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054 - AAA2017 - Webster
126 Plays6 years ago
Paper: The Archaeology Podcast Network: Podcasts as Digital Preservation and Public Outreach, Webster
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Anthropological Discussions
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Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:09
Speaker
This is the recording of a paper presented at the 116th annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C. on December 1st, 2017.
Session Highlights: Podcasts and Anthropology
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Speaker
The session was entitled, Podcasts and Anthropology, Exploring Approaches to Multimodal Research and Communications, and was organized and chaired by Nushin Setigasamy and Kyle Olson, both of the University of Pennsylvania. This paper was presented by Chris Webster of the Archaeology Podcast Network and was titled, Podcasts as Digital Preservation and Public Outreach.
Chris Webster's Media Journey
00:00:41
Speaker
So this is podcasts as digital preservation and public outreach. And we'll talk about that shortly. But first, since most of you probably don't know me, I'll tell you a little bit about myself. I'm an archaeologist. I'm a cultural resource management archaeologist. I do most, I've worked all over the country, but now I own a cultural resource management firm in Reno, Nevada. I work mostly in Nevada and California, sometimes some of the surrounding states, but mostly I've been doing that since about 2005 or so.
00:01:08
Speaker
I started a blog as a result of the 2011 Society for American Archaeology Conference. They had a blogging archaeology session. I was like, blogs, these are cool. And I started one that day. And then that turned into a book called The Field Archaeologist's Survival Guide, published by Left Coast Press. And I was sort of hooked on the thought of these sorts of mediums as public outreach. And the podcast turned into, really, or the book turned into a podcast, basically.
00:01:38
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And I started the CRM archaeology podcast about, I guess, six years ago, and I'll get into that a little more later.
Impact and Growth of Archaeology Podcast Network
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But what I see myself as mostly these days, because I promote digital archaeology using digital methods in the field and things like that, and this is all tied to podcasting as a digital archaeologist, but also as a public archaeologist through the archaeology podcast network. And all of this is tied together, and we'll get to that.
00:02:04
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So the APN, as I mentioned, just so you guys know where we're coming from, we have about 19 shows. We have a little over 20 hosts. It kind of varies from time to time. Thousands of hours of podcasts that we put out there in the last three years. Actually, today is the three-year anniversary of the Archaeology Podcast Network. And as of yesterday, we have over 100,000 monthly subscribers to the entire network.
00:02:26
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Let that sink in just for a second. We started with about 6,000 with the two shows we brought in three years ago. Now we have over 100,000 monthly subscribers of people that are not at conferences like these that are listening to podcasts about archaeology. And I wanted to start this with a really quick email. I actually slotted this into the presentation right before I sent it off because we got this email about a week and a half or maybe two weeks ago.
Listener Stories and Personal Impact
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And I'm going to read this just in case people can't see it.
00:02:53
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It's a little bit of a paraphrase, because I took some information out for her privacy. But it says, I'm a big fan of the ARC 365 from Chennai, India. And I want to thank you for how this podcast has changed the way I look at my life and future now. Real quick, ARC 365 is a podcast we started after the last presidential election. We figured we need a podcast a day about archaeology. So it's every single day for 2017. And now I've got a team working on 2018. We're going to continue that in through 2018. And it's just short three to five minute episodes.
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on any topic in archaeology from something history related to definitions and terms to whatever just once a day in 2017 and now 2018. Continuing on, I do not get many opportunities to listen to the APM, but whenever I do, I'm reminded that there are people actually living what I have come to believe as only my fantasy. I'm 28 now.
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I don't know if I'd ever get to a place where I'm qualified enough to call myself an archaeologist, even if not, I'm going to die trying. Whether I fulfill my dream or not, the Archaeology Podcast Network, especially the ARC 365, would be a huge inspiration. So thanks a lot to you and everyone else involved with the APN. Thank you again for making me believe that it's okay to dream again. Thank you for the motivation. Please continue the good work that you guys are doing. I am sure I'm not the only person who's inspired by the APN.
00:04:08
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Thanks also for being the only voice that I found comforting during some of the worst days this year. You probably have no idea how much R365 meant to a boring, stupid housewife in a corner of India. So that's pretty amazing. We don't get very many emails, which I think is a good thing, because people only email on the internet if they're really mad. So I consider that a good thing that we don't get a lot of emails. But we've had probably a dozen or so emails like that in the past year or so. And I call that a pretty big win for us. That's pretty good.
00:04:37
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That's why we're here. That's what we're doing. So again, this is about digital archaeology, and we're going to talk about the problem first with digital archaeology.
Challenges in Digital Archaeology
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And really this goes to, you know, I say archaeology because I'm an archaeologist, but this is a broader question for the entire field of anthropology. So digital archaeology and digital preservation, okay?
