Transcribing your podcast. A straight-forward idea and process you might think. The production of a textual reference of your podcast audio that aids both search-ability and access-ability. That you would produce them as part of your overall podcast output is a no-brainer. Yet, the process of creating transcripts does open up logistical, ethical and even epistemological questions which have precipitated, for me, a spiral of thoughts on the very nature of language, mediation, and how we ever really communicate anything successfully to one another. The coherence of what follows might reflect that spiral, so, you’ve been warned.
Every since I started podcasting, and particularly editing my own speech in the conversational, unscripted shows I generally create, the gap between the thought that my brain produces (the inner voice) and the words and sentences that are actually sounded - with all the hesitations, extraneous vocal tics, repetitions, grammatical mistakes, pauses, umms, arrs, etc, etc - is frighteningly stark. In the editing process the dimensions of one’s ‘imperfect’ speech is constantly made apparent to you, both in sound of course, but also visually with those waveforms that have a nauseating symmetry. Then, to see a transcription of this speech verbatim, I have to confront the possibility that what I say borders on total gibberish, requiring in the listener a highly sophisticated intuitive decoding mechanism to make any sense of what I’m actually on about.
Visualising speech ‘imperfections’.
Working in academia, navigating the relationship between written and spoken word comes with the territory. Yet with the recording and editing of podcasts, the confrontation with every misplaced syllable, or imprecise utterance, provokes anxieties reminiscent of when I was really struggling in the final excruciating months of my PhD. I’d gotten into a headspace where the connecting tissues between thought and speech had snapped. I was second guessing everything I said, trying to process the myriad potential caveats intrinsic to every utterance. This made public speaking feel like an out of body experience. My train of thought seemed to get split in two. I would think about what I was saying, and say it, then analyse what I saying immediately after my voice expressed it. Of course, the two ‘trains of thought’ couldn’t operate simultaneously and I found myself pausing, analysing internally what I had just said, restating, several times. All this while dealing with the awareness that you are standing in front of audience wondering just how much of an idiot you look.
Relying on pretty extensive written notes was the way I got out of those patterns. A safety net of text that allowed me to bypass immediate thoughts and just read and speak. As my experience and confidence grew so did my ‘letting go’ of the mechanics of how my thought and speech interact, and in turn, the reliance on the text as an external notation to get me through lectures. At this point, I use a fairly sparse framework of bullet points as triggers when teaching/presenting. I have a level of trust in the improvisational process of speech; that thoughts will just manifest themselves in coherent expression. Yes, I have lost my trajectory of thought many times and listening back to the audio of recorded lectures, they a far, far from grammatically precise. Yet the natural flow of speech that isn’t subordinated to the formality of textual script is, for me, more engaging in a presentational setting like a lecture (this claim does open up other questions about reading scripted speeches in a research conference for example, versus more ‘of the cuff’ unscripted delivery).
When I started podcasting back in 2015, the nature of the podcasts I produced was unscripted conversation. To this day, I produce a fairly sparse rundown of topics, which might include, again, specific cues, quotations or lines of thought that I pre-write in note form. To be honest, back then (and even up until quite recently) the question of transcribing my podcasts did not really register, primarily because I didn’t really know if we would gain any audience to begin with. However, as the Cinematologists Podcast developed, and with emergence of New Aural Cultures, so did my interest in podcasting in an academic context, both in terms of production and conceptualisation. Exploring podcasting many forms and the research into the medium from other scholars, continued to provoke a kind of on-going, self-reflexive diagnosis with regards to communication between oral and written expression.
The question of transcripts in podcasting is an ongoing topic, but it came up specifically in a recent session of the podacademics meet-up, and had also been a subject covered in my discussion with the academic Dr Hannah McGregor on New Aural Cultures podcast. Hannah’s advocacy of transcripts is ostensibly one of accessibility and progressive ethics. Associated with the open-source, democratic philosophy, particularly with regards to podcasters with a social justice orientation, she argues they are an almost an obligation to produce particularly in an academic context. A different type of accessibility is the basis for Podcast Pontifications host Evo Terra’s championing of extensive written text accompanying every audio podcast one produces. For Evo, it’s a discoverability issue. The fact that the internet is still structured on the recognition of text, and the assertion that listeners are far more likely to find and engage with your podcast through the digital trail that a written transcript creates.
These arguments for the merit of transcripts are somewhat self-evident, and in an ideal world transcriptions would accompany all podcast output as a matter of course. Indeed, AI technology, the accuracy of which is continually developing, is now at a point where audio speech can be converted quickly and relatively cheaply into text. I used www.temi.com to create the transcript for the Hannah McGregor episode (see below) and other services are popping up all the time. Yet there are certain caveats that make me question whether it’s realistic or even desirable that transcripts should de rigour as part of podcasting output.
Even with the AI software available making the creation of a full episode transcription much more efficient and (relatively) cost-effective, there is still a significant cost and labour involved. My own podcasting practice is essentially zero budget, produced out of a combination of pure personal motivation and creative satisfaction that the medium affords. The transcript below required several hours of editing to make it legible for any reader who might want to use it. Does the (relatively niche) listenership of the New Aural Cultures justify the labour involved (for me) to produce (of course the cost equation changes if a podcast is funded particularly for from an academic source).
This then leads one onto the thorny question of how one edits, what is the overarching purpose, and what are the ethical implications? Is the aim simply a precise correlation between audio conversation and written text? Or should the text actually clarify meanings that may not seem obvious if one just sees the text on the page? This may involve alteration of sentences that could be interpreted as a decoupling from the audio. I guess the question then moves onto who is the intended audience for the transcript and how they use it in relation to (or completely separately from), the audio.
In editing the conversation between Hannah and myself, I found myself wanting to make changes where the textual structure was grammatically incorrect and when the over-aching meaning seemed unclear. This was mainly for my own utterances a Hannah’s speech was much more complete and structurally coherent than my own (which of course fed back into my anxieties about my thoroughly imperfect expression). Interestingly, I felt compelled to check with Hannah that she was happy with the edits. This was almost a compulsive reaction to the possible accusation that I had altered someone’s speech in way could understood as changing the original intent. But that there is the slippage between between what one said, and then what would say now having the chance to re-articulate with hindsight.
The question of the ethics of editing accompanies how ones clarifies, smoothes out, embellishes, recontextualises, the spoken words that arrived through the immediate, synaptic firings of electricity that produce vocal expression out of thought. This possess an improvisational vitality in the space of human conversation, which when committed to text loses the context, emphasis, intonation and textual that the materiality of the voice imbues. See what I mean about the spiralling gap between thought and expression.
On top of these caveats of propriety between speech and text, there is a question as to whether transcribing as matter of course undermines the use of podcasting’s sound ontology as an academic tool; what I have written about elsewhere as a kind of progressive disruption of the accepted idea’s of constitutes academic research. Writing journal articles and books is the unquestioned metier of scholarship, yet the limitations and prescriptions regarding how knowledge is articulated and communicated, particularly in the context of institutional measurements (such as the REF in the United Kingdom), still struggle to accommodate more more creative, esoteric epistemologies. In one sense, the transcript would seem to be absolutely invaluable, allowing podcasting to fit more easily into the accepted frameworks of knowledge validated by universities.
