Abstract
In this article I call for more recognition of and scholarly engagement with
public, volunteer digital humanities projects, using the example of LibriVox.org
to consider what public, sustainable, digital humanities work can look like
beyond the contexts of institutional sponsorship. Thousands of volunteers are
using LibriVox to collaboratively produce free audiobook versions of texts in
the US public domain. The work of finding, selecting, and preparing texts to be
digitized and published in audio form is complex and slow, and not all of this
labor is ultimately visible, valued, or rewarded. Drawing on an ethnographic
study of 12 years of archived discourse and documentation, I interrogate digital
traces of the processes by which several LibriVox versions of Anne of Green Gables have come into being, watching
for ways in which policies and infrastructure have been influenced by variously
visible and invisible forms of work. Making visible the intricate, unique,
archived experiences of the crowdsourcing community of LibriVox volunteers and
their tools adds to still-emerging discussions about how to value
extra-institutional, public, distributed digital humanities work.
At LibriVox.org there are eight different audiobook versions of Lucy Maud
Montgomery’s
Anne of Green Gables, all created by
volunteers for LibriVox’s public domain audiobook collection. The most recent of
these versions was begun and completed in 2016 — not in response to any great
need for another free digital audio version of the book, but explicitly because
such a well-loved story was seen as an unintimidating and fun way for those less
familiar with LibriVox to engage and become more familiar with the community’s
audiobook-making processes. Another children’s classic,
Little Women, was also being re-recorded in its fourth version that
summer, and veteran volunteers like MaryAnnSpiegel
[1],
who coordinated the 2016
Anne, recognized the
popularity of these works as potentially useful gateways through which newer
LibriVox volunteers could learn and engage with the production processes of the
LibriVox audiobook project [
Spiegel 2016].
LibriVox workflows have developed in an ad hoc manner, across multiple online and
offline spaces, negotiated by volunteers who were learning together how best to
support and steward this open digital project. Built upon the affordances
provided by new models of collaborative production [
Howe 2006]
[
Howe 2008]
[
Shirky 2010] and the increasing availability and accessibility of
digital tools and platforms, the LibriVox project invites any willing volunteers
to join in their mission “To make all books in the public
domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet”
[
LibriVox, n.d.]. LibriVox productions are most often deeply
collaborative, with several readers recording smaller sections of a text. All
languages, accents, and reading styles are welcome, and anyone willing to
propose, manage, and complete an audiobook project is encouraged to contribute.
Aside from an insistence on public domain content recorded in standard,
accessible file formats, there are no firm rules about how volunteers perform
this work. LibriVox volunteers operate collaboratively, but independently,
without institutional sponsorship and without much official direction or
management beyond their own transient, global, online community of practice.
However, there is a need for consistency and some degree of shared policy in
coordinating the contributions of thousands of diverse volunteers. Volunteers
must find ways to reliably coordinate the labor not only of recording and
distributing audiobooks, but also the labor of developing, documenting, and
maintaining a set of “standard,” inviting production
processes, while also allowing the project to remain open, flexible, and
relatively convenient for current and prospective members. The dual priorities
of maintaining an open, inviting community while also aiming for clear,
accessible, and consistently high-quality recordings from all volunteers can
occasionally seem at odds. Each volunteer confronts and negotiates her own sense
of balance within that tension, and along the way, subtly reinforces or
undermines the current status quo within the wider project. Within such a
context of production, where individuals from diverse cultures are encouraged to
contribute as much or as little as their time and interests allow, how do
LibriVox volunteers (collaboratively and individually) navigate the technical,
sociocultural, and material contexts in which their audio recording and editing
work takes place?
By tracing the digital publishing history of LibriVox and examining how its
volunteers have managed and negotiated procedures and policies for their ongoing
collaborative work, I begin to make visible the intricate, unique, archived
experiences of these volunteer digital humanists, while acknowledging that there
are myriad ways in which volunteers’ efforts — whether with LibriVox or any
other public digital humanities endeavor — can never fully be accessed or
quantified. In what follows, I situate LibriVox as a valuable digital humanities
project and argue for more scholarly recognition of and engagement with public,
volunteer digital humanities projects. I ask that we consider what digital
humanities work can and does look like outside of the constraints and
affordances of institutional or scholarly sponsorship.
Examining LibriVox, its history, and its modes of collaboration more closely
allows us to begin to understand the evolving workflows of this public, open
digitization work and to make visible the work that has helped support thirteen
years of functional, productive, and sustained collaboration across cultures,
languages, platforms, and media. Often the work of organizing, networking,
planning, meta-writing, negotiating change, accommodating new members,
moderating disputes, and other behind-the-scenes work that is often a part of
complex digital humanities projects can be erased or made less visible. Such
foundational, behind-the-scenes work can easily blend into the shapes of larger
tasks that leave deeper, more obvious traces. As Star and Strauss (1999)
discuss, what is “counted” as work may be marked by a
“gamut of indicators” — physical, social, legal,
and so on, and “All along this continuum, the visibility and
legitimacy of work can never be taken for granted”
[
Star and Strauss 1999, 15]. Impressive finished projects can easily
eclipse the smaller, more thinly-spread negotiations and interpersonal work
taken on by multiple volunteers across weeks or months or years. Circumstances
of material or social privilege can also very easily be overlooked, made
invisible by the assumptions we make about the supposedly egalitarian nature of
digital technology and distributed, networked communities. Only in retracing the
archived conversations of the LibriVox community can the extent of volunteers’
collaborative thinking, rethinking, and working be made more consistently
visible.
