IASA's 55th Annual Conference

This session consists of 2 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Johanna Huehn - “But whether the voice of the heart can be heard is questionable”. Sound recordings of prisoners at the 1926 Berlin Police Exhibition (Long presentation)

➺ Ninna Carneiro, Gabriel Cardoso - Organizing the unorganized: the challenge of structuring a digital audiovisual archive (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ “But whether the voice of the heart can be heard is questionable”. Sound recordings of prisoners at the 1926 Berlin Police Exhibition
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Johanna Huehn (Long presentation)
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This contribution discusses how sound recordings of prisoners were presented as potential forensic evidence in the context of the 1926 Berlin Police Exhibition. It traces the collaboration between the Berlin Lautarchiv (sound archive), Prussian police, and local prison administration, and contextualizes the bid to promote sound recording and reproduction technology as a promising tool for police investigation. It argues that the recordings framed as “voice portraits of criminals” were an attempt to establish voice recordings not only as biometric identifiers to be cataloged in police databases but also as evidence of a person’s character and inclinations. It ties the claim to 1) the evidential characteristics of the voice to the idea of “anthropophonetics”, proposed by the then director of the Lautarchiv as a science in its own right based on phonetic examination, and 2) relates the recording project to a broader shift to prioritize “the criminal’s character” rather than “the character of the crime” – as discernible in the reforms of the Prussian penitentiary system, the increasing institutionalization of “criminal biology” and specifically, the intensifying discourse around so-called “habitual criminals”. It emphasizes how the interests of the involved institutions have shaped the structure and texture of the archive and attempts to counter these embedded and imposed narratives by a close(r) listening/reading of the recorded testimonies and manuscripts, emphasizing moments of interrogation and contestation on record and paper. Drawing on archival theory and sound studies, I critically reflect on my own attempt and desire to “unveil narratives” when engaging in academic/archival work.

➺ Organizing the unorganized: the challenge of structuring a digital audiovisual archive
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Ninna Carneiro, Gabriel Cardoso (Short presentation)
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The Nucleus of Audiovisual and Documentary (NAD) is a part of the Center for Research and Documentation on Contemporary Brazilian History of Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV CPDOC), and it was created in 2006 as a space to think of new ways in which to use CPDOC’s historical archive. These documents, that include manuscripts, letters, photographs, moving images and oral history interviews, among others, are important sources in terms of research of Brazil’s contemporary political history, ever since CPDOC was founded in 1973. When NAD was created, its original purpose was to reuse these documents, creating documentaries, short videos, edited interviews, among other productions. The intent was to expand access to CPDOC’s archive, but over the years NAD began to create its own audiovisual documents, a vast array of digital audiovisual archives that were not organized in any type of database. Our current project is to organize all these documents, making a digital curation effort to select which documents should be preserved, how to best organize them so other can access them in the future, and how to make a long-term digital preservation plan of these documents that is adequate to CPDOC’s infrastructure.