The transference of sound to text as I have discussed is not a straightforward one. There is an epistemological question of what one loses in terms of knowledge, when sound, voice, aurality is omitted in favour of stasis of the text. In the development of Podcast Studies, there should arguably be an onus on the sound artefact as intrinsic to the communication/perception of knowledge being produced. To omit the audio altogether and simply read what was said (again with caveat transcription slippage) is to deny the very nature of the podcast, what make it a potentially valuable medium for many areas of communication. Perhaps this is a somewhat extreme a concern and the transcript is simply useful addendum that actually expands the parameters of engagement with an audio medium that is still developing in terms media status and academic use.
My musings here emerge from on-going thought about podcasting and how its use continues to impact on myself and others as mediating and mediated subjects
So, below is the transcript for my discussion with Hannah (interestingly, the Anchor hosting platform which I use for New Aural Cultures does not have the facility for extensive transcripts with a 4000 character limit in its shownotes section). If you are so inclined, feel free to listen to the episode, read the text and make you own judgements regarding the efficacy of the transcription and any ethical conclusions you may make regarding the slippage between the thought, spoken word, and textual clarifications that have been made.
Transcript
Dario LLinares (00:00:00):
So Hannah, it's great to welcome you to New Aural cultures. How are you doing?
Hannah McGregor (00:00:05):
I'm pretty well. I just realized that this is the first time I've recorded a podcast in at least a week because I closed my balcony door, which I haven't done.
DL (00:00:18):
Yeah, funnily enough, we've got a load of workmen who are doing the roof next door. So it's just out now. This is good timing because it's six o'clock here in London, but I know it's the morning where you are.
HM (00:00:29):
Yeah. Yeah. You'll be getting a lot of bus noise, a lot of uneditable bus noise.
DL (00:00:34):
I treat that as kind of like an ambiance type of podcast. Bring all of these sort of soundscapes in, you know, I think you've talked about that on your podcast a little bit recently. It's funny, actually, I was listening to your secret feminist agenda episode on listening and that was recorded back in May. I really got the sense that you were sort of coming to terms, as we all were back at that time ,with what was going on and how it was affecting your life, but also what impact it was having on the way that you integrated with your environment. And it was so interesting that you were sort of saying that the idea of "controlling your listening" and rather than just asking somebody, how are you doing? It's like, how are you listening right now? I thought that was a really interesting idea. And I just thought now thinking back to that time from August and how things have changed, how are you listening at the moment?
HM (00:01:30):
I think in May, what I was really experiencing was an intense desire to control my audio landscape as a sort of last-ditch attempt to control something in a deeply chaotic world. So, I got noise-canceling headphones for the first time in my life, but I was also finding myself wanting to do more sort of un-distracted listening. Like I was really enjoying lying on the living room floor and listening to a podcast which I normally never do. And I've been experiencing, that sort of, what I want to listen to and how I want to listen, continues to shift as the pandemic shifts. And, that question of how you are listening now that comes from Jason Camlot, who is my collaborator on the SpokenWeb podcast. And it has really pinged in me a sort of sense of attention, to how my tolerance for, or desire to control my personal audio landscape, seems to be a fairly good metric of like how I'm doing. Like, am I taking pleasure in the sound of my neighborhood? You know, having my balcony door open and being able to hear somebody play the abandoned piano that is in the alley right behind my building, or does the sound of that piano fill me with almost uncontrollable rage. It's really, it's a good litmus test.
DL (00:02:53):
Yeah, I think so. And, that sense where we were all locked down to some degree or another, and therefore - maybe I'm talking about me and academia and the privileged lives that get to work from home during this period, but that sense of sort of being in the one place really did augment the idea of being "present", and sound, I think really is the arena in which you tend to experience things a little bit more perhaps during that time.
HM (00:03:24):
Yeah. Yeah. And in an uncontrollable way, like it's in that literal sense of, it is a lot harder to close my ears than it is to close my eyes. And so the soundscape that I'm surrounded with feels in some ways kind of, you know, uncontrollable, which is part of the evocative pleasure of sound, as well as how it infiltrates spaces in these kinds of uncontrollable ways. But you're totally right, like those, those heavy days of lockdown when we really were stuck inside, I was desperately aware of every sound around me. And now that I feel like I have a little bit more mobility, I'm taking more pleasure in like going out into the city and like eavesdropping on people's conversations again, which I love.
DL (00:04:08):
Yeah. It's great. My office here, I've got the window and we are in a basement flat, so it's down below [the street level] nobody can see me, but yeah, I can hear people walking down the street and you really do get that sense of there are organic podcasts going on all the time. You think, Oh, should I have, in a really sort of weird creepy way, I'd love to surveillance a microphones around, I could really make an interesting podcast.
HM (00:04:31):
It's an extremely hilarious and ‘podcasty’ thing to say is calling a conversation an organic podcast, like listen to these human beings, just spontaneously producing podcasts, that's incredible.
DL (00:04:43):
To conceptualize the idea of somebody talking and another person listening is a very ‘podcasty’ thing to say that's for sure. So, how are you? How are you doing now in terms of the projects that you've got coming up and ongoing? I mean, I don't know whether you're doing any teaching this semester, but you know, we're gearing up for that right now and dealing with a lot of the things that you've been talking about in terms of zoom calls and and the effect of that.
HM (00:05:14):
Really bracing myself for gearing back up to the sort of Zoomification of the fall. I'm not teaching in the fall semester, which is really nice. I am teaching a super intense podcasting course in the spring semester. Um, they sort of bought me out of all of my teaching for the fall, so that I could just work on this big podcasting course, which we were in the process of conceptualizing how we will do a podcasting course. I'm co-teaching it with Gordon Katic, who is the producer of The Cited podcast, which is another Canadian podcast working at the intersection of scholarship and podcasting. But we are having to figure out what exactly it's going to look like to teach people how to use editing software if we can't actually be in the same room as them. So there's some ideation building around that trying really hard as best we can to lean into the potential.
HM (00:06:10):
And in general, I feel very lucky right now that the form that my work takes for the most part, this focus on podcasting means that I have been able to keep up with my projects fairly easily. Things haven't been canceled. Things haven't been delayed. I've been able to continue working on the work that I want to be prioritizing, which is really nice. I know for a lot of my colleagues who, you know, do soundscape research that involves having to actually meet up with humans in a place, or who do archival research like, and all of these various ways people's projects have been really, I mean, it's not the great tragedy of the pandemic obviously, that archival research has been delayed, but it's nice that podcasting does as a digital medium. We can just keep keep working away at it.
DL (00:07:02):
No, it's an interesting one because in a sense, I teach on a film course and there is so much conversation about where filmmaking is going in terms of the production side, and productions are starting to get up and running again, but is it ever going to be the same and how are we going to teach practice in that sense is a really tricky question. And, I don't know whether that course that you're talking about is going to be theory, practice combination, and indeed, maybe, hopefully in January, things will be, will be better and you'll be able to be a little bit more hands-on.
HM (00:07:35):
We definitely will not. My delightful institutions, Simon Fraser University is taking a very conservative approach to in-person teaching, which means that if I wanted in January to be able to teach students in person, I would have to apply in September to be allowed to do that. And I'm not going to because, bless their grubby little hands, but the primary demographic that infections are spreading between in Vancouver is people in their twenties, because they are socializing in small groups indoors. And, uh, and I love my students a great deal, and I love teaching a great deal. And I'm sure none of my students would ever do that. But do I want to follow a bunch of people in their early twenties around with Lysol wipes? I don't particularly. It's not where I want to put the energy of my pedagogy is what I'm saying. Disinfecting seems like, I can do that or I can like take some webinars on how to do fun things in zoom, which I'm doing this afternoon.