Drawing on an ethnographic study of 12 years of archived discourse and
documentation, I interrogate digital traces of the processes by which several
LibriVox versions of Anne of Green Gables have come
into being, watching for ways in which policies and infrastructure have been
influenced by variously visible and invisible volunteer efforts. Recognizing the
value of this interpersonal, tenuously connected, volunteer-supported work
within the context of LibriVox will allow us to more readily appreciate — and
potentially support and reward — such work in other arenas. I recognize LibriVox
and other social spaces of production (Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive,
WikiSource, or Goodreads, for example) as sites of legitimate labor, not in
order to claim that such labor requires monetary compensation, nor that it
should necessarily be granted any of the recognition we tend to assign to work
in a traditional sense, but in order to showcase the significance and impact of
such work, and to begin thinking about more inclusive and intersectional ways of
valuing public, amateur contributions to the digital humanities.
A Global, Digital Audiobook Picnic
Many recent discussions of public, crowdsourced instances of digital humanities
production follow institutionally-sponsored projects seeking volunteers to help
complete especially laborious tasks such as tagging, transcribing, or
proofreading [
Causer and Wallace 2012]
[
Manzo at al. 2015]
[
Bilansky 2015]. In contrast to these types of projects, LibriVox
has always employed an entirely volunteer-driven model of production, and its
processes and output are much more open. Any volunteer can join the project,
regardless of expertise or language background, and any internet-connected
listener can access and use the audiobooks that volunteers produced.
As a crowdsourcing endeavor without institutional sponsorship and without
commercial incentive, the LibriVox project falls into a model that Shirky (2010)
describes as neither public (the way most roads are funded), nor private (the
way most cars are produced), but social — or “how most
picnics happen”
[
Shirky 2010, 118]. In the social sector, groups or
communities create value among themselves, primarily for themselves or
likeminded others, following their own norms and guidelines without direct
pressure from any outside economic or political interests. Within the strict
legal boundaries of the US public domain, LibriVox volunteers otherwise have the
freedom to determine their own policies and workflows amongst themselves. Five
fundamental principles frame the project’s mission and practices:
- Librivox is a non-commercial, non-profit and ad-free project
- Librivox donates its recordings to the public domain
- Librivox is powered by volunteers
- Librivox maintains a loose and open structure
- Librivox welcomes all volunteers from across the globe, in all
languages [LibriVox, n.d.]
Because all LibriVox audio editions are donated back into the public
domain, others are free to do whatever they like with them, whether for
personal, educational, or commercial purposes. Thus, in the case of LibriVox,
value produced within the group is also shared with non-members, who are welcome
to share and distribute that work further.
The LibriVox catalog currently includes more than 12,500 audiobooks, read in more
than 90 different languages.
[2] Any previously published text free of
copyright restrictions is eligible for inclusion; volunteers have recorded
novels, plays, poetry, cookbooks, textbooks, and government documents. Included
among these are versions of well-known stories like
Beowulf and
Hamlet, as well as many
other more obscure texts that commercial publishers would have very little
incentive to reproduce. Monetary incentives and financial profit are not the
primary values driving community-based production models — the novelty of
participating, the social capital or ethos gained through providing service, and
personal enjoyment of the activity can be equally powerful motivations. Because
LibriVox functions so separately from commercial frames of value and production,
its production model and history are particularly valuable examples of
distributed, decentralized, extra-institutional work.
Though LibriVox volunteers, for the most part, do not act as scholars, nor as
paid professionals or experts, their work does count as digital preservation, as
humanities work, and as generous public service. The work of finding, selecting,
and preparing texts to be digitized and published in audio form can be complex
and slow. According to the needs of each project, LibriVox volunteers may
perform the labor of curators, copyright sleuths, digital content managers,
voice artists, project managers, mentors and instructors, researchers,
translators, audio producers, and technical writers. Not all of this volunteer
labor ultimately remains visible (or audible) to those who download and listen
to finished LibriVox audiobooks, nor is it even visible to all volunteers.
The Makings of Digital Audiobooks: Past and Present and Future
LibriVox will celebrate fourteen years of existence on August 10, 2019. In the
time since its founding, the Librivox project has grown and shifted in response
to new technological developments and as a result of volunteers’ changing levels
of engagement and literacy with regard to what LibriVox is about. As LibriVox
founder Hugh McGuire reflected in a 2007 blogpost, “the
whole thing — the system — evolved like an organism, getting more complex in
response to environmental challenges. More readers, more books, more
languages, more projects required a slow evolution of a management”
[
McGuire 2007]. Audio recording practices, project management
practices, and digital cataloging procedures at LibriVox have evolved under the
influence of past practices. Community norms and standards have been shaped by
small, ad hoc, or makeshift decisions influenced by the material circumstances,
constraints, and affordances of the project’s context overall and various
volunteers’ contexts individually. Some of this growth and evolution is recorded
and visible in the archived digital artifacts of the community. Some, however,
is more hidden, or has been lost, ultimately making a full recovery of
LibriVox’s distributed history impossible.
