Network Effects | suss suspect device

Image via thetyee.ca

It is with equal parts frustration and disappointment that I find myself being compelled to remove the CBC Nightlines and Brave New Waves archives I have hosted at networkeffects.ca since April 2012. In September 2015 I moved the growing archive of fan recordings to a subdomain of this site using Omeka to organize and share it. In doing this I also provided a means for fans to share their hometaped recordings – clearly the CBC disapproves of people celebrating their affection in such a manner.

As I have been hosting small clips from my personal collection of Nightlines and Brave New Waves cassettes since 2012, I can only assume that it was my attempt to connect fans and provide a space for sharing that prompted this action. I have found many people share my love of these programs and the artists they exposed me to – I expect they will also share my disappointment.

My friends and family know my affection for Canada’s public broadcaster. I wore my CBC logos with pride and frequently recommended programs I discovered at cbc.ca and CBC radio. I would like to think this incident has not tarnished my affection for the public broadcaster, but am feeling those equal parts frustration and disappointment alienating a long-time fan.

Update: November 23, 2015 – Takedown

Back in 2013 I found a box of cassettes containing some CBC Nightlines shows from the 90’s – I shared them on a page here at NetworkEffects http://networkeffects.ca/?page_id=1301 and highlighted a few more of my favourite finds like the Nightlines Pub Rock Show and some Pooby Christmas tunes.

Soon after I posted these I received some emails from fans of CBC Nightlines & CBC Brave New Waves offering to share some of their digitized cassettes. Some of these fans had even used their VCRs to record the radio programs – taking advantage of the VCR programmable timers to capture their favourite late-night programs.

It became clear to me sometime in 2014 that the submissions finding their way to my shared Dropbox volumes were going to far outpace my ability to update the humble collection on my blog so I started looking for a better way to not only host them, but a means for all of these great people to grow the collections + provide info/tracklists/program details.

After poking around far too long I have decided to setup the Nightlines and Brave New Waves collections at audio.networkeffects.ca using Omeka – an open source content management system for online digital collections. I’ve called this little project Citizen Rewind … a little play on words with hat tips to CitizenFour and CBC Rewind. I think of this project as a fan-led CBC Rewind for those of us who miss our late-night public broadcasting as it was in the 80s and 90s. The CBC Digital Archives likely have all these program archives somewhere (or did) but are also likely handcuffed by risk averse copyright considerations … this fan-site is not.

The more I use Omeka, the more I love it. I’ve found just enough features and extensibility to make collecting, organizing, and serving a large collection of audio files and the more I explore it the more I am finding it is also capable of considerable large-scale projects – like serving digital collections of the New York Public Library system.

I have been working on getting archives uploaded this weekend by getting started with the Brave New Waves archive uploads.

http://audio.networkeffects.ca/items/browse?collection=1