DL (00:08:40):
No, I think that that is the best option and I wish that us and other universities had been a little bit more clear and even honest with students in terms of what it's going look like, but I suppose, you know, like everyone else, they don't want to really admit there is, there has been a major change. Anyway I don't want to go off [on a tangent], and depress us all with that.
HM (00:09:00):
It's a whole question. I think it's been easier in Canada for us to make these decisions in terms of closing campuses for a variety of reasons, including that we're a public system. And so tuition is almost the same at every institution. I think in the States, you're justify charging students $20,000 a year for the campus experience. And so then it becomes really hard to justify charging them that same tuition if they have to stay home, but we're in a slightly less dicey position in Canada, for sure.
DL (00:09:34):
So how did you come to podcasting? I mean, I've read a little bit of your Biog and, you know, you've come through, obviously, PhD and post-grad projects in modern media magazines and new media experiences. And it seems to me this ties in clearly with what you're doing now. But was there a moment in which podcasting became a 'thing' for you in terms of whether it was just listening and then transferring into pedagogy or research and, obviously it has become a big thing, pretty much central to your career.
HM (00:10:08):
Yeah, yeah, it really has. And it all sort of unfolded in a kind of backwards and accidental way for me, because I started very much as a literature scholar. My PhD was Canadian literature, and then I went and did a postdoc with a focus on magazines and new media. So that was already enough of a research jump that I was already having trouble at that point reconciling to like, when I interviewed for a job, if they would be like, so how do these things connect? And I would sort of shrug and say, oh, where are they supposed to? But it was midway through my postdoc in 2015 that I started making a podcast with a friend. And at that point I was already quite a committed podcast listener. I started listening to podcasts during my PhD. Um, probably around 2010. I had had no previous exposure to them. And I was going on a road trip with a very dear friend's boyfriend who I did not know well at all, but I had agreed to drive him from Toronto back to Ottawa for Thanksgiving weekend.
DL (00:11:15):
That'll be interesting for you.
HM (00:11:17):
I would be in the car for like six hours. We knew, you know, we'd known each other for a long time, but in that way that, you know your friend's partners that are like, Oh, I don't think we have six hours of stuff to talk about. And he brought an iPad that he had downloaded a ton of podcast episodes onto to plug into the car system and just eat up the space. So that car ride, I listened to almost six hours of solid podcasts. And by the end of that, I was like, well, I'm pretty into this now. So it started with pure comedy podcasting entirely. It was My Brother, My Brother and Me and the Thrilling Adventure Hour were the ones that he got me on. And so for a long time I was purely just a recreational podcast listener, but a fan of the medium.
HM (00:12:09):
And then a friend of mine who had some background in campus radio suggested that we start a podcast together. And the two of us with no clue what we were doing. We're like, how hard could that be? Which is why I maintain a deep, personal commitment to the amateur, DIY roots of podcasting, because it's my area of research now. But if it had been a medium that I had any sense that you had to have expertise or qualifications to get involved in, I would not have touched it. I absolutely would not. We would not have like sat down, consumed a bottle of wine, picked up a Zoom H4 with one single microphone that we just passed back and forth and just, just start talking just like we can do this. Right.
DL (00:12:58):
It sounds so familiar, all the processes of getting better recordings and working on the editing. And then, for me, I'd sort of realized that then the editing was a crafting of information, but the way it was crafted could change that information. The form of the content: it brought me back to the idea that actually they influence one another, which is one of the most fascinating things about podcasting. It's interesting that you said there - especially when we were talking in the podcast studies group, which is really fantastic that that's come about now - that it seems that you come from a similar perspective as me, which is not from a traditional sense of the "radio" way of doing things. I think that its really interesting how that tension still resides in the way that people talk about podcasting.
HM (00:13:52):
I mean, I find the amateur/professional divide in podcasting really fascinating from a scholarly perspective. And then also personally engaging because of the way that I came into the medium but I was already, prior to getting my start in podcasting, I was already very interested in theorizing the role of the amateur and the way that undisciplined and unprofessional knowledge and practices have the subversive capacity to them to break into official ways of doing things and break open new possibilities. And then we started making this podcast and so did all my co-host's on Witch, Please, did all of the production for the first nine months, and then had a baby. And it was at that point that I was like, I would like to take over some of the production because you have a newborn and that feels unreasonable.
HM (00:14:48):
So I learned to edit audio by looking at the files Marcelle had produced and trying to reproduce them. And so I learned by just looking: Okay, here's how long she made the theme song, and then it gets quieter here...You know, the same way that you learn to write an essay by studying other essays. I just looked at the audio files and figured out what she'd done and reproduced it, and then slowly started to get comfortable with doing my own things. But in that sense, I learned from Marcelle more than anybody else, the degree to which the choices you make at a production level are themselves rhetorical, argumentative, and stylistic choices. She made all of these decisions early on about the sound palette. There's a lot of sound effects in that podcast that are used as a third voice, that comments on what's happening. There's a lot of uses of editing to make jokes. And that's all stuff that's going into making the podcast. I had very little sense of the way the editing can produce something unique of a voice. And it has also - I don't know if this is something I've also heard you comment on - it has in turn really transformed how I think about my scholarly writing. So you start thinking about form.
DL (00:16:14):
It was one of the things I was going to ask you, actually, especially since you mentioned your background in literary scholarship. There must've been a sense in which you're having to reassess or renegotiate the relationship between the written word and the spoken word. And it's not to say one is better than the other, because hate that [binarism] in any kind of area, but there are things that are produced within the oral landscape that are just not produced when you're sitting down and writing something or reading something on the page. One of the things for me that podcasting has allowed is to bring that [sound] back to the fore as a valuable way of understanding knowledge, or any particular kind of area. And it also, and this is one of the things I think that you do so well, is it integrates who the person is, who's delivering, which is what exactly what traditional academia in terms of the academic journal doesn't want you to do. So there's always a really interesting tension there, I think.
HM (00:17:19):
A hundred percent. And in that sense, I do think that there is certainly in my PR approach to scholarly podcasting, a sort of through-line to more general feminist interventions, into scholarly writing and writing in general, you know, that sense that I think a lot of us were trained in order to produce expert scholarship, we had to systematically remove ourselves. We're all we're taught at some stage that you're not allowed to say "I" in an essay. You're also taught that you need to prove that your scholarship is rigorous, you need to remove bias, you need to remove perspective. You need to erase yourself. And then gradually as you start to publish in professional settings, you also start getting these copy editors who were raised like every time you use a contraction, every time you put a joke in there, they're like: "Nope, out, gone, gone". This needs to be absolutely like indistinguishable from everybody else's academic prose.
HM (00:18:23):
That sense that we need to drive "ourselves" out of our scholarship to make it rigorous is a deeply patriarchal/ white supremacist notion of what expertise and rigor and objectivity look like. And so there are already so many rich examples of scholarship, particularly coming out of feminist studies, critical race studies, indigenous studies that have theorized putting the self back into the work, have theorized, putting our bodies back into our work, re-embedding ourselves in the actual standpoint we are coming from. Podcasting is beautiful for furthering that kind of conversation, because one, our voices bring our bodies with them in a way that our writing doesn't necessarily. You can curb a lot of that if you are trying to sort of professionalize and normalize your voice. But, but there is that body attached to the voice that is producing. And there's an opportunity if we want to let it, for podcasting to also put feeling and effect back into our scholarship. It's not inherent in the medium, but it's a ripe potential there in working with sound.
