ted Russell of Pigeon Inlet fame. They will take the main stage at The Lantern on Barnes Road, and show that while traditions may change and evolve, storytelling is far from a dying art.

Young Storytellers at The Lantern: A Concert of Young Voices Telling Tales
Thursday Oct. 23
The Lantern
35 Barnes Road, St. John's
7:00 p.m.
Tickets $5 regular / $2 student

Registration Closed for David Taylor workshop

Response to the November 3rd workshop with David Taylor has been incredibly positive, so much so that we are now at capacity, with a waiting list. If you have not yet registered, but want your name placed on the waiting list, please email me at ich@heritagefoundation.ca

Planning Cultural Documentation Projects: A Practical Workshop

On Monday, November 3, David A. Taylor, from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, will lead a practical, three-hour workshop on how to develop plans for cultural documentation projects.

He will take participants through the process of planning a project, addressing such factors as the identification of its goals, primary focus, financial requirements, and available resources, as well as the selection of documentation equipment and techniques, the use of consent forms, the development of products derived from documentary materials, and the organization and preservation of sound recordings, photographs and other materials generated through field research.

This workshop will be beneficial to people who are contemplating cultural documentation projects of all sorts, ranging from short-term projects involving a single researcher to complex, long-term projects involving many researchers.

“Proper attention to planning is crucial for the success of any cultural-documentation project,” says Taylor. “As well, if funds are needed to carry out a project, the presence of a clear, detailed and logical plan is very often a crucial factor in determining whether applications for grants are successful.”

The workshop, which is being sponsored by the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador, will be held on Monday, November 3, from 1:00 to 4:00 pm, at The Lantern, 35 Barnes Road, St. John's. Those wishing to participate should contact Dale Jarvis, Intangible Cultural Heritage Development Officer, at 1-888-739-1892 ext2 or email ich@heritagefoundation.ca in order to reserve a spot.

The deadline for registration is October 30th. There is no charge for the workshop.

About David Taylor

Dr. David A. Taylor is the head of research and programs at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. His work includes planning and carrying out research projects and public programs concerned with American, ethnic, regional, and occupational cultures; providing technical and reference assistance to cultural institutions and individual researchers; presenting public lectures about American traditional culture; and leading the Center’s research and programs unit. He also serves as the head of acquisitions for the Center's Archive of Folk Culture, the nation's first archive devoted to traditional life and, with over four million items in its collection, one of the largest repositories of its kind in the world. He is the founder and director of the Center's annual field school for cultural documentation, which was launched in 1994. He has directed a number of team-based, multi-disciplinary, field-documentation projects for the Center, including the “Italian-Americans in the West Project,” the “Maine Acadian Cultural Survey,” and the “Working in Paterson Project.” He has served as a member of the United States delegation to the World Intellectual Property Organization's intergovernmental committee on folklore, traditional knowledge and genetic resources.

Taylor’s areas of specialization include field-research methodology, material culture, maritime culture, and occupational culture. In addition to his work for the Center, he has carried out independent field research on these topics in Maine, Florida, Newfoundland, and Norway. He is an expert on traditional watercraft, and is proud of the fact that his field research and writing served as the basis for the creation of the award-winning Winterton Boat Building and Community Museum, in Winterton, Trinity Bay, Newfoundland. Outside of his work at the American Folklife Center, Taylor is involved with research and writing about European and American decorative arts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

He holds a B.A., in anthropology, from the University of Maine, and an M.A. and a Ph.D., both in folklore, from Memorial University of Newfoundland.

A Winter's Tale - The Podcast

On October 4th, as part of the symposium and gallery show "Invention, Exuberance and Art: The Country Furniture of the Island of Newfoundland", I chatted with William (Bill) Winter about his grandfather Henry William Winter’s life and legacy. We were joined by Newfoundland furniture expert Walter Peddle, and introduced by the curator of history for The Rooms, Mark Ferguson.

You can listen to the conversation podcast here in MP3 format. For other formats, or to listen in streaming audio, go here.