Is it time to form a community for audio professionals in the humanities?

A lot has changed in podcasting over the last 3-5 years. When I started podcasting 6 years ago, there weren’t a lot of history or humanities podcasts. In fact, in late 2014 the total number of podcasts in the iTunes directory stood at about 250,000. Today, there are well over one million podcasts listed in Apple Podcasts and “History” now has its own podcast category.

A similar growth has taken place in the number of podcasts produced by humanities-based organizations and those who work in the humanities. Gone are the days when we had to tell organizations and departments what podcasts were and why they should embrace them. Organizations from the Omohundro Institute to the Library Company of Philadelphia to the Smithsonian have podcasts and they have at least one person on staff in charge of producing them.

Just as within the wider world of podcasting, there exists a diversity of backgrounds among those of us who produce audio programs for humanities organizations or as part of our work in the humanities. Some of us trained as scholars and we taught ourselves how to produce audio. Some of us have backgrounds in journalism and communications. Others have different backgrounds and we taught ourselves both the focused knowledge of our organizations and audio production.

One of the aspects I enjoy about podcasting is the community of people who work in the medium. We are members of a large and robust community of audio producers, just as we are also a part of a smaller, but growing community of people who produce audio professionally. As the number of audio professionals in the humanities has grown, we now have an opportunity to form a community of our own. A space where we can converse about audio production and how to produce audio that best conveys stories, information, and the work of humanists to those who work outside of the humanities.

I imagine this community as a space where we could gather once a week, or perhaps twice a month, over Zoom or Google Hangouts to “talk shop.” We could use our time together to workshop ideas and problems, have others listen to our content and provide feedback, and we could host community-run training sessions on both the content side of audio production and the engineering side. In between meetings, we could make use of a private Slack or Facebook group to network and hold conversations and to seek help and community when we need it in between meetings.

When I meet others who produce audio for humanities-based organizations or as part of their professional humanistic work, we tend to lament how lonely our work is. We love being part of our organizations and at the same time we know how isolating it can be to do and pursue our work; we are often the only people on our respective staffs or in our respective departments who understand the intricacies of audio production. In reality, our space has grown to the point where we no longer have to feel alone. There are enough of us that we can form a community to help each other out.

If you are someone who produces audio as part of their professional work in the humanities, please take the survey below so we can gather information about those who are interested in helping to found and participate in a collaborative community of humanities audio professionals.