DL (00:19:50):
Yes. There's so much in that, in terms of when that happens and when perhaps it doesn't happen. And then the concept of the voice. It's interesting you say that it's not innate to the medium but, especially when I started podcasting with Neil [Fox] we just found ourselves commenting on what we were doing as we were going along, and pointing out the things that were good or not good, or things that we wanted to think about about in the way that we were presenting ourselves. And I don't know why that would be the case. I mean, I've got some suspicions that it is a sense in which perhaps it does come from this amateur background and the open-source ethos. I think a lot of people who would have liked to have gone into film or television or radio, and found barriers to access there, have found it easier to go into podcasting. And they're wanting to kind of almost explain and be self reflective about that.
HM (00:20:52):
Yeah. Yeah. I do think that there is something powerfully amateurish about the way that podcasting, as opposed to radio, produced the space where people put themselves back in, right? The sort of NPR objectivity, which is, I know a stereotype that doesn't actually apply to all NPR shows, but that sense that, as an NPR journalist, you can never state your personal politics and the way that podcasting became a space almost to push against that and to be like, you know, fuck it. I'm not going to be professional. I'm not going to be together. I'm going to speak in my normal voice, "normal". I keep correcting myself. This is a thing that I would love to talk about is the tension between being a podcast producer and a scholar of media and the experience of being like, here's how it feels to make a podcast. Here's what this is like for me. And then at the same time, this other half of your brain being like, "Hmm, got to fear us that". I know that you said it feels less mediated, but there's no such thing as things being less mediated, it's just mediated differently
DL (00:21:58):
When I was listening to on one of your episodes where you were talking about the idea of "performing listening", and "performing speaking" and, this is the first time that we've directly spoken to each other in this way (without being on a zoom call with 30 other people). And there's the media [platform] itself that we're having to kind of tight rope walk across, we're having to try to get to know each other and try to create create a sort of authenticity. And then there's, let's be honest about it, there's my identity and your identity. And we're looking at each other face to face on a zoom call. Maybe there could even be a tension of what's this guy's politics? or what's your politics? That may clash with each other. It's really interesting trying to figure all of that out while you're just trying to have a normal conversation and speak.
HM (00:22:51):
A hundred percent, which is why when I'm teaching students how to make podcasts, I often come back to the things that are going to look like there'll be easy, will often be the hardest things. Because in fact, even the negotiation of a dynamic like this, the simultaneously thinking, okay, I'm listening to your questions and I'm coming up with responses to them, I'm trying to generate responses that are like, listenable and fairly interesting. And also, I just have to make sure that I'm still holding my mic in the right place and that my recording button still lit up. Like, that feels like second nature at this point. But when you first get started, it's really hard not to be, yes, "my answer to that question is", while staring at your recorder the entire time.
DL (00:23:39):
Yeah. You've got to let go of that formalism. And I think also sometimes it's, as I'm speaking there, I kind of said something twice, and I've started a sentence, and I've put a caveat in there and then I've gone back to the beginning of the sentence. I'm thinking, shit, this is going to look so bad on the transcript. I'm going to have to correct it, otherwise it will just make no sense whatsoever.
HM (00:24:00):
Oh my God, I don't do my own transcripts. And I'm really grateful for that because I feel like I've gotten so used to editing the sound of my own voice, that it doesn't bother me anymore. But I think looking at what I say when I am improvising like an oral essay, which is what I'm doing on Secret Feminist Agenda a lot, I think if I actually had to look at that in writing, Oh the deep shame,
DL (00:24:25):
Just what you were saying there in terms of getting used to your own voice, that's quite difficult to do. I mean, once you start editing over and over and over again. What sort of anxieties did you have about your own voice? If any.
HM (00:24:38):
I am always louder than everybody else on every recording.
DL (00:24:48):
Not me. You and I could have a “loud-off”.
New Speaker (00:24:48):
Ha ha. Yes. Part of it is that I am often talking to women and non-binary people, and I have a lower register voice than a lot of other women and non-binary people. And so part of it is just that you get used to the shape of your voice. I often have to take my voice down to a lower volume than my interlocutors so that I am not echoing over them. If I'm recording an interview in person, I can always hear my voice on their mic as well. Which is like "so sorry, can't stop being so loud." But recording yourself and editing yourself is I think, akin to, did you ever have one of those, like pedagogy, professionalization workshops where they made you videotape yourself teaching and then watch it? Yeah. What a horrifying experience to realize what you do with your hands and face when you lecture.
DL (00:25:42):
Yeah. It's so funny. It's like the little curls you get on your lips and it's just like, oh my God, do I actually look like that?
HM (00:25:50):
What are you doing with your hands? Stop it. Yeah. So it's similar. I realized when we were still working on Witch, Please, how much I say "right?" At the end of a point. I make a point. And then I say "right?" And it's a teaching tick because I am pausing to get a response from the students and have say like, "you know, are you following me? Are you, are you picking up what I say? Nod to confirm you're all still conscious. Okay, let's move on". But I do it in podcasts too, but the listeners can't respond. So it doesn't really work.
DL (00:26:23):
I have so many. "So is one of mine, whenever I'm transitioning to something else. "So". I doing in teaching all the time. It's just horrendous. But I had a really, I mean, I've always had a thing about the Northern accent. It's been clipped over the years because of teaching and softening it. But "I could go really broad if I want to like" [in Northern English accent] , and that's how I would sound. I have that "eeeer, uuuuur" and I just feel, oh my God, people just must think I'm an idiot. But that's the class politics of the voice I think, and that can affect so many different kinds of voices in the way people think about themselves in presentation, which is really fascinating,
HM (00:27:01):
A hundred percent. We don't have that kind of granular differentiation of class voices in Canada that exists in the UK. You know, things have been sort of, homogenized more generally though. There are definitely still a select number of regional accents that signify very, very strongly in Canada, but encountering all of these more general racializations of the voice, the classing of the voice, the gendering of the voice, and coming face to face with those moments where somebody actually just says to you: "I would love to listen to your podcast, but just your voice is so annoying". You're like: " Cool. cool, cool, great".
DL (00:27:44):
But alongside that as well, I think, especially if you're talking about gendered voices, there is that really problematic trait that you see all over the place, not just in podcasting, in terms of the notion of authority. There was that whole article, I'm sure you read it, about vocal fry and specific female voices having a certain register and what that signifies. That must be really, really irritating.
HM (00:28:18):
So in the very early days of making Witch, Please, Marcelle and I were invited onto CBC, Edmonton AM to talk specifically about women in podcasting. And this is back, you know, this was like 2015 back when there were a lot of conversations about women in podcasting. That significant gender gap has been overcome, which is why I believe the conversation now about there being too many podcasts, because that's always what happens when women and people of color catch up is people say "Oh, we're done with you."
DL (00:28:51):
Don't make any more podcasts. Now, now we've got a space for it.
HM (00:28:55):
Yeah, but we went on to talk about the policing of women's voices and started talking about vocal fry and the host, a professional radio broadcaster interrupted us, to very seriously explain to us why vocal fry is bad for you. And all podcasters should be focusing on creating a professional radio voice. We were like, "Cool, thanks for proving our point. Very helpful. You're really enacting it right now. It's very helpful".
