Ye wha’? Class, Gender, Race and Age: Fixing Diversity in Text-to-Speech Accessibility Readers

Project Information

YEWHA

Grant agreement ID: 101108189

DOI

10.3030/101108189

Project closed

EC signature date 21 March 2023

Start date 1 September 2023

End date 31 August 2025

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 215 534,40

Coordinated by

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND MAYNOOTH
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - YEWHA (Ye wha’? Class, Gender, Race and Age: Fixing Diversity in Text-to-Speech Accessibility Readers)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2025-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Prompted by questions around diversity and access as exemplified by voice, both physical and virtual, in public spaces and online, I proposed to investigate voice and representation, providing two cross-mdia creative responses with inbuilt mulitvalent dissemination, with the further intention of intervening in - and of breaking boundaries between - discourse inside and outside the academy, as well as generating methodologies to build bridges between creative and critical practice.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

I worked on two projects. The first was writing the book Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters, which was published by Verso in September 2025, and the second was to work towards a forthcoming interactive website, featuring a hand-coded generative hybrid ‘Irish voice’, Ye Wha’.

Amateurs! is a book of essays about DIY internet cultures. My proposed investigation of marginalised internet voices led to a much-needed historicization of the post Web2.0 cultures that allowed these voices to be heard, and their subsequent and recent destruction by platforms that priotised profit. The book is itself a work of creative criticism written in a voice created at the intersection of critical and creative research practice. It stands as a performance of critical appropriate to my investigation of amateur mimetic techniques in the work. It is a voice that actively questions the boundaries of academic writing, via its ability to cross between academic and popular audiences and venues.

Ye Wha’ is a creative investigation of the variety and hybridity of Irish voice in terms of gender, age, ethnicity, ability and cross-lingual influence. I created the code for a hybrid generative voice, hand-coded and made using recordings of my own voice as well as other immigrant and emigrant voices. These will be be used to create the generative voice which will be used as a text-to-speech reader, presented on an interactive website, whichwill also feature interviews with participants. The work will offer a vital challenge to both notions of ethnonationalism, and to the dominance of big data and large-scale commercial apps, showing what can still be coded by hand.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Impact: Commercialisation: my book, Amateurs! was published by Verso in September 2024. Verso holds a special place in English language publishing, bridging the divide between academic and general readerships, and is ideally suited to my project, ensuring that my book will reach an international audience of academics, arts practitioners, journalists, general readers, and particularly the online ‘amateurs’ I study in the work. I have delivered a series of short talks on RTÉ, Irish public radio, of work in progress from the book as well as participating in panels, giving talks, and interviews at academic conferences, art galleries, universities, art schools, bookshops, literary and arts festivals, generating income for publishers, bookshops, radio and arts and literary festivals. Details are given in the Communication and Dissemination sections.

Impact: Contribution to Academic and Arts Practice: My work is unique it its development of a style, form, and allied modes of dissemination appropriate to the subject of my investigation, that engage and bring into conversation diverse audiences via the same work, to produce a work that is not only multidisciplinary but multivalent. The hybridity of my methodologies and outcomes is a unique and cutting-edge contribution to the critical form that proposes an expansion of the kinds of practices available within and outside academia, and in art as social practice.
My outputs intervene in and bring togther a range of long-running debates within and outside academia regarding equality and diversity in arts access and funding; aesthetics, class and taste; AI art an artistic autonomy; feminist discourse around onscreen and online representation, and art practice as labour and/or leisure. As a result of my project I have been invited to write a monthly column, ‘Works of Art,’ for Art Review, creating a solid public platform for the discussion of creative acts as labour.

Impact: Internationalisation: Events around the launch of the book in September/October and November 2025 reaching live audiences in Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Portugal, plus a larger audience via online recordings. Venues include arts journals (Spike, Berlin), Bookshops (eg Desperate Literature, Madrid, After8 Books, Paris and Burley Fisher, London); universities and art schools (Manchester, RCA, de Montfort); and festivals (the BETA digital arts festival, Dublin), as well as a book launch in Maynooth University. I will work to present my work at futher events beyond these dates. I currently have requests for presentations next year at John Moores University, UK, and at IADT, Ireland.

Ye Wha’similarly has inbuilt impacts:
The website will be free to use, and coding will be, where possible, open source. It will be presented to cross-disciplinary audiences: at a future BETA digital arts festival (Dublin), and I am in discussion with the Irish gallery, Kunstverein Aughrim, about creating an installation based on the work, which will reach a live local audience. Further financial support is needed to create the final stages of the project. I am in the process of making applications.

published book, Amateurs by Joanna Walsh