Listening With/in Context: Towards Multiplicity, Diversity, and Collaboration in Digital Sound Archives

Despite increasing attention to the preservation and development of sound archives in academic research cultural heritage institutions, they are yet be more substantially embraced larger theoretical debates on archival theory practice. Fraught with contested histories through legacy ethnomusicology, rooted enterprises colonial imperialism, now era mass digitization distribution, many collections attempting develop ethical empowering methodologies that support community involvement a vigorous remediation between visuality. Addressing this confluence concerns, article considers ways which contemporary digital projects encouraging an engagement history memory innovative complex ways, mobilizing affordances tools community-based material careful negotiation its sonic visual constituents. Through analysis two case studies – The Roaring ‘Twenties Smoke Signals Radio Show Archive examines how activate remediate documents their contextual counterparts invite diverse, multifaceted, multi-sensory encounter history, memory, knowledge, past.