DL (00:29:27):
That sense of, "the should" of any kind of practice, whatever you want to call it is. It's so problematic. Obviously with the kinds of podcasts that we produce and listen to, hopefully that is being challenged all the time. Also within Podcast Studies as well. It's interesting, from our perspective, myself and Neil's podcast on The Cinematologists, we have made an absolute conscious effort to realize that we're two straight men talking to each other, but to try to not be the stereotype of that. The recognition that that itself has been criticized has been there and we've tried so hard not to be that, but also, to have a perspective on the political elements of what it means to sound a certain way and also what it means to have a voice. So all of those things are kind of imbued into the way that we try to talk. So, it's something that is really key to the way that we should examine podcasts going forward.
HM (00:30:33):
Yeah, absolutely. There's, there's so many from a publishing studies perspective, which is sort of the other hat that I put on when I, when I think about podcasts, um, when we're talking about sort of equity in the podcasting world, you know, there's other conversations to be had that for me, mostly have to do with money, which is the question. We can look at podcasting as a whole and say, okay, what does the breakdown look like? And then narrow that down to podcasts that actively make money and then look at the racial and gender breakdown again. So there's another conversation, I think an important conversation to be had about how podcasting, despite its claims to have low barriers, to access, still have some very clear forms of gatekeeping in place. And who's getting kept out of that.
HM (00:31:27):
But this amateur possibility. This opportunity that it gives us, I think, particularly academics who are used to being just professionalized within an inch of our lives, in terms of the kinds of conversations we can have, that capacity to have a kind of like loose baggy conversation where you can question things and undermine things and come back around again and say, Oh, let's have this conversation. Let's pause and have a meta-conversation about this conversation. Let's pause and consider how we're feeling about this conversation we're having. How are our voices inflecting the ability to do that and how that is both a function of not just the medium, but also of specifically the non-professionalization. That you can just go off on a tangent and explore something and just have the space for that, is part of what feels still exciting and potential-laden for me in terms of where this medium intersects with scholarship.
DL (00:32:34):
That's so vital and I think it ties into the way that you do Secret Feminist Agenda, I think really strongly. I'm just wondering that with the possibility that you've just laid out there with podcasting, do you think that that ties into the ways in which feminist podcasting specifically, and I want to be careful how I say, but it is a really interesting and possibly a more positive space to take feminism forward rather than say social media. I realize that's quite a loaded question, but there you go.
HM (00:33:20):
I'm working on writing a book right now in which I am attempting essentially to theorize the things I have learned via shifting my practice as a scholar towards podcasting and also, to bring the voice I have developed as a podcast or back into my writing. And so I'm trying to actually write something that is in the style I have learned to adapt as somebody working in this other medium. But the chapter that I am writing right now is about personal relationships to technology and particularly unpacking my personal relationship to social media. So I'm right in the thick of exactly this thinking. And I was so prompted, I was rereading the opening essay in Jia Tolentino's book Trick Mirror, which is an essay about the horrors of social media and essentially what Twitter in particular has done in terms colonizing and capitalizing on identity itself in a way that is wildly destructive.
HM (00:34:28):
And that prompted me to actually close down my personal Twitter account temporarily. I was like, I actually need to take a break. Coming into podcasting I think was the thing that let me become somebody who could confidently be a publicly engaged feminist scholar, because podcasting feels like a space, both where I can do that thoughtfully and where I can do that in comparative safety. By which I mean, I think podcasting lends itself less to ill-advised hot takes than social media does. I think it's a slower, medium. It still ideally has a kind of regularity and seriality to it, a kind of rhythm, but one that is significantly less constant and high paced than social media production. So there's time to slow down and think, and obviously an hour-long audio recording allows a lot more expansive space for nuance than however many characters we're allowed to use now.
HM (00:35:31):
And on the other hand, people come up after tweets readily and viciously because they are so easy to find and engaged with. In the sense that like you can just set up an alert for a word that makes you angry and then anytime somebody tweets that word, you can just come after them. And it's really, really easy to do. But for the time being, audio recordings aren't searchable. They're probably going to be at some point because they're coming up, primarily for advertising purposes, a lot of podcasting companies are working to come up with ways to track audio, search audio, and that's going to be a bummer because it's going to really increase the trolling in podcasts. But for the time being, because they're not searchable anybody who wants to get mad at me for what I say on a podcast has to listen to it. And that is a great protection against trolling because one, it takes time and commitment and many, many trolls are extremely lazy and two, it has hidden my terrible ideas in the thing that misogynist hate the most, which is a woman's voice, so you'd have to listen to me.
DL (00:36:52):
But also in the complexity and the depth in which you have to draw out what you're saying. And so it might even be the case that there are certain things that you or I, or anyone else would bring to light and talk about, but there's almost, I mean, Malcolm Gladwell uses this phrase, the "conditionality of meaning" which is something that I think that is afforded to people on podcasts a lot more. So the idea that I'm going to say something to you and you're going to listen to it, but you're not automatically going to assume that that's the final word. That actually, we can, because it's a dialogue, then you can come back with somebody. And I think also that the labour of production in podcasting, you have to come with the sense that the other person is acting in good faith. Whereas a tweet, the default position is the person on the other end has to be acting in bad faith. You know what I mean? It's really interesting what you raised there about the searchability of individual trigger words or phrases that people could use to just troll. Yeah. I hadn't really thought about that. That's really fascinating.
HM (00:38:12):
Yeah. It is. Trolling relies, in so many ways, on the sort of evacuation of context. Pulling something out of context and then fixating on that and then recirculating it again out of context so that people can just get an immediate and uncomplicated reaction to it. And as you say, podcasting is deeply embedded in context. Ideas are being worked through in these sort of longer and more complex forms. The worst trolling I have ever received for a podcast episode was a result of somebody listening to it and then transcribing a particular sentence and then screencaption that sentence. And that screencap continued to circulate on social media for years and it would come up again and again. So I'd made the episode, it was an episode in which I called Margaret Atwood, a shitty white woman. And she's a real sacred cow in Canada. So that was made a lot of people really mad. When I saw that the episode was getting trolled, I deleted it temporarily. I unpublished it temporarily just to sort of just take the wind out of their sails. And then a week later when things had died down, I just quietly put it back up. And the people who continued to circulate that screenshot never even went back to look and see if it was still there. Like that's how disinterested people in general are in context. S there is something really interesting there about social media of Twitter in particular as being a medium, that is all about the ripping away of contexts. So that tweets can circulate in these contexts, freeways versus podcasting, still being a medium that's like very context-rich.
DL (00:40:04):
One of the things that I'm always wrestling with myself though, is where podcasting fits in this grand narrative about ecosystems online and the fact that whether it's Facebook and who we follow and who our friends are. On Twitter the same thing. that we're getting news and information repeated back to us that we want to hear. So where we're sat in these ideological bubbles, you know all of this. And I'm always wondering how much podcasting actually contributes to. In the listening of it itself, it's an insular thing. If we feel that there's a podcast community, we have to kind of imagine it. It's almost links to Benedict Anderson. Because we're doing it [imagining a community of listeners] ourselves. Unless you're in the car for six hours with another person and talking about it. I know Richard and Lori Beckstead are working on the generic aspects of defining podcasts and there is that sense that there is a niche list podcasts for everyone. I'm always kind of thinking, well, am I just talking to the straight white men who like film and, in turn, are you just talking to the LGBTQ+ community, and is it contributing to this thing, where nobody's ever really talking to each other and having the difficult, but progressive conversations that need to be had?