Taking an ethnographic approach to the LibriVox project [
Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, and Taylor, 2012]
[
Hine 2015]
[
Adams and Thompson 2016], I have observed and participated in the processes
required for making free, public domain audio. Immersing myself in LibriVox
processes has been crucial for learning more about the experience, norms, and
nuances of the community. As I have observed the community and “learned-by-doing”
[
Hine 2015], I have also followed Catherine Adams and Terrie Lynn
Thompson (2016) in attending to and “interviewing”
digital artifacts, interfaces, practices, and micropractices by “listening to things, observing them in action, discerning
their co-constitutive influences, as well as relations with other entities
and beings around them”
[
Adams and Thompson 2016, 17-18]. Attending to aspects of intertextuality
and interactivity among various LibriVox participants, online spaces, and other
artifacts, particularly those records gathered by the catalog database, website,
and LibriVox forums, has helped me to reconstitute and triangulate details from
the history of LibriVox’s ongoing production and documentation work.
LibriVox volunteers share and manage their recording and editing work in
generous, flexible, and sometimes idiosyncratic ways. They adopt and adapt
various applications, platforms, hardware, software, and multimodal file formats
as needed, requesting help and offering tutorials and advice in the LibriVox
forums along the way. No two volunteers will have the same recording space or
environment, nor will they follow the same processes exactly. While many
volunteers use the open source recording software Audacity, others have found
and continue to find their own ways to contribute using other platforms, tools,
and processes.
My research has involved clearly articulating and representing the activities of
LibriVox volunteers as I retrace and untangle their past and present practices.
Using what evidence that remains of those practices, I must “inventively reconstruct anecdotes from a variety of sources in order to
provide a more co-constitutive account of humans thinking, dwelling, and
building with and through their nonhuman surround” and “gather observational threads and interview snippets, then
carefully weave human and nonhuman storylines back together”
[
Adams and Thompson 2016, 29]. Importantly, this postmodern methodology
“means letting a thing retain its silence” even
“while gently coaxing it into the light, giving it time
and space to speak so that we might take notice”
[
Adams and Thompson 2016, 18]. The iterative process of coaxing LibriVox
artifacts into the light has involved tracing and retracing my steps through the
digital archives of this idiosyncratic community, cross referencing dates and
events that have been partially documented across forum posts (see Figure 1),
podcast episodes, website updates, and catalog pages (see Figure 2).
The eight LibriVox versions of Anne of Green Gables
serve as useful touchstones for this article’s exploration because their
production has spanned a wide range of LibriVox history (2005–2016) and a range
of project types (collaborative, individual, and one dramatic performance).
Together, all eight versions include contributions from 51 individual volunteer
readers, coordinators, and proof listeners who are part of a broad, global
contingent of LibriVox members. By reviewing this range of audio production
cases, I begin to uncover, recover, trace, and retrace what evidence is and is
not left behind by volunteers as they contribute to the living archive of
project documentation and public digitization work of LibriVox.
Table 1 organizes evidence and theories as to the structure and infrastructure of
each Anne of Green Gables project, with details
drawn primarily from the original project threads for each version. These
project threads typically include a record of the volunteers who coordinated and
completed each project, instructions for collaborators, links to the original
e-text and to audio files in progress, and a series of back-and-forth updates
and conversations about each version’s progress over time. LibriVox’s public
forums help to preserve the shared knowledge and interactions of volunteers, old
and new, over time.
Version |
Version Image |
Version Details |
Date Begun |
Total time in production* |
Run time (hh:mm:ss) |
Notes |
Anne of Green Gables [Montgomery 2006a]
https://librivox.org/anne-of-green-gables-by-lucy-maud-montgomery/ |
|
Collaborative; 12 readers; 1,933,797 Views;[3]
42 Favorites; 1 Review |
4 December 2005, 5:48 pm |
114 days (~3.5 months); 153 forum posts |
10:30:11 |
The first LibrIVox “edition” was completed under the direction of
thistlechick (Betsie Bush), who (like all volunteers at the time) was
brand new to the LibriVox community. Interestingly, the cover art that
now attends the catalog entry for this version was not created until
2011, by volunteer Janette Brown. This version has the most views
according to Internet Archive, perhaps because it has been available the
longest. Project thread: https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=319 |
Anne of Green Gables (version 2) [Montgomery 2006b]
https://librivox.org/anne-of-green-gables-by-lucy-maud-montgomery-2/
|
|
Solo by rachelellen; 446,567 Views; 16 Favorites; 5
Reviews |
10 October, 2006, 2:52 am |
70 days (~2.5 months); 140 forum posts |
9:34:43 |
Rachelellen began this project with some worry that she was
unnecessarily duplicating the concurrently in-progress solo that would
become Version 4. However, she was encouraged by the community to
continue anyway, in line with the LibriVox principle that readers should
read and record what they love. Project thread: https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3810
|
Anne of Green Gables (version 3) [Montgomery 2007]
https://librivox.org/anne-of-green-gables-by-lucy-maud-montgomery-3/
|
|
Solo by gypsygirl (Karen Savage); 1,931,307 Views; 48
Favorites; 5 Reviews |
2 June 2007, 7:48 am |
10 days; 62 forum posts |
8:37:32 |
Very little discussion attended this version. Of the eight, it boasts
both the shortest production time and the shortest total running time.
