Audible

Stepping away from our sample set of metadata for just this one section, let’s explore the strengths and weaknesses of presenting historical research audibly. In 2022, I worked on a Storytelling Fellows for the University of Washington. The central focus is an industrial area just south of downtown Tacoma, Washington spanning 3,000 acres known as the Tideflats. Particularly, I wanted to look at a plot of land that was occupied by The Carstens Meat Packing Co., at one point the largest animal processing operation west of the Mississippi, and is now currently occupied by theNorthwest Detention Center, under contract of the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Turn of the century, wooden, multi-story industrial building with a pen of cows out front and shallow, still water in the foreground.
Carstens Meat Packing Co. on the Tacoma Tideflats

Though Thomas Carstens and Geo Group have no economic or genealogical ties to one another, I wanted to explore how their motivations for occupying this same space in the built environment were similar. Both corporations knew that they wanted to profit off of something that was environmentally and ethically questionable and they wanted to be at just enough of a remove that they could be out of sight and out of mind to the resident’s of the urban center, while benefiting from transportation centrality and proximity to unorganized labor. Both corporations engaged in the psychology of distance and spatial perception, asking:

How far away can you be from a city’s residents so you are almost never considered, while still close enough to impact them environmentally or psychologically on a daily basis?

As opposed to the last geographic approach, audio is also a great way to convey a sense of space and distance. At the time, I was living within walking distance of the detention center and one of the first things I did for the project was to take a handheld microphone and visit. I’d like to play an excerpt of this work and, while listening, think about way in which media is being either incorporated or translated to the audio format:

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In that recording, a summary of elements might be:

  • Field recording (ambient sense of place)
  • Background music (maybe used as reader cues that we are going backwards or forward in time)
  • Narration
  • Oral history recording
  • Sound clips (kendo sparring, streetcars)
  • Multiple documents, news articles and scholarly journal excerpts that I am weaving into the narration

One of the greatest strengths of presenting historical research in audio is immersion. If you have a clear idea of the story you would like to present, you can structure things in compelling ways that draws in the listener and it is especially great if you happen to be working with oral history recordings, music history or recorded interviews where the incorporation of multiple voices will make something much more dynamic than words on a page. The limitation, of course, is that all visual elements need to be described in writing.

Resources

Student in glasses and scarf wearing headphones and speaking into a microphone in front of large dual monitors.
Student using equipment in The Studio

If you are interested in creating an audio project, we have everything that you would need at our media lab in the library called The Studio. Here is the full user guide the list of video and audio equipment available and the link to where you can reserve a space.