Intermediate Podcasting Workshop

On January 25, 2017, SFU Library's Research Commons and Digital Humanities Innovation Lab held a follow-up workshop to the Podcasting for Scholarly Communication workshop. Hannah McGregor led the Intermediate Podcasting workshop and is an assistant professor in Publishing@SFU as well as the co-host of Witch, Please, a scholarly podcast about the Harry Potter world. Intermediate Podcasting went beyond the basics of audio recording and introduced participants to creating audio brands, publishing a podcast, and publicizing it on social media. The workshop attracted members of the public as well as graduate students and faculty from a wide range of disciplines including English, Publishing, Philosophy, and Education.

In the first half of the workshop, McGregor introduced participants to various genres and formats of podcast with an eye toward creating an audio brand. She played a few example segments, including clips from Let's Find Out, the Memory Palace, and Another Round. Taking information gathered from the examples, participants then explored what kind of podcast they wanted to create along with the necessary components to make it happen, such as a well-developed topic and a clear sense of the intended audience. This was followed by an exercise in storyboarding, where participants worked together in groups to lay out a sample episode piece by piece.

In the second half of the workshop, McGregor moved from conceptualizing a podcast to implementing one, focusing on publicity and publishing. Of particular interest were the nuts and bolts of publishing a podcast, which included hosting the episodes on a platform like Soundcloud, setting up an RSS feed of the podcast, and pointing iTunes to the podcast so listeners can find it. Finally, McGregor walked participants through publicizing their podcast by using her podcast, Witch, Please as an example. Participants left with a better sense of the tools and know-how required in order to start a podcast of their own.

Intermediate Podcasting is part of the DH Series of workshops hosted by the SFU Library's Research Commons and Digital Humanities Innovation Lab. To find out more about our future workshops and to sign up for one, visit our Events + workshops page.