The soloist, gypsygirl, also recorded several other Anne books in the
series. Project thread: https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=8890
|
Anne of Green Gables (version 4) [Montgomery 2008]
https://librivox.org/anne-of-green-gables-by-lucy-maud-montgomery-4/
|
|
Solo by LibraryLady (Annie Coleman Rothenberg); 136,161 Views;
4 Favorites |
3 August 2006, 1:34 am |
754 days (2+ years); 22 forum posts |
10:52:22 |
Though this solo was started second, Versions 2 and 3 were completed
sooner. Sounds of LibraryLady’s material context as a reader, such pages
turning, are present in this recording. Various wordings also evidence
the evolving LibriVox policies regarding the introductory disclaimer.
Cover art for this edition, like that of Version 1, was created by
volunteer Janette Brown, but not added to the catalog entry until 2012.
Project thread: https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3083
|
Anne of Green Gables (version 5) [Montgomery 2009]
https://librivox.org/anne-of-green-gables-version-5-by-lucy-maud-montgomery/
|
|
Collaborative; 11 readers; 55,641 Views; 1
Favorites |
10 November 2009, 5:12 pm |
14 days (2 weeks); 75 forum posts |
9:31:36 |
This version was created as a special Christmas project, and so
required a much quicker turnaround. The usual LibriVox guidelines for
timing and flexibility were superseded by the coordinator’s
requirements. Project thread: https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=22359
|
Anne of Green Gables (version 6) [Montgomery 2013]
Originally: https://librivox.org/anne-of-green-gables-by-lucy-maud-montgomery-5/
Later updated: https://librivox.org/anne-of-green-gables-version-6-by-lucy-maud-montgomery/
|
|
Solo by Woolly Bee (Sarah Parshall); 192,349 Views |
10 January 2013, 8:14 pm |
202 days (~6 months); 191 forum posts |
11:06:45 |
Initially, this project was (most likely mistakenly) cataloged as
Version 5. A significant database overhaul took place around the time it
was finished in late summer 2013, and apparently that shift affected the
project’s metadata and final URL. Project thread: https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=43837
|
Anne of Green Gables (version 7) (dramatic reading) [Montgomery 2010]
https://librivox.org/anne-of-green-gables-dramatic-reading-by-lucy-maud-montgomery/
|
|
Dramatic; 20 readers; 629,786 Views; 11
Favorites |
8 December 2010, 4:48 pm |
55 days (~2.5 months); 244 forum posts |
9:39:29 |
The major roles for this dramatic reading were pre-cast by the
coordinator — that is, she invited particular volunteers to take on
those parts before opening the project to the community as a whole [Lipshaw 2010]
[Chesley 2018a]. This practice has been discussed within
LibriVox Community Podcast episodes as somewhat controversial [Daly 2012]. Version 7 may not have originally been
labelled with a version number; none is included in its URL, and the
mismatched cataloging with 2013’s “version 6”
suggests that the parenthetical “version 7”
here may have been added during later updates. Project thread: https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=30001
|
Anne of Green Gables (Version 8) [Montgomery 2016]
https://librivox.org/anne-of-green-gables-8-by-lucy-maud-montgomery/
|
|
Collaborative; 14 readers; 8,707 Views; 1
Favorite |
23 March 2016, 1:03 pm |
118 days (~4 months); 196 forum posts |
10:20:51 |
This recording was specifically undertaken as a way of familiarizing
new volunteers with the ins and outs of LibriVox. Project thread: https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=60342
|
Table 1.
Details from eight LibriVox versions of
Anne of Green
Gables, for comparison
Though all eight versions, according to their catalog listings, appear to have
been based on the same public domain source text — one digitized for Project
Gutenberg by David Widger and Charles Keller in 1992 [
Montgomery 1992] — the reader for Version 4 seems to have read
directly from a printed and bound copy. The sounds of pages turning leave
audible traces in her recordings. In her case, the catalog’s link to Project
Gutenberg’s e-text could be a convenient shorthand, seeming to overwrite the
true provenance of her performance. This instance in which the true embodied
practice of an individual LibriVox volunteer is hidden behind a screen of
metadata, presumed policy, or other project management convention, is one among
many. Conversely, there are also examples where community policies and
conventions are superseded by the specific needs or constraints of a volunteers’
material situation. Inconsistencies are prevalent across many of the very first
items cataloged. Only later in LibriVox’s development were readers regularly
given instruction to read from a specific digital text and only that text. Even
still, knowing precisely which text (or in which format, browser, or type of
screen) an individual reader read from in every particular case would be a
difficult matter to ascertain.
Incarnations of Anne of Green Gables at LibriVox: In/Visible
Chronologies
Following my survey of all eight versions, I conducted a more detailed review of
four particular
Anne of Green Gables versions,
noting specific changes in file storage and retrieval, recording protocol for
all audio sections, and other behind-the-scenes elements of LibriVox work. Each
of these projects has left behind time-stamped traces of both the individual and
the collective efforts involved in transforming alphabetic texts into accessible
audio content. Some of these traces, in combination with others scattered around
the LibriVox forums, reveal particularly interesting shifts in LibriVox’s
collaboratively-built digital infrastructure, procedures, and policies. Some
traces are much less scrutable, highlighting unpredictable contrasts between
visible and invisible work.
- The very first version (2005–2006) has left prominent traces of the
highly transient, decentralized nature of LibriVox’s early
infrastructure. Works-in-progress were temporarily hosted on third-party
file storage sites or donated server space.
