Keywords: children’s poetry, public engagement, reading aloud, recording of poetry, Veidenbaums
The development of public engagement technologies has provided new ways of ensuring societal participation. Public engagement events developed by various institutions provide ways to combine learning about cultural heritage with individual participants. Poetry readings serve as one of the ways the sound of Latvian literature and particularly Latvian classical poetry can be updated. The authors of this article analyse the first two public engagement actions (“Skandē Veidenbaumu” and “Lasīsim dzejiņas” of the series “Lasi skaļi” (Read Aloud) launched by the Institute of Literature, Folklore, and Art of the University of Latvia. During these events, participants were given the opportunity to record thematically-selected poems in the audio recording booth of the Latvian National Library or, as an alternative, to record a poem on their computer or mobile device and upload them to the action site.
The events combined the creation of a recorded body of poetry readings with related educational content and represent one of the newer educational methods for reaching the general public and some of its subgroups (children, pupils, students, etc.). Through these events, the public was given the opportunity to become acquainted with Latvian cultural heritage while simultaneously creating new cultural artifacts. The participants creatively used different approaches of performance, recording the poems in a variety of voices, singing, or even incorporating digital sound processing programmes. They actively seized on the opportunity to create new versions of poems that had already been set to music. The main reasons for rejecting any particular recording were buffoonery or cursing during the recording process, or having left the recording unfinished.
Both events resulted in more than 4,500 audio recordings which were then stored in the digital archive of the Institute. The set of recordings could be of interest to researchers in the fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics and computer linguistics, as it provides a unique representation of pronunciation during a specific period of time performed by people of different ages, genders, and nationalities.
Juggling Roles, Experiencing Dilemmas: The Challenges of SSH Scholars in Public Engagement