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In archaeology specifically, just because that's my frame of reference, we're dealing with big data sets now. We're dealing with people knowing they have to move from paper. And even if they use paper in the field, they're still
00:05:11
Speaker
Converting the paper information into digital information and everybody's trying to figure out what to do with it So it's being stored in these big these big data servers. I work in cultural resource management archaeology It's all everything's stored on a on a CD or a DVD drive In a BLM field office somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Nevada where no one can literally nobody can get to it I mean you need special permits and
00:05:32
Speaker
appointments and all kinds of stuff just to see the information, so it's really hard to get to. And you go to the analysis phase and you generate even more data. Even more things are created. And like I mentioned, storage is a huge issue for all this stuff. And it's not just storage of the big data, it's storage of the ideas and information and results of the analysis that were determined based on the project. Again, back to cultural resource management,
00:05:59
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I just turned in a report to the Forest Service in Eastern Nevada, and it's sitting at a little-known Forest Service office, even more little-known than the BLM office in Elko, Nevada, and literally nobody's ever going to see that report. All the fantastic conclusions I came up with. The Forest Service archaeologist is the only one that's ever going to read that. The client just says, can we put our bulldozers there or not? That's all they care about. And then outreach.
00:06:24
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Outreach is a huge problem in archaeology, especially CRM archaeology, because we don't have time for it, and we don't have the money for it. We get a budget for a project, and it's the lowest bidder on these government projects that always wins. So when you start ratcheting that bid down a little bit, you start cutting out things, and outreach is typically one of the first things to go, because it's not essential to getting the project done, which is a huge problem. Sometimes the federal projects will require some sort of outreach, but it's usually the
00:06:53
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you know, hey, let's create a pamphlet or something like that, that again, nobody's going to see. Or at least not enough people are going to see. So in the past, again, referencing archaeology, we record stuff in notebooks. We write reports about the stuff we recorded in notebooks. Sometimes we might write articles if we do it on our own time and on our own budget. And then sometimes these things end up as museum exhibits.
00:07:19
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And I know we're in the mecca of museums for United States, but don't get me started about museums. Okay. Now the president, what's going on now? That was the past.
Evolution from Traditional to Digital Methods
00:07:29
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That was a long time ago. The president, we're actually still writing stuff in notebooks. We're still writing reports. We're still writing articles when we can, when we have the time. And now museums have changed just a little bit. We can do different types of outreach and exhibits. We still have museum exhibits, of course, but we have websites where people can access information.
00:07:47
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We have blogs where people can read a little more personal information about certain projects. And we have podcasts. And podcasts can be audio or video. Sometimes they're called vodcasts when they're video. But podcasts, they're the emerging way to get information out, I think, even though podcasts have been around for, I mean, depending on who you talk to, at least 20 years. But they've only been popular for the last maybe 10 years or so.
00:08:14
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Okay, so where are we going as we move into the future? Well, let's first talk about the public.
Podcasts: A New Routine for Science Literacy
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Speaker
People have long commutes. I mean, my Uber ride here from downtown D.C. said seven minutes. It took 25. And I listened to podcasts the whole way because the guy wasn't saying anything. Usually I try to talk to him, but he wasn't saying anything. But people have long commutes and they want to listen to stuff during those long commutes. And as was mentioned in the last paper, people are starting to
00:08:38
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curate what they listen to and not just turn on the radio and take in whatever's being spewed out by the radio. They're saying, I want to listen to this. So they're going and finding that and listening to it. People are exercising quite a bit, actually, and they want something to listen to that. Next time you go to the gym, try to count the number of people that don't have headphones in. They're listening to something. Most people are listening to music. I'll give you that. But a lot of people are listening to podcasts and knowledge. People are trying to seek knowledge, especially in all the circles that
00:09:08
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probably most of us travel in, people are seeing that there's a huge problem with scientific communication and science literacy and things like that. So they're seeking out podcasts that help fill that gap. And people are cheap.
00:09:23
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I mean, let's just put it out there. So podcasts are free. They can be listened to in any way. You don't need a fancy MP3 player or smartphone to listen to them. You can just go right to the website. In most cases, hit the play button and listen to it for nothing. You can do that on a free library computer. I mean, there's no reason if you want to listen to a podcast, why you can't listen to it. If you just put a little effort into it and you shouldn't have to pay at all for that. Okay. So podcasts.
00:09:47
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Real quick, a little brief thing about podcasts just for the people that aren't too familiar with its history. There are literally millions of shows out there. I saw a statistic just a few months ago, a podcast movement in California. Something like 1,500 podcasts a week are submitted to iTunes a week. Now, most of those do what we call pod fading. They don't have a plan. This is why I'm teaching people how to podcast. They don't have a plan.
00:10:12
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They go into it thinking, I've got a fantastic idea, and they do three episodes, and they're out of ideas. They don't know how to proceed, and then it's gone. There are many ways to connect a podcast, as I mentioned. You can listen on a computer, on a phone, on a tablet. You can burn them all to a CD and hand them out that way. You can record them to tape if you want. It doesn't matter. They're just audio files, and they can be presented in a number of ways. They're easy to use, as I've mentioned. And there are literally billions of listeners to podcasts.
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Video, I'm just gonna mention this shortly because video is quickly becoming easier and easier to do. Let's just put it that way.