- Over the two-year period (2006-2008) during which Annie Coleman worked
on Version 4 of Anne of Green Gables, her solo project absorbed several
changes in the policies and procedures of the still-evolving LibriVox
community.
- A multitude of voices and volunteers came together for the most
labor-intensive version of the text — the dramatic reading, completed in
2011. The individuals and voices present and not present in the project
thread compared to those present (and not present) in the finished
catalog entry for this version illustrate core LibriVox principles of
openness, patience, and flexibility.
- Anne of Green Gables Version 6 (originally mis-cataloged as Version 5)
was actually completed 3 years after what is currently labeled in the
catalog as Version 7. Such quirks and inconsistencies in metadata and
content management highlight deep complexities within the catalog’s
database infrastructure and its management/re-management over
time.
Through these example cases, I observe that LibriVox’s emergent,
community-made procedures variously accommodate and at times resist the changing
expectations of the project’s volunteers and its outside audiences.
2005–2006: Scattered Seeds of Digital Infrastructure
The enthusiastic book coordinator, thistlechick (Betsie Bush), who opened the
very first collaborative
Anne of Green Gables
project for LibriVox had been a member for only a week when, in December of
2005, she began inviting contributions to this collaborative reading.
LibriVox was roughly four months old at this stage, and much of its
infrastructure had yet to be built. That month, the number of active
volunteers fell just short of 200, and only a dozen audiobooks had been
completed [
Mowatt 2007]. Standard technical specifications for
audio files had not yet been finalized, and discussions about creating a
searchable, database-driven catalog were still slowly progressing.
LibriVox’s early growth and development into an online community and
eventually an extensive global collaboration align with Wenger, White, and
Smith’s observations about communities of practice: “Unlike the trajectory of a team that’s planned from the start,
communities unfold over time without a predefined ending point.
Communities often start tentatively, with only an initial sense of why
they should come together and with modest technology resources”
[
Wenger, White, and Smith 2009, 540]. The beginnings of LibriVox were
tentative, but also bold. Volunteers gathered first to a simple blog, then
to forums, making do with whatever other digital platforms and tools they
found useful. Several coordinators donated their own server space as
temporary storage for the audio files of projects-in-process, and others
used third-party file transfer sites such as
yousendit.com or
megaupload.com.
Hyperlinks to these temporary sites of storage are still present, but
broken, in this and many other early LibriVox project threads. Though no
longer useable as paths to the works-in-progress they once were, they leave
traces that evidence volunteers’ generosity, savvy, and resourcefulness in
the early days of LibriVox. The ability and willingness to share/donate
personal resources (such as time and server space) and the technical savvy
to do so were important factors in helping LibriVox grow and settle into the
robust volunteer space it has ultimately become.
The practice of relying on temporary file storage, whether from third-party
sites or from generous volunteers with their own server space, continued for
several months. It wasn’t until nearly two years later when LibriVox could
claim its own central server space (also maintained via donation, and also
meant to be temporary — all finished audiobooks are hosted more permanently
at archive.org). Even still, to some extent,
the transient nature of works-in-progress at LibriVox persists. Completed
projects at LibriVox still bear consistent marks of a transience, since even
the central LibriVox file storage space is continually overwritten with new
works-in-progress as previous works are finished and moved to their final
catalog spaces. Evidence of this in-between labor is not meant to last, but
does leave behind traces of past infrastructure (or lack thereof) and
infrastructural development. As the LibriVox project has become more
established and developed more standardized, centralized procedures, its
community has also become more accessible to volunteers who may lack the
same levels of technical expertise that early volunteers were more likely to
need.
As this first
Anne project drew to a close,
LibriVox volunteers had begun discussing whether it would be worthwhile to
enforce a “prooflistening” stage for all LibriVox
submissions. After much debate about whether the extra effort and potential
for inviting criticism [
Chesley 2018b] would prove too
discouraging to future volunteers, the practice was gradually adopted and
eventually instituted as routine. By the time the next version of
Anne was begun, in August 2006, prooflistening had
become fairly standard for all LibriVox works.
2006–2008: Negotiating and Enacting LibriVox Policies
The institution of the new practice of prooflistening was not the only
instance of LibriVox policies changing in response to volunteers’ discussion
and debate. During the two years that LibaryLady (Annie Coleman Rothenberg)
spent gradually recording what would become Version 4 of Anne of Green Gables, another small but
significant change was successfully argued for and implemented — one that
would subtly mark her solo rendition of the text.
As a crucial marker of their public domain status and their origin from
within the LibriVox project, all LibriVox recordings begin with an
introductory disclaimer and invitation to listeners:
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public
domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit
librivox.org.
This official disclaimer has remained
fundamentally the same in wording and in length since the beginning of
LibriVox, despite occasional attempts to shorten it. During LibriVox’s
earliest years, readers customarily pronounced the standard disclaimer first
before specifying the title, author, and chapter details of the section they
were recording. And so it continued until in December 2006, roughly four
months after LibraryLady began her version of
Anne of
Green Gables, another volunteer related the following in a new
thread in the “Suggestions, Comments, News, &
Discussion” forum at LibriVox:
As I'm listening to my iPod Shuffle (admittedly,
with no screen) with shuffling switched off, iit [sic] takes a full
30 seconds to find out what track I am on. It would be helpful if we
could say right away, “Chapter 30 of Mark Twain's Innocents
Abroad. This is a LibriVox recording, etc., etc. ...” That
way those without screens (and there are many at the screenless
Shuffle level, especially in schools and school libraries) can
quickly know where they are. [Sayers 2006]
For the sake of those without immediate visual access to the list of chapters
or sections on a display screen, LibriVox volunteers determined together to
modify the order of chapter/section numbers and the introductory disclaimer.