HM (00:41:28):
Yeah, yes, yeah. A Hundred percent. I think that there's lots of ways in which podcasting differentiates itself from the contemporary digital media ecosystem. Primarily I think because of the logic of the RSS feed, which is just a fundamentally different logic than the algorithm. And so it feels in that sense like, oh, you curate a list of podcasts versus, most other platforms, where the algorithm is just pushing stuff into your face and you aren't really getting to choose in any meaningful way. But even that claim suggests that curation is an act that is a hundred percent neutral and individual, which is not how curation works. So we are still curating via primarily word of mouth as the way we get podcasts. In that sense, they are as granular as our social circles are.
HM (00:42:28):
But in addition to that, they are much more like digital media than anything else in the sense that the capacity for endless creation in the digital realm via the possibilities of storage and digital circulation creates a long tail and a long tail means many small niches. As opposed to monocultures, mass cultures, et cetera. Podcasting is not a mass culture and it's hard to imagine a version of a podcast beyond sort of the weird blip of Serial. It's hard to imagine another moment when podcasting would meaningfully become mass culture because digital culture is not mass culture. They're almost the opposite of each other. And so what I find interesting are those spaces where podcasting butts up against mass culture. I think there are some interesting openings for having conversations with people who maybe don't come from the same place as you. By which, I mean, my audience for Secret Feminist Agenda is roughly a quarter of the audience for Witch, Please, my Harry Potter podcast. And my Secret Feminist Agenda audience is significantly more likely to be university-educated, self identified feminists. Like somebody asked me once who my demographic is, and I was like, Oh, it's feminists in their twenties wearing green lipstick. I can very specifically picture them right now and they all love to come up to me at live events and be like, "my lipstick's blue though". Yeah. You see what's happening.
HM (00:44:11):
And so I get lots of challenge and critique and resistance within my listenership to Secret Feminist Agenda. But it almost entirely comes from the perspective of like, you aren't doing a good enough job thinking about neuro-divergence when you had this conversation. So go find a guest to talk about this thing with, do better, your transcripts aren't going up in a timely enough way. This is a feminist podcast, you should be more committed to accessibility than this. That's the kind of pushback I get within my community People who are pushing me to actually enact my feminism more readily, so still resistance and critique and complex multiple voices, but coming from within a shared set of values. But Witch, Please we get listeners who listen to it because they will listen to any Harry Potter thing. Harry Potter is mass culture. People from across the political spectrum will come and listen to Witch, Please and then have to deal with and often get very mad about the way that we read it or the way that we talk. I love to guest on other Harry Potter podcasts because the listeners to those other podcasts will listen to me and be like, who is this bitch? She's terrible. And I'm like, ha, at last, I have broken out of my media silo, behold, all these people who hate me.
DL (00:45:38):
I've gone on to and guested on podcasts and even the radio a couple of times. And it's just not, it's just not a place for me really. One of the things about podcasting I have found quite difficult at times, just because of my own insecurity and narcissism, but the idea that somebody, like a celebrity, could start a film podcast and within one week has got more downloads than I ever have in five years. And it's just dealing with that is the idea of rejecting mass culture and just doing what you do and realizing, actually we have an audience. It's not a mass audience, but you're never going to have a mass audience. It's allowing you though to have an environment in which you can do what you want to do. Which is the thing that is the positive aspect. I think for me anyway.
HM (00:46:34):
The question of numbers, I think, when it comes to the kinds of podcasts we are making is always really an interesting one because we are not going to be mass culture. We are not going to reach celebrity levels of downloads for, we are not celebrities. And also, we're academics. Some people are going to listen and be like, "Hmmm. Two thinky, no, thank you". But you know, if 5,000 people download an episode of Secret Feminist Agenda, that's 4,998 people more than would read any articles I published. There's no easy way to say I'm going to prove podcasting is effective based on numbers. The higher numbers you have, the more effective that scholarship is. That kind of scholarship has popularity content, that's not gonna serve us. But there's something there about, yes OK, maybe I'm only reaching a niche, but I'm reaching out significantly larger niche than I would through any traditional scholarship.
DL (00:47:40):
And again, I think that's coming more and more to the fore, especially with some of us who are particularly interested in the idea of academic podcasting and what that actually means. Which brings us to the peer-reviewing research that you're doing now. Was that always the plan, that Secret Feminist Agenda was going to be peer-reviewed so that it could then count as it were as an academic output?
HM (00:48:10):
Absolutely not. No I do everything real backwards. So, Siobhan McMenemy, my collaborator on this podcasting peer review project. She's the managing editor at Wilfrid Laurier University Press, which is a beautiful fit for this project because they are a small press with a very clear social justice orientation and a commitment to creating scholarship that can reach larger audiences. So they were already thinking about podcasts as a possible direction to move in. And Siobhan knew my work with Witch, Please, and was interested in me making something a little bit more explicitly a scholarly podcast. So we got this grant to do this project. And the idea was that I would make like a five or six-episode mini-series on a topic related to my research and that we would peer-review those episodes in a much more traditional way prior to them actually being published. Then they would go up and then it would be, Oh look, peer-reviewed scholarship, but it's audio. And what we ended up doing turned out to be significantly more experimental and weird because right around the time that our grant started, I just started Secret Feminist Agenda for fun. I had left Edmonton, which is where Marcelle and I had been making, Witch, Please. I was in a new city. I didn't really have an intellectual community here yet. I wanted an opportunity to start to build that community. And so I was like, I'll start a podcast where the whole premise is that I talked to interesting feminists and then I'll have an excuse to make them all talk to me, then there'll be my friends, and it worked great. Most of my friends in Vancouver are people I've had on the podcast, it's really effective. But I wasn't thinking about the peer-review-ability of it at all, particularly not when I made the commitment to make it a weekly podcast. So, yeah, we ended up doing an after the fact peer review. Once I had put a whole season up, we would have that season peer-reviewed and then I would use the feedback from that to inform how I made the next season, which makes it a non-traditional peer-review on multiple levels, but was also a really fun and interesting experiment.
DL (00:50:37):
When we did it for one of our podcasts, it was really interesting. And the reviews that you have are super detailed, really, really interesting, and really good. And they, I think for me, they really expand on some of the difficulties when it comes to creating scholarship that isn't within the traditional mold. These questions are being worked through by the reviewers as much as anything else which is really fascinating. And that sense of, what do we mean by scholarly rigor and where is the inherent knowledge within a piece of media? Where does it actually reside? Because it's just taken for granted that somehow if you've got a journal article, knowledge is just woven in there in some way. It's really odd how that can't be, but people find it very difficult to associate that with a piece of a piece of audio. It's almost as if it's still so difficult to not have to go back to the written text as the grounding of the knowledge. Was that something that you were, not pushing against, but having to think about and negotiate around?
HM (00:51:51):
The question of what counts as scholarship is one that I have been grappling with personally, since I started making podcasts. Particularly when we started making Witch, Please, which we understood as purely a friendship project and then universities started inviting us to come and talk about Which, Please, which was when we realized that it must be scholarly because all these universities wanted us to come and talk about it. And we were like, Oh, okay, I guess we're doing scholarship. And then the same thing with Secret Feminist Agenda. I started making it Siobhan said, actually, this would be a great podcast to use for our project. And I said, "Oh, that won't work, it's not scholarly", because I really had internalized these very specific understandings of what the scholarly looks like. Those are marriage to the written word in one part, but also a particular understanding of, generating new knowledge in a particular mode with a particular tone. You know, a kind of seriousness, and in my mind, it was like, if we're going to translate the seriousness of scholarship into a podcast, it's going to have to sound like an audio documentary with particular kinds of production values. Because that's like NPR, the academia of podcasting.
