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January 2017, Week 2

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From:
Eric Hoyt <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Fri, 13 Jan 2017 19:46:16 +0000
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An announcement from my colleague at UW-Madison, Jeremy Morris, about an important new digital project that I hope will be of interest to Screen-L subscribers…

Dear Friends,

I’m thrilled to start 2017 with an announcement that I hope many of you will find useful for your teaching and research needs.

With the help of colleagues and students here at UW-Madison, I’m happy to be launching PodcastRE:<http://podcastre.org/> A searchable, researchable archive of podcasts. Short for Podcast Research, the database contains links and metadata records to over 150,000 individual audio files, from over 1000 different podcast feeds (and growing everyday). Here is a link to the site: http://podcastre.org<http://podcastre.org/>

PodcastRE provides a search engine that lets you search by show title, episode title, or keyword and display the results by grid or list (with new visualization and analytics tools on the way!). You can stream audio if the podcast is still available online from its original feed and we have over 5000 interactive audio transcripts for shows in our database. We also have a tiered account system that allows researchers greater access to the database to study podcasts that may no longer be online, or to add specific podcasts to the database for further study.

Podcasting is just over 10 years old, but it has been nothing short of an explosion of cultural and sonic creativity: there are millions of episodes in over 100 languages. But this exciting new media form is shockingly vulnerable; podcast feeds end abruptly, cease to be maintained, or simply aren’t saved and archived properly. PodcastRE aims to avoid this fate for podcasts through preservation and providing an interface for researching them. We believe that what today’s podcasters are producing will have value in the future, not just for its content, but for what it tells us about audio’s longer history, about who has the right to communicate and by what means. We may be in what many are calling a “Golden Age” of podcasts but if we’re not making efforts to preserve and analyze these resources now, we’ll find ourselves in the same dilemma many radio, film or television historians now find themselves: writing and researching about a past they can’t fully see or hear.

Many thanks to the many folks involved in helping realize this project. The tireless Peter Sengstock for countless hours of technical development and the student developers and programmers who have helped build the platform: Luke Salamone, Zheng Zheng, Avichal Rakesh, Ying Li, and Keyi Cui. Additional content curation and feature ideas from Andrew Bottomley, Jessie Nixon and Sean Owczarek. Transcripts appear courtesy AudioSear.ch<https://www.audiosear.ch/> (with extra special thanks to Anne Wootton).

And stay tuned for more. My colleague, Eric Hoyt, and I are working toward building an analytics platform for the database with even greater visualization and analytics features. Imagine ArcLight<http://search.projectarclight.org/> meets PodcastRE. If the grant funding powers-that-be smile upon us, there’ll be much more to come!
In the meantime, try out the site and let us know what you think.<http://podcastre.org/> Feel free to direct any questions to me at [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>. We’re still working out the kinks, so let us know what works and doesn’t and how you’re using it for research or teaching.

Jeremy.

****
Dr. Jeremy Morris
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Communication Arts
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6132 Vilas Hall




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