recitedthat

RecitedThat is a collaborative digital archive and platform dedicated to collecting, annotating, and distributing recitations of literary and public-domain texts. It provides a searchable repository of audio recordings paired with aligned transcripts, enabling researchers, educators, and performers to study pronunciation, rhythm, and performance practices across languages and dialects. The project emphasizes oral transmission and aims to document variations in recitation styles.

Launched in 2021 by a group of linguists and educators, RecitedThat operates as an open-access resource with community contributions. Contributors upload audio files along with transcripts, metadata (title, author, source, language, dialect, date, location), and licensing information. Most items are shared under permissive licenses (e.g., Creative Commons), enabling reuse with attribution.

Content is organized into entries and collections, with features such as time-aligned transcripts, searchable keywords, and tagging for genre, era, or region. The platform supports annotations, comments, and user-curated playlists, and provides tools for researchers to export data or align transcripts to audio for linguistic analysis.

Governance is implemented through a community moderation model and an editorial board that enforces guidelines on accuracy, copyright, and respectful conduct. RecitedThat has been used in classroom settings and by scholars studying oral performance, prosody, and language variation. Limitations noted by users include uneven coverage across languages and the quality of user-generated transcripts.