HM (00:53:17):
So I had all of these hangups around what constitutes the scholarly and Siobhan is the one who really pushed me to try to let go of those. But it wasn't until I read that first season of the peer-review and saw all of these senior feminist scholars being like, yeah, of course, this is scholarship. Let's move on and talk about the nuances of how we think about credit and labor, and research versus service versus teaching. The haste with which all of the peer-reviewers were like, Oh, scholarship, for sure. Let's move on to the real conversations. That really helped me let go of my attachment, continue to work to let go of my attachment to how scholarship needs to sound or look. But what you were saying there about our attachment to the written word...this has just dawned on me, but I suspect that part of our conservatism in the humanities around what looks scholarly is that we are forced constantly to fit our work into categories that were built for other disciplines that were built for STEM fields. So we don't produce research really. Like we're not going out and finding new data. We're not creating tables, we're not doing studies, we're analyzing objects. So the difference between our research, our teaching, our service has always been more blurred, is inherently fuzzier. So, I'm engaging in an analysis in an article and then I'm doing it with my students. Are those meaningfully different things because I'm doing one in a classroom and one in an article, not really. And podcasting, this mode of podcasting in particular, really just sort of gets at the weird gray areas between service and teaching and research. And that's my favorite thing about the peer-reviews, how everybody used it as an opportunity to push back against the very idea that there's an identifiable thing called research that we do in the humanities at all.
DL (00:55:39):
And also that if you follow a certain structure, you will get to the answer to that research. It's what you said earlier on about the idea of having a free form. But your peer reviewers have been very good in going with it. I've had situations where particularly with the podcast, trying to fit it in what's called the REF in the UK, it's just been impossible. And as I was saying the other day in the meeting, I've just given up, I'll write the journal article because I can't be bothered to argue with about what scholarship is. You talk to a sociologist, or somebody who comes from a STEM subject, if you haven't got your hypothesis and, your methodology and then your research data, and then your discussion, as if the way that those papers are written are not edited and constructed and, and don't have emphasis in certain ways and not in others. The advantage of the podcast in an academic sense is that you can have a conversation. It doesn't have that stasis where there's nothing you can argue with when you're reading.
HM (00:56:52):
Yeah. A hundred percent. That for me is one of the big questions of scholarly podcasting right now is the question of credit. I'm going up for tenure next year. And so I have to be actively invested in the question of whether my podcasts will be counted, because if they will not be counted, that I have been extremely unproductive for the past four years. But if they are counted boy, look out, you know. And it's helpful that my podcasting work was supported by grants, which always count. But that question of credit is also for me, where I am most invested in doing capacity building and infrastructure developing work is I want it to be possible, not just for me to build a career on making podcasts, but for more early-career scholars to also experiment in non-traditional scholarly forms and get credit for it. And part of that, for me, really comes back to the politics of open and accessible scholarship, because there is a fairly clear tendency for the academics who are most concerned with making open and accessible scholarship, tend to be academics who come out of working-class backgrounds who are queer, who are people of colour, who are black or indigenous, who are disabled, who come into the university with a sense of commitment and responsibility to other communities outside of the scholarly one. And so want to make work that is also for those communities. And until we can interrupt the system where you have to do the community-engaged work, and then also publish an article on it every time, which is just a doubling of labor, that's going to continue to be a barrier to access for the incredibly necessary transformation of who actually makes up academia.
DL (00:58:59):
Yes, at its very it allows an entry point to more public scholarship, also politics. There's a real possibility of that. And it would be sad if the infrastructure of podcasting makes that more and more difficult. In terms of the way that the industrial side is developing, but I suppose that that drive to what you've just said there, in terms of open accessibility, is driving the Amplified podcast network project.
HM (00:59:30):
Yes, absolutely. So the Amplify podcast network is the next stage after we finished the experimental peer review of Secret Feminist Agenda and part of Secret Feminist Agenda as a pilot project was also just feeling out how are people going to respond to our claim that a podcast is scholarship? And the answer is positive. For the most part, there has been a lot of sort of warm reception of this idea. And so the network will expand the research. We're adding three new podcasts, some from experienced podcasters, some from people who have not worked in the medium yet, but have a clear commitment to accountable and community-engaged scholarship. And so we're going to expand it in that sense. And then we're also just doing a lot more of that, that infrastructure work.
HM (01:00:24):
So really trying to say what stands in the way of podcasts counting? What is the real barrier here? Because there's an instinctive sense from a lot of people that it doesn't count, like there's no category on the REF that makes space for this, right? Things look different in Canada, but if I can say, hey our national funder, there's no way for me to record my podcasts as research in the CV form that you have. And so I am going to push you to change that, or, what I am particularly interested in is can we attach metadata to podcasts such that they become ingestible by scholarly research engines, such that when somebody goes into J-store or Google Scholar looking for scholarship on Film Studies, they will find your podcast. Because right now our podcasts don't exist in that ecosystem at all. And I think that's the kind of thing is going to really help with making it count.
DL (01:01:49):
What Neil and I have been working on is a project to get some money together, to try and look into doing something, with almost exactly the same reaction to academic podcasting, but done in a slightly different way. So what we're looking at is trying to produce a podcast hosting site that is for academics, so that you can embed into the audio, all of the things that you would find in an academic journal. And when you get to the point where you've got your metadata infrastructure sorted out, those two things would align very well together. I think that's a big problem in that you could say a podcast, but there just isn't all of that infrastructure behind it to guarantee the sort of academic rigour that the universities are looking for.
HM (01:02:41):
Including citeability, that is great. I was a couple of weeks ago having a meeting with the digital humanities innovation lab, which is the group we're working with here at SFU to build this tool. And I was talking to their programmer and we've been having a lot of back and forth about, you know, where does the audio live when you put a podcast in this tool? Having to work out a lot of workflow stuff. And at one point I was like, I mean, I guess it could just also be a podcast hosting site and he paused and he said, have you ever heard of scope creep? I was like, Oh yeah, you're telling me, you absolutely know that's a whole other project. And so I was like, Oh yeah. I mean, it's a great idea, but you're totally right. It's outside of the, of the bounds of what we're doing here. So I'm delighted to hear that you're making it.
DL (01:03:34):
Well, we're trying to get the money to get somebody, to make it for us. So that's the idea, but it's so great that there is grant money out there for podcasting development because it seems to me, unless you're a show and you're doing just a show, let's say on a science researcher and you're just covering their research in a journalistic way. It doesn't seem that there's a lot of interest. I haven't seen projects that, that are exciting in terms of the idea of developing podcasting as a [academic] media platform in that sense. But maybe things are about to change when I get my huge amount of money to do that. Anyway. So obviously we were on the Podcast Studies meet up the other day, which is really a great developing network of people. And we have our Slack channel now. So hopefully that will develop, but I'm just wondering, what do you think about the very demarcation of Podcast Studies as a field and what does it mean to you and what should its main concerns be, and how does it differentiate between radio studies and media studies.
