Skip to main content

TapeLetters

If you want to chat to a far distant member of your family these days then it's easy to fire up Skype to get in touch with pretty much any part of the world. But in the past, before the days of smart phones and internet messaging, if you were part of a community that didn't have a history of using written language to communicate, the way to get yourself heard would be to make a tape recording and send it in the post.

TapeLetters examines the communications from just such a situation. Drawing directly both from first-hand interviews and from the informal and intimate conversations on the cassettes themselves, the project seeks to unearth, archive and present a portrait of this method of communication, as practised mainly by Potwari-speaking members of the British-Pakistani community.

We created a website and app to showcase this fascinating project and we think it was rather great.

Screenshot of the Tapeletters website

Links

The original website is sadly no longer available although there is some information about the project still at tapeletters.com

You can view an archive of the original site here.

 

View the app on Google Play

View the app on the Apple app store