Word Vancouver Talks with the PhoneMe Team
Word Vancouver met with the team from PhoneMe in the beautiful Nitobe Gardens at UBC to learn about the inspiration for the poetry app and how it works.
Join us for the PhoneMe workshop on April 28th at 7pm.
Download the app to try it out yourself!
About PhoneMe
PhoneMe provides a global interactive map with poems publicly pinned at specific locations; each pin includes the poem in text form, audio recording of the poet reading their poem, and visual panorama of the location.
PhoneMe was first hosted at phonemeproject.com, and has since been released on Google Play and the App Store as a free mobile app available worldwide. One of the main ideas is to use mobile devices to serve the needs of poets, allowing them to produce poems about specific locations and events that warrant poetic commemoration to publish.
About the PhoneMe team
Kedrick James is a poet and spoken word artist who is committed to ecological and place-based awareness in keeping with Indigenous ways of knowing. He is a professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, and Director of the Digital Literacy Centre, a site of research and software development focused on digital language and literary innovation. He has been involved in Canadian literature for the past 35 years and has been a literary publisher, festival director, and internationally touring artist for much of that time. He also spent many years as an artist and curator working in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side.
Rachel Horst is a PhD candidate in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. She is interested in 21st century literacies and futures literacies as conceptualized through an ontology of difference. Her work explores the confluence of digital technologies, writing-as-becoming, and narrative futuring for cultivating the future(s) imaginary. Informed by decolonial discourse, diffraction, and affirmative difference, she engages with arts-based and experimental methodologies that explore the aesthetic nature of qualitative research.
Yuya Takeda is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Language and Literacy Education, UBC. He has been a part of the PhoneMe team since 2016 and involved in various PhoneMe workshops, development of the app, and research projects. His dissertation research investigates how conspiracy theories should be discussed in critical media literacy education. Takeda is also a street photographer. To find out more, please visit yuyapecotakeda.com
Produced by: Holly Hofmann