Paper Short Abstract:

This paper takes a phenomenological approach to explore archivists' embodied engagement with digital sound archives. It highlights how embodied practices reveal the materiality of digital sound archives, uncovering tacit knowledge and non-verbal experiences beyond text.

Paper Abstract:

This paper critically examines the embodied experiences of archivists in relation to digital sound archives, interrogating the materiality and sensory dimensions of digital sound collections through a phenomenological lens. While writing has historically served as the dominant method for documenting oral culture, sound archives—particularly in their digital form—offer alternative, multi-sensory modes of engagement that challenge textual and normative archival practices. Central to this study is the role of archivists as embodied agents whose sensory and physical encounters with sound materials shape processes of interpretation, preservation, and access.

This research argues that digital transformation not only reconfigures engagement with physical archives but also underscores the materiality of born-digital and digitally preserved sound objects. Contrary to perceptions of digital archives as disembodied and immaterial, sound recordings reveal their materiality through phenomenological encounters that foreground sensation, tactility, and affect. Such engagements facilitate the documentation and communication of tacit knowledge, non-verbal experiences, and ephemeral phenomena, which the primacy of writing otherwise obscures.

Drawing on primary material collected from fieldwork research within the British Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage (UOSH) Project, this paper explores how archivists’ embodied interactions with digital sound objects critically influence the construction, interpretation, and authenticity of digital sound archives. Ultimately, this paper underscores the importance of acknowledging the embodied labour of archivists and the phenomenological materiality of digital sound archives in a continually evolving digital environment.