Podcasts are part of almost everyone’s daily lives. They not only act as a means of connection to a broader community but also allow for the dissemination of information to the wider public. I feel very passionate about podcasts because I am in charge of my undergraduate history department podcasting project, where I produce, record, edit, and publish podcasts. A podcast has so much potential that it can not be achieved within a regular medium such as text. First, podcasts, particularly historical podcasts, allow listeners to interact directly with the subjects they are learning about. This can be heard through oral histories, interviews, and other forms. As the podcast Throughlines highlighted it the episode “The Lavender Scare,” oral history interviews can be directly shared. This creates a greater intimacy with the audience and a direct connection between the listener and the storyteller. A direct oral interview can be shared, and a reading of the subject works also creates a greater connection. Podcasting also allows for those who are auditory learners to understand better information that they can not as easily comprehend in text form. Beyond this, podcasts are also critical for their ability to be shared with the wider world. One of the most essential aspects of podcasts and digital humanities is accessibility and whether the general public can find work. With a podcast, nothing is more important than sharing your work with the world. This can be shown directly in the project I work with as the undergraduates who participate in the project use their research paper to share with the world and create our own digital form of student-published journal. Their research can reach a wider audience and inform the masses with a podcast.

Podcasts not only exemplify the key factors of digital humanities projects, such as data visualization with Voyant and mapping with Kepler .gl, but they also share projects with the greater public. These projects show how digital humanities scholarship can use a multidiscipline approach to data, information, and sources to create a project with various mediums. Not to mention that podcasts and other digital humanities projects are primarily collaborative and allow for many to work on a project together. This allows for varying perspectives and critical contributions that are not the same in traditional scholarship.  Academic scholarship is outstanding for academics, but digital humanities projects and, specifically, podcasts create a means of disseminating one’s work to a broader audience and, in turn, enriching the lives of others. Intimacy in listening to a subject’s voice, such as a historical figure or just an everyday person, perpetuates the principles of digital humanities and creates something exceptional for the world.