New projects, from that time forward, would no longer begin immediately with
“This is a LibriVox recording…”, but would
instead first note the section or chapter number of the text being recorded.
Volunteer coordinators and admins adopted this policy change gradually over
the next months, modifying instructional documentation along the way.
Only a subtle trace of this change exists in the first few seconds of the
finished audio files of LibaryLady’s Anne of Green
Gables. The first 22 chapters, recorded between August 2006 and
March 2007, begin directly with “This is a LibriVox
recording,” according to the older, original LibriVox convention.
The very next chapter gives listeners the updated, more informative
introduction, with “Chapter 23 of Anne of Green
Gables” first, and “This is a LibriVox
recording…” next. The remaining fifteen chapters of the book all
follow this new pattern. The audible evidence of this collaborative decision
about recording protocol manifests only as a sudden, easily missed change
between adjacent chapters. In response to a volunteer sharing their
listening experience, the LibriVox community accepted and shared the
discursive labor of negotiating this change, of shifting their established
recording habits, and of updating documentation across the LibriVox
community to represent the change in policy.
2010–2011: Adapting Anne of Green
Gables
The planning, preparation, recording, and editing of a dramatic reading
entails extensive work. For the dramatic reading version of Anne of Green Gables, coordinator wildemoose
(Arielle Lipshaw) estimated it might take a full year to complete the
project. The reading would need volunteers for twenty-four distinct speaking
roles, including Anne herself as Narrator. In reality, several more than
twenty-four volunteer readers professed interest in joining this project,
posted claims for specific roles in the project thread. Yet not all of them
are ultimately credited in the catalog as collaborators.
Because LibriVox maintains a volunteer-driven, loose and open structure,
contributors may perform come and go from the project, dedicating as much or
as little effort as they wish. Volunteer LibriVox coordinators do not
require previous audio recording experience and do not necessarily expect
any lasting commitment. When sections or roles in a project are claimed but
not completed within a reasonable time (determined by the project’s
coordinators), the convention at LibriVox is to “orphan”
those sections and open them up for other volunteers to take on. Orphaned
sections are common; all four of these collaborative Anne of Green Gables project threads contain comments about or
other evidence of orphaned sections.
In the case of this dramatic reading, seven volunteers, most of them brand
new to the LibriVox forums, arrived in the project thread to claim roles in
the dramatic reading. Then — for reasons that now remain largely invisible
and unknown — these individuals never completed their planned contributions.
One would-be reader for the project, AmateurOzmologist (Miriam Esther
Goldman) did submit two chapters’ worth of Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s lines, but
disappeared from the thread with no public explanation before the project’s
end. AmateurOzmologist’s work with this text, because it was incomplete, is
entirely absent from and entirely unacknowledged in the finished
audiobook.
Volunteers like AmateurOzmologist, who come to a project and get lost from
it, whose un/recorded voices or other prospective efforts may ultimately not
make it in to the final catalog, are still a part of LibriVox. The community
values their willingness to volunteer even if it is only potential, put off
until “someday, eventually.” And ideal of loose,
open, volunteer-powered project means that the possibility (and apparent
risk) of volunteers disappearing as quickly and easily as they arrive at
LibriVox, of course, is unavoidable. These realities — where volunteer
relationships and connections are tentative, easily breakable, and often
lost — are part of the inviting, practical modularity of LibriVox. In
response, the general attitude at LibriVox is one of understanding,
tolerance, and patience. To tolerate so readily the apparent
“failure” of seemingly earnest volunteers may seem
something of a burden to the volunteers who do complete their work in good
time. But part of LibriVox’s loose and open structure involves making space
for those invisible, not-yet contributions from potential members of the
project. Perhaps if they are too busy this time, they will come back to
volunteer next year, or the year after that. Overall, volunteers have
responded to the project’s open flexibility with an impressive number of
volunteer hours, the true quantity of which is only hinted at by the
cumulative recorded run time of the entire LibriVox catalog.
2013: A Time-Traveling Anne and the Impact of Major Catalog
Upgrades
When WoollyBee (Sarah Parshall) began recording what later came to be labeled
as
Anne of Green Gables Version 6, she was
brand new to LibriVox and especially enthusiastic about recording this
children’s classic with which she strongly identified. The project took her
about six months to complete and was cataloged in July of 2013. This date
places WoollyBee’s solo chronologically between Version 7 (the dramatic
reading completed in 2010, discussed above) and Version 8 (the most recent
collaborative reading, completed in 2016). The reasons for the oddly
anachronistic tagging of both the solo recording and the dramatic reading
are not fully made clear in any LibriVox records I investigated, but the
issue is likely tied to the major catalog update that took place during the
summer of 2013. That August, the final stages of an in-depth, year-long
overhaul of the LibriVox databases, workflow tools, and infrastructure were
implemented [
LibriVox 2012a]
[
LibriVox 2012b]. Handfuls of error reports related to this
crossover from old system to new were posted in the LibriVox forums during
the first half of August 2013, including one from Woolly Bee herself
concerning an apparent error with her finished
Anne of
Green Gables. Hers and most other reports during this period are
answered with confident encouragement from administrators that the issues
would be fixed as soon as the new catalog system was fully functional. The
website and database infrastructure behind LibriVox, in combination with the
distributed, ad hoc volunteer community that work within that
infrastructure, are complex enough that quirks and inconsistencies in
metadata like those noted here have likely accumulated in several other
corners of the project.
