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, a campus poetry reading 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, part of the College of Humanities, started Voca in 2012, making new readings accessible online and, over time, digitizing the entire collection of historical recordings as well. 

"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 6 million words were added to the archive in the form of plain-text .vtt files, Kortemeier said. Search engines index such files, allowing items in the Voca archive to show up in results to search engine queries. The .vtt file syncs to the recordings, either audio or video, via either captions or an auto-scrolling transcript. 

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

During the project, several "lost" recordings, previously unknown to center staff, were discovered, Kortemeier said. Archivist and outreach librarian Julie Swarstad Johnson even discovered, digitized and uploaded an extra recording of a reading by poet Ai in 1972 that had previously gone undigitized due to a dating error on the original media. 

The transcription and captioning took tens of thousands of hours of work 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 the first among its peers to attempt a comprehensive transcription and captioning project for a historical literary audiovisual archive, said Tyler Meier, the center's executive director. 

"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, and this project braids together those three threads."

Voca also presents new possibilities for digital humanities research, Kortemeier said. 

The center's Poetry Centered podcast, which began during the pandemic to share poetry recordings while the reading series had to pause, has evolved into an ongoing tour of the Voca archive. In each episode, a different guest poet, among them current U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, curates three poems from the archive, sharing their insights about the readings. 

Amanda Kraus, executive director of the university's Disability Resource Center, said the Poetry Center should be commended for its commitment to accessibility. 

"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."