HM (01:04:47):
Oh, that's a big question. It has been really exciting to me to start to get, to actually have conversations with other scholars working on podcasting. I had never read another scholar articulate clearly, my understanding of the work I do until I read your introduction to the podcasting book and you were talking about making a podcast and how it felt. I've cited the sentence a number of times now. Maybe we're being too utopian. Maybe this is too optimistic, but it kind of maybe feels like there's a possibility to do something exciting and new in this media mess scholars. And I was like, yes, yes. That. But for the most part that is not a conversation I've seen as much of in podcasting scholarship. I'd like to see more of that.
HM (01:05:39):
That's what excites me is the research-creation and dimension. This getting to meet other people who are doing this work, I think is starting to give me a sense of the exciting potential that podcasting studies has as an inter-discipline. So like a space where, like in the digital humanities, which is a space I came up in a lot of ways as an early-career scholar, some people are now like digital humanists and that's their discipline. But for the most part, it's people who come from a lot of different disciplines but have a shared set of concerns or tools or interests. And that makes the conversations really rich and exciting. And I think there's a lot of potential to say what happens when you put somebody who's a radio studies scholar, somebody who's a new media scholar, somebody who's a digital humanist and somebody who's a journalist on a panel together to talk about podcasts.
HM (01:06:45):
You're going to get new understandings of the medium that arise out of the fact that we are coming from really different perspectives in terms of how we're thinking about what it does. And I love even just seeing those conversations start to pop up. I'll say something about podcasting that comes out of a publishing studies perspective and then my brilliant research assistant Stacey Copeland, who I think, you know, she's in your book, who comes out of a sort of Sound Studies and Radio Perspective. will say "well that thing that you just said about podcasting is also true because of this thing about the compression rates that are used for radio versus podcasting". And I'm like, what, tell me more, this is very exciting.
HM (01:07:37):
So those intersections feel exciting to me. And as somebody who struggles to find exciting conversations about podcasting at say digital humanities conferences or literature conferences, but also I think I would feel in over my head at a Radio Studies conference. Not to cast shade on any particular discipline, but we love to police the boundaries of legitimate knowledge in our scholarly disciplines. So going to a Radio Studies conference, I think would be challenging. But the idea of creating a space for this interdisciplinary work, where we can figure out what happens when we bring our different realms of knowledge into contact with each other. That feels really exciting to me. To think about genre, to think about production, to think about mediation, to think about industry formation, to have people who make and people who study actually in dialogue, that there feels like there's yeah, there's something exciting there
DL (01:08:57):
To me as well, I think the one thing that has happened is a kind of invigorated or, has just made me realize how important sound is. I mean, it's just a basic thing really, but, now a lot of my sort of film studies scholarship is nuanced with a lot of the sound element of the film, and I feel like a lot of my academic work on film studies before I got into this had a whole bit missing that I didn't even take care of. Do you know what I mean? So it's really interesting how that has affected the way that I've gone forward in terms of embracing podcasting and then Podcast Studies. But I think there is a need for the discipline to be, this is what it is. And whenever you go, if you do go to Radio Studies conference or you are in a Media Studies seminar, whatever it might be, there's an implication that what you're seeing or you're reading, whatever it is you're talking about through those disciplinary backgrounds. I do want the ability to be able to talk about podcasting and not have to come through a Radio Studies trajectory because that's not the way that I came through it. And I do want to challenge the idea that, well, , podcasting is just a subset of radio because it isn't for me.
HM (01:10:24):
It isn't for me either. And it has been an interesting new experience coming into this, just stepping one foot into the sort of radio study side of the world and immediately having all of these Radio Studies scholars be like, well, your podcast, not a real podcast, that's not real sound like that's what you're doing is not legitimate. What are you talking about? Like you just pick up a microphone and talk into it. And I'm like, okay. I mean, I'm definitely not creating radio for sure. But you know that a lot of podcasts are just people talking into a microphone, like a whole big chunk of the medium. And so that possibility of having more scope in terms of what directions we come from to talk about podcasting just feels, it feels exciting for me to have a space where I can learn more about sound, learn more about production, learn more from people who have different kinds of expertise than I do.
DL (01:11:33):
I certainly I'm totally on board with what you're saying there. That's yeah, that's absolutely right.
HM (01:11:37):
Can I, can I insert one other thing before we wrap up, I just want to say that my personal introduction to this, like working with Radio Studies, working with Sound Studies people has been primarily through the SpokenWeb Podcast, which is another project I work on, which is a Sound Studies project that is particularly looking at audio literary archives, and that they brought me on as a co-applicant for this grant to help work with them, to make a podcast because I had the sort of expertise and knowledge in terms of not even so much in terms of production, but in terms of infrastructure like and labor and how to actually set up a podcast and get it working. And that's how I met Stacy. I hired her to be the project manager and supervising producer for that podcast. And then work with Sound Studies scholars who study sound, but don't have any experience necessarily in production of it.
HM (01:12:36):
And that, as a collaboration, has been a beautiful micro experiment in what happens when people who are interested in podcasting, but come from really, really different perspectives. So to all get together and try to make something. And I love what we've made because as a podcast, every episode sounds totally different. Like it's such a fun experiment with a lot of investment in using podcasting as a space to play and very little investment with producing a particular professional sound and so that has been, has really opened my eyes to how exciting it's going to be to get to collaborate with more Sound Studies and Radio Studies people.
DL (01:13:21):
Yeah. That's the next thing that's queued up on my list to listen to, because I'm doing some work on the concept of audio-cinematic experience. So which is borrowing from podcasting, borrowing from Sound Studies, borrowing from film and what that actually might mean in terms of the way that we conjure images. And we imagine things through the experience of sound. So I'm definitely going to be listening to that. Hannah thanks so much for taking the time out, we've been going an hour and 15 here, so it's been a brilliant conversation. I've really, really enjoyed it. Is there anything else you might want to recommend for people to listen to maybe something that they maybe haven't might not have heard of?
HM (01:14:08):
Yeah. Can I recommend, here's what I'm gonna recommend to everybody. I hope that you are ready for an incredibly niche recommendation. I'm going to recommend a politics podcast called Sandy and Nora Talk Politics. And I love this podcast for a couple of reasons. One is that it is an extremely frank. It's a Canadian politics podcast. I do very much believe that non-Canadians will also get a lot out of it because the conversations that they have come out of the fact that both of them are deeply rooted in organizing work grassroots political organizing. And so they come at political conversations from such a different perspectives than any other politics podcasts I've listened to. They come from the perspective of here's a problem. How will we organize in response to it? What are the possibilities for organizing that one might imagine? What can you actually do, which is so different from a sort of like, let's just theorize the political and learn about it also helpful.
HM (01:15:10):
But the other thing I love about it as a podcast is that these are two brilliant political thinkers and organizers who are basically persona non grata on CBC because they are too radical and too unwilling to sort of compromise their politics in order to say something pleasant for the national broadcaster. And they have explicitly talked about how their podcast is like the second, most popular political podcast in Canada, but CBC will not touch them because they are too radical. And it's such a perfect example of how podcasting still does that thing, that sort of utopian thing, which is, it creates a platform for people whose ideas don't fit into the mainstream media and lets them actually build an audience and engagement and even earn money off that platform. And it's, so I love listening to them because it is a real sort of spitting straight in the eye of mainstream media in a very pleasurable way.
DL (01:16:16):
Great. I'll put the link to that up on the show notes, along with everything else that that Hannah has mentioned in terms of projects and the podcasts that she produces and hosts. Hannah, thanks so much for coming on New Aural Cultures. I really appreciate it.
HM (01:16:31):
Thank you.