Reflecting on this project, WoollyBee correctly cites it as the “seventh version” of Anne of Green Gables. She also
recalls the catalog updates of 2013, and their overall impact on LibriVox,
positively:
The most notable physical change that I’ve seen
happen to LV during the time I have been volunteering here is
definitely the huge update that happened maybe 3, 4 years ago. Once
everything was updated there was definitely a huge learning curve,
but I like our new system so much more. It’s so much easier to be a
book coordinator now… it’s just a much better system all around.
[Chesley 2018a]
Once more we have an instance where volunteers’ labor — that of WoollyBee and
the coordinators who worked on her
Anne solo,
and that of the volunteers who guided LibriVox through the upgrades and
redesign process — are only visible in partial traces. WoollyBee hints at
the work of re-learning how to coordinate LibriVox projects in the aftermath
of the redesign. While a handful of forum announcements and blog posts
communicate some of the labor involved in the update, including planned
server outages, status updates, and a report of hours spent [
LibriVox 2012a]
[
LibriVox 2012b], the full scope of individual and collective
efforts to accommodate the change are not made completely transparent to the
public.
As this case illustrates, public digital humanities projects have the
potential to outgrow their tentative beginnings enough to warrant drastic
changes in infrastructure and procedures. Whether that change emerges from
within or is imposed from without, it will require flexible, patient human
cooperation. The work of evaluating, building, and implementing new
technologies and the work of accommodating fellow volunteers to that new
technology are both important. The agility to navigate (and help others to
navigate) ongoing technical and infrastructural change are crucial for
supporting a sustainable, persistent digital humanities project. Fitzpatrick
(2017) offers a comforting reminder in this vein, asserting that “Real sustainability, after all, isn’t just about revenue
generation and cost recovery. It’s about relationships, about personal
and institutional commitment, about the willingness to work together
toward long-term means of ensuring that the platforms we build today
will not just survive but evolve with our technologies and the people
who use them”
[
Fitzpatrick 2017, para 3]. As volunteers and their many
tools join and contribute to the LibriVox system, the infrastructure they
use will also continue to evolve.
Stewarding Technology, Stewarding Community
Through all of these Anne of Green Gables projects,
relationships among human volunteers, digital technologies, interfaces, texts,
recording hardware, software, and other tools intertwine and build upon each
other. The time and effort volunteers donate to LibriVox, whether regularly or
sporadically or somewhere in between, not only supports and maintains the
project’s infrastructure, but becomes part of that infrastructure itself,
working towards reinforcing (and at times contradicting) the purposes and
practices that bring volunteers together.
In a global, digitally-distributed volunteer community, public and accessible
instruction is crucial for the longevity of the project, and for attracting and
training new participants. LibriVox’s archived technical documentation, however
partial, contingent, or informally distributed among the project’s members, all
plays a crucial role in shaping, managing, expanding, and sustaining this
community of diverse and sometimes transient volunteers. Volunteers, their
hardware and software tools, their forum posts, and their interactions all
contribute to the stewardship and maintenance of LibriVox as a productive
project and a welcoming digital community.
Recognizing the importance of what they call “technology
stewardship,” Wenger, White, and Smith (2009) define the role of
technology steward as one that emerges as “a natural outcome
of taking care of a community that’s using technology to learn
together”
[
Wenger, White, and Smith 2009, 831]. They go on add that
… in many cases, technology stewardship is a critical
part of community leadership, facilitating a community’s emergence or
growth. It becomes a very creative practice that evolves along with the
community and reflects the community’s self-design — the process by
which a community designs itself as a vehicle for learning, which
includes use of technology. [Wenger, White, and Smith 2009, 854]
As individuals learn and build themselves into the LibriVox project, they
take on roles as technology stewards, contingent team leaders, just-in-time
facilitators, teachers, or mentors. Their various and combined efforts help the
project to expand and continue to “design itself”
along the way. In some cases, as we saw with the discussion about re-ordering
the LibriVox disclaimer, a single person’s observation about the potential needs
of a group can eventually scaffold a whole new set of protocols. As volunteer
Cori observed in a 2012 LibriVox forum discussion, “everything starts because one person thought it was a good idea. LibriVox
itself, and all the processes and tasks within it”
[
Samuel 2012]. Even if only one volunteer notices and cares that
something is done to serve a small subset of the community in a new or different
way, their influence can spread and begin to benefit larger sections of the
LibriVox project, its audiences, and the world.
