Podcasting for Humanities Graduate Students: Storytelling for a Modern Audience

National Humanities Center Virtual Institute for Graduate Students

January 8–12, 2024

Podcasting has become a common form of storytelling and scholarly communication in the digital age. This five-day virtual institute provided hands-on, immersive training for PhD students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to translate research, commentary, and community-engaged narratives into podcast episodes.

Working in cross-disciplinary and intra-university teams, participants learned how to storyboard an idea, to create and collect audio content, and to edit narratives into entertaining, powerful podcasts. Participants heard from leading scholarly podcasting experts, learned the technical components of recording and editing audio, and explored ways to incorporate podcasting into their pedagogy.

Goals

The program sought to:

• Encourage emerging humanities scholars to embrace a sense of responsibility for sharing stories of the human experience with diverse American publics.
• Foster new models of expertise that are responsive both to the traditional authority-based credentialing systems of the professional humanities and to the emerging concerns of university-based and public constituencies.
• Grow capacity for collaborative—team, interdisciplinary, cross-university—scholarship.
• Expand humanities professionals’ capabilities for curating humanities materials in a way that adds depth and understanding to contemporary public affairs and cultural conversations.

Participants were able to:

• Forge new intellectual connections between public life, humanities research, and responsive digital media.
• Deepen collaborative inquiry and project management skills.
• Hone their ability to communicate humanities expertise in accessible and publicly-responsive formats.
• Acquire conceptual and technical skills to create, revise, and publish broadcast-ready podcasts.
• Develop skills and networks valuable within and beyond the university.