Demographic

Age: 23

Gender identity: Gender apathetic

Race: White

Indigenous: No

Class: Grew up working class; first generation of family to attend university

Other identity (e.g. linguistic, religious):

Education: Bachelor’s degree (Sociology), recent graduate

Language: English monolingual

Personal responsibilities: Cat; job in coffee shop

Location: relationship to Lower Mainland (from here, were from here, from elsewhere): Grew up on a Gulf Island and moved to Vancouver for university

Widgets: Tools & Platforms

• Storytelling – HistoryPin
• IIIF (for audio/image integrated browsing)

Brief Biography

Summary of all factors as narrative

K. Summer is a 23-year-old recent university graduate who is developing their skills as an experimental audio producer, using archival sound recordings in the production of new audio artworks. K. grew up on a small island in the Salish Sea and moved to Vancouver for university; K. is the first of their family to attend university and felt a degree of ‘imposter syndrome’ during their time as a student. K. is comfortable and confident approaching new technologies but has come up against frustrations navigating archival databases in search of sound recordings. K. doesn’t understand why it is easy to find recordings from some archives and not others; why they can’t easily identify and connect to related recordings; or what questions they could ask an archives to start to address these frustrations. K. is eager to learn more and discover more recordings and is willing to put in some work, but is hesitant to ask for help due to imposter syndrome and feeling like they don’t ‘get’ something others do.

Character description

• Very passionate about their newfound interest with a voracious appetite for more
• Impatient when technologies aren’t intuitive but will work at learning when highly motivated
• Because of lack of familiarity with archives, doesn’t necessarily know which difficulties are theirs and which are baked in to the archives’ access systems. For this reason, not confident expressing difficulties to others
• Tends to work at problems alone

Interest in archives & Life experience

Why interested in archives: Discovered audio collage during university, has become passionate about incorporating archival sound recordings into new audio art productions

Community affiliations: Campus-community radio, experimental audio production/audio art

Represented in archives: As a young, emerging artist with working-class roots, underrepresented. As a white settler Canadian, overrepresented

Professional affiliations: None yet

Access needs and mobility: No specific needs

Motivations

Why: They have the sense that there’s something they need to ‘crack’ to be able to find relevant recordings more easily, though this may not be true (i.e. the problem might be the systems available, not that they don’t know how to use the systems well).

Frustrations

Barriers: Different archives use different systems that can be frustrating/time consuming to learn; some systems are very granular and allow multiple ways to search and filter results, while others only allow general keyword searches; would be nice to have recommendations or be able to discover related recordings easily. No real understanding of the ways archives are arranged and described (respect des fonds, original order, levels of description), frustrated when trying to find recordings that might be related on bases other than shared creatorship.

Info and Tech Access & Experience

Hardware: Mac, PC

Software: Office-type software (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.); audio production software

Network connectivity: Has internet connection at home, mobile phone with data plan

Experience with archival tools: Has done some searching of archival databases, looking for audio recordings to repurpose in audio artworks

Experience with archival frameworks: None – they don’t know what they don’t yet know about archives

Comfort with learning technology: Comfortable and confident approaching new technologies, but easily frustrated when technologies aren’t intuitive

Goals

What do they want to do: Find sound recordings easily; find and connect to related recordings (related creators, related content) easily

What relationship do they want to the archives: They don’t know what relationship they want to the archives. They have only recently begun to explore archival databases in search of interesting sound recordings and have yet to enter an archives physically. They aren’t sure what kinds of questions they would ask an archives, or what kinds of questions would be reasonable to ask.