UA Poetry Center transcribes, captions over 12,000 recordings

The University of Arizona's Poetry Center's VOCA archive of recorded poetry now has over 12,000 digitized captions !

VOCA is an online, audio-visual archive containing poetry that was made at the center.

The project started in 2021. It took countless hours from professional transcribers, poetry center staff and interns to transcribe and caption the recordings. Web developers even redesigned the VOCA website to show the new features.

It's now one of the largest captioned digital poetry archives, dating back to 1963. Sarah Kortemeier, UA Poetry Center library director, says the project is something she's wanted to do for years.

"It was a massive, staggering amount of work, but so worth doing," said Kortemeier. "So, I'm really hopeful that this project will be kind of a trailblazer and show folks it can be done and it's worth doing."

VOCA now has about six million words of transcribed text.

"We've had a large number of poets come through since the '60s including a number of Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, national book award winners," said Kortemeier.

The archive gives access to anyone, anywhere without having to request it.

"The captions, as it turns out, are also useful for anybody who is viewing the archive in a public environment," Kortemeier said. "Either a very soft environment where the noise would be disruptive or a loud environment where you can't hear the noise, the captions are super useful there."

Chinese, Czech and Latin are just a few of about 25 languages spoken on VOCA.

"It was really just a lot of really specialized work from a ton of people," said Kortemeier. "I just relied on so many folks with different language expertise to get this done."

Kortemeier says the center will eventually transcribe and caption a few of the languages they couldn't get done in the process.

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Jacqueline Aguilar is a multimedia journalist at KGUN 9. Born and raised in Yuma, AZ., she is no stranger to the unforgiving Arizona heat. Now this U of A wildcat is excited to be back in Tucson and is looking forward to involving herself in the community. Share your story ideas with Jacqueline by emailing jacqueline.aguilar@kgun9.com or connecting on Facebook , Instagram or X .