Podcasts

This page contains links that may be helpful during the Bok Center Learning Lab's podcasting workshop for EASTD115 Japanese Monsters.

In a podcast, your voice will often achieve an intimacy or approachable informality that can be more effective at connecting to your audience, and you have tools at your disposal (pacing, sound effects, music beds) that can add additional layers of meaning.

why podcasting?

Typically, when encountering podcasts, we think of audio authoring, or an audio essay of sorts. But across the wide array of projects you might tackle in the audio zone, the strengths of this modality in communicating academic ideas are numerous.

Creating an academic audio essay calls upon many of the skills, tasks, and creative engagement involved in writing a final research paper: it requires choosing a topic, conducting research, defining a point of view, considering relevant theoretical frameworks and providing supporting evidence for the argument.

Audio authoring a podcast or radio play also challenges you to develop new media skills and carefully consider how to use voice and narrative style to reach a particular audience. You will manipulate auditory elements (e.g. voice, sound effects and/or music) into a cohesive message, with intentional tone, style, and pacing. And crucially, making podcasts can help you integrate first-person perspectives and personal experiences with the questions/data/issues that are important for engagement with your discipline/subject matter, a move that you must contend with as you move between your academic and non-academic lives.

Even when composing a piece of music you must make intentional choices, where even the seemingly merely aesthetic elements are playing a critically functional role in your academic argument about the apocalypse.

TOOLS

• Garageband
• Soundtrap
• Audacity

We can also help out with any questions you have about Logic, Ableton or Adobe Audition if you decide to go with one of those tools instead.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

As you begin to create your own podcasts, here are a couple of resources to check out:

• podcasting.learninglab.xyz is a great resource for thinking about podcast structure, recording, and what resources are available to you at Harvard
• A quick guide on recording with your phone some very quick tips on how to optimize as well as some basic recording practices
• Tips for recording with no little to no equipment
• BBC remote recording protocols are really great
• Pro Tools tips on remote recording
• Audio Collaboration helpful tips for navigating collaboration remotely across a variety of tools

PEOPLE

Today's workshop features:

• Jordan, Learning Lab Assistant Director
• Casey, Learning Lab Studio Coordinator
• Mike, Learning Lab Media Production Coordinator
• Katie, Learning Lab Project Manager

QUESTIONS

If you have any questions after the workshop, or at any time during the production of your podcast, feel free to reach out to use at help.learninglab.xyz and we will put together a customized tutorial for you.