Theorizing the sometimes inscrutable decisions and actions of the many
participants who contribute to LibriVox is perhaps an unusual undertaking, but
valuable as an avenue toward appreciating the everyday digital humanities work
that happens as part of our increasingly digitally-mediated lives. Of the
possible range of motives shared among LibriVox volunteers, founder Hugh McGuire
writes,
Some of us are making a stand about public,
non-commercial space, about public domain, about the importance of
efforts outside the pervasive commercial framework that dominates our
world. But some of us are just reading because we like it. This can be
political if you wish, or mean nothing more than this: we read books and
give the audio files away for free. Both are valid, both are important.
[McGuire 2005]
Whether motivated by pure enjoyment, by ideology, or by a mixture of
both, LibriVox volunteers are engaged in a particularly open and inclusive
project of cultural preservation. However, despite prevailing LibriVox policies
that disallow censorship, bowdlerization, and abridgement, an almost invisible
degree of macro-censorship is inevitable within the project, driven by what
volunteers have so far chosen not to read. Through the results of the choices
they make in selecting and producing free audiobooks, volunteers at LibriVox
collectively influence what kinds of human culture and knowledge are being
collected, digitized, preserved, consumed, and circulated by global audiences.
This realization echoes Griffin and Hayler’s (2018) reminder that “DH tools and practices reinforce, resist, shape, and encode
material realities which both pre-exist, and are co-produced by
them.” The labor practices behind LibriVox’s ever-expanding audiobook
catalog are not neutral, no matter how much LibriVox as a collective might
espouse an ideal of impartiality. As is true of much volunteer work, individuals
and groups who are most resource-rich, whether in material/monetary terms,
education or expertise, or free time, are most likely to engage in and to
benefit from such labor [
Musick and Wilson 2008]. Similarly, as Bourg (2018)
points out, the risks and benefits of participating in open projects are “unevenly distributed in patterns that match existing systems
of oppression”
[
Bourg 2018, para 51]. No matter now democratic or equitable
new digital spaces and platforms may seem, we cannot merely assume that all
identities or perspectives are being included. Nor can we take for granted that
current systems and norms are adequate for supporting and serving the needs of
all who might wish to be a part of public digital humanities work.
Understanding the perspectives and values of the volunteers who are driving these
processes will require further critical attention and research. Documenting the
full range of motives behind all LibriVox contributions has been beyond the
scope of this study, but efforts to do so could add depth to further discussions
of public digital humanities work. Future research might also attend more
specifically to the reception, circulation, and wider cultural effects of
LibriVox audiobooks as another way of accounting for the value of the labor that
is producing them.
Conclusions
LibriVox volunteers are digitizing and preserving literature and other texts in
audio form in ways that afford near limitless access, re-distribution, and
re-use. In retracing the archived conversations of LibriVox and in
re-articulating some of the organization’s changes over time, I’ve begun to make
more visible the extent of volunteers’ collaborative intellectual, social, and
material work. Though their efforts do not necessarily stem from scholarly
interest nor have the rigor that more academic digitization projects might
require, LibriVox volunteers are engaged in a thoroughly public and thoroughly
digital project, making extensive portions of human culture more widely
accessible to more humans. As part of this ambitious public domain project, the
relatively undirected work of amateurs and volunteers can make small but
meaningful differences in how the world’s knowledge and information is preserved
and passed down across media and across time. In turn, the kinds of documented
culture available will influence the identities and lives of those audiences:
the perspectives they are exposed to, the histories they may consume or to
contribute to, the educational opportunities they are allowed or able to access,
and the creative or economic or vocational decisions they might make.
As we recognize public, volunteer, crowdsourcing projects like LibriVox as
established, yet unique, institutions of digital publishing and public digital
humanities work, we also are more likely to remember that all institutions were
once new, contingent, and shaped by the small decisions of regular humans making
things happen as best they could with what was around. Recognizing the
digitization and re-mediation work of such digital humanities projects,
especially in spaces outside the typical institutions of workplaces and
academia, is important in context of our increasingly distributed and
decentralized world and the economic transformations that may attend increasing
globalization and ongoing technological advancement. Inviting and involving more
people into the processes of preserving human culture will mean that more kinds
of culture, more perspectives on and from those cultures, and more embodied
experiences from across diverse cultures will also be preserved and
safeguarded.
Notes
[1] When referring to
LibriVox volunteers in this article, I employ the usernames each uses within
the LibriVox forums, following exactly the capitalization and other
formatting chosen by each user. It is common for volunteers to use an alias
on the forums and yet use their real names in their recordings, though some
use aliases for both and some use real names (or close variations of real
names) for both. I have added parenthetical references to individuals’
“real” names when known, if they are significantly
different from volunteers’ forum names. In my reference list, forum members’
last names are cited when known and forum names are cited otherwise.
[2] This data current as of February 1, 2019. Out
of 12,535 total LibriVox audiobooks, 1,617 (12.9%) are in languages other
than English, including Hindi, Hungarian, Korean, Kurdish, Sudanese,
Swedish, and even Esperanto.
[3] These
totals are taken from the LibriVox catalog as hosted at archive.org
and are current as of February 10, 2019. The Internet Archive
algorithms consider a “view” to be any
interaction with any form of content in their collection; one view
could reflect someone’s streaming a brief clip of a short story, or
someone downloading an entire .zip file of a
31-hours-and-44-minutes-long recording of Ulysses. The most recent Internet Archive statistics
appear to include views from May 2008 to the present. Any engagement
with these audio files by alternative means — via third-party apps,
torrents, YouTube streams, burned CDs, and so on — is not reflected
in this data.
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