Continuing Studies: for Higher Ed Podcasters

I think podcasts are terrific for the way that they can really immerse you and kind of give you an emotional connection to the story that you're engaging with.

And I think that is just so vital to like caring about the history of learning, right?

That is worth its weight in gold.

To find a way to care about what it is you're learning about.

Welcome to Continuing Studies, a podcast for higher education podcasters to learn and get inspired.

I'm Neil McPhedran, founder of Podium Podcast Co.

And I'm Jennifer Lee, founder of Jpod Creations, podