Saving New Sounds: Preserving Podcasts and Making Audio Culture Analyzable

This project creates a campus-wide digital research resource for aggregating, navigating, searching, analyzing, and archiving podcasts. Called PodcastRE (short for Podcast Research), the website stores and preserves podcasts and makes them more accessible for research and investigation than currently existing archives. Given that roughly 90 percent of U.S. silent films and 75 percent of pre-1975 radio recordings have been lost or destroyed, PodcastRE is trying to avoid the same fate for podcasts. It seeks to archive not only professionally produced shows, but also the hundreds of podcasts UW-Madison students are producing every year about stories in our community.

PodcastRE will use new digital methods and scholarship to open up novel opportunities for archiving, searching and analyzing audio content and the associated metadata. This project will extend the scope and scale of this database, and ensure its sustainability as a long-term digital collection for the UW community and beyond, a truly distinct and distinguished resource that would position UW as a leader in digital collections foresight, research and management.

Principal Investigator

• Jeremy Morris
  Assistant Professor of Communication Arts
  

Co-Principal Investigator

• Eric Hoyt
  Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies

Collaborators

• Bruce Barton
  Shared Development Group Manager
• Peter Gorman
  Head of Digital Collections UW-Libraries
• Lee Konrad
  Associate University Librarian
• Cameron Cook
  Digital Curation Assistant
• Peter Sengstock
  Computer Media Specialist and Podcast Database Developer
• Dana Gerber-Margie
  A/V Archivist, WiLS