The Rise of Accessible Video and Live Streaming
00:10:48
Speaker
Live streaming, you can now Facebook live stream from most desktop computers if you're using a Chrome or Firefox browser, and coming soon to Safari for Mac users. And it's super easy. We decided to just jump into it with the RKLG Podcast Network. We've got a weekly, actually two weekly shows now that are live streamed on our Facebook page for the APN.
00:11:07
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And we don't do a whole lot of planning for these. We just come in, we jump on, we record it. We interact with our audience directly, the ones that get the notification that we went live. We answer their questions on the air.
00:11:19
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And we didn't have to do anything for this. We're broadcasting from a computer sometimes, sometimes we're broadcasting from a smartphone. I mean, there's really no technology involved. We happen to have some microphones and stuff, but you don't even really need that. We just have these things. We're interacting with the public now and immediately. And then the great thing about Facebook, particularly, and YouTube for that matter,
00:11:39
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is that that video is automatically stored for free on their servers. So make them do the work. People talk about how they're a billion dollar company. Well, let them use their billion dollar servers to store your audio for free and your video. Simple editing, and I'm only saying that because it's now becoming more simple. There's a lot of programs out there, like some of the Mac programs that they come with, iMovie and things like that. It's really easy to learn. I've used Adobe Premiere and it does all the same things, but they make it incredibly complicated to figure out.
00:12:08
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But we don't need complicated editing. We're not producing the next Star Wars movie or something like that. We're just producing a show with a couple, maybe, intros and outros and stuff, and as that becomes easier, video will start to take over, I think. I put instant understanding on there, and that was a result of a conversation I had, because with video, it's just visual, and you can use less description, and you can use more of your words for different things, rather than just explaining what you're talking about. Sometimes that's an impediment to audio podcasting,
00:12:36
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we have to be a little bit more explanatory, which can be a good thing, but it can also take away from the conversation. And I think it's the next big thing for anthropology as a whole, is video as it becomes more accessible to people, easier to do, easier to edit, and easier to store. That's the other big thing, is the files are enormous, so when you can take advantage of something like Facebook or YouTube that's going to store your video for free, then you don't have to worry about it. We've got terabytes of data for the APN, and that's just audio.
00:13:06
Speaker
All right, so what's the point of all this?
The Importance of Public Outreach in Anthropology
00:13:09
Speaker
Well, let's talk about it. So purpose, we record history in order to preserve it and to learn from it. I mean, that's a basic thing that we do. As far as I'm concerned, and I tell this, I changed this to anthropology for this conference, but I usually tell people at an archaeology conference, is that anthropology is public outreach, or it is nothing. If we're not telling people about what we do, I tell this to CRM archaeologists all the time, half of your job is actually that final report. That's not the 100% completion like they lead us to believe.
00:13:36
Speaker
That's 50% of completion. The other 50% is telling people about what you did in a way that doesn't violate your client's needs, the agency's needs, or anybody else's needs. But there's usually something that we can say about that project, and it should be put out there. So the basics, and it's really simple. People think it's complicated. You do the thing, you tell people about the thing, and everybody learns from the thing. It doesn't need to be overly complicated. But why podcasts? And as I mentioned before,
00:14:04
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Because you can make one in the hall on your phone, you can walk out, turn on the audio recorder on your phone, and record yourself a podcast. It's actually that simple. They don't need to be complicated. They are easy for anyone to listen to and to learn from. They are preserved forever online, for the most part. They themselves are a record of the past, and that's what I'm gonna talk about here shortly, the podcast. And because
00:14:28
Speaker
As we're looking at this, you'll see different people from different parts of the world just using a smartphone and interacting with it all the time. Just walking down the streets of D.C. in the last day or two, everybody's got their nose buried in a smartphone and they've got headphones on and they've got all things going on and I think we need to capitalize on that because history is your responsibility as the people who are
00:14:51
Speaker
collecting the information, analyzing the information, coming up with these conclusions, it's our responsibility to present that to the public. And to take this a little step further into preservation, people are history. Podcasts equals knowledge transfer. Tell a good story, let the people retell it for you. And what I mean by that is, as we know the cultural transmission of information from one person to the next, I feel like with podcasts, I mean, I'm talking to maybe 20 people in the room right now,
00:15:21
Speaker
But this is being recorded. It will be up on the archaeology podcast network page tonight. It will go out on our Facebook page, it will go out to Twitter, and we'll have thousands of listeners or views on these presentations by the end of the weekend. Okay, that's guaranteed. I've done that before. I presented at the Nevada
00:15:37
Speaker
Association of Archaeology. Talk about a small meeting. This was like the entire meeting size right here. And I did a talk the day before, and then the next day I did a lightning talk. And the lightning talk was all about my talk the day before. So I recorded my presentation, put it online, and then the next day talked about how many people had engaged with it. There were about this many people in the room.
00:15:57
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but already 3,000 people had listened to that presentation by the next day. So that's how we can get information out there with podcasts, and we can get that stored in the people that are saving it, and then they go out and retell those stories, and they pass on that information. So that's all I've got. If you're interested in more, arcpodnet.com and arcpodnet.com forward slash training if you want to learn how to podcast. Thank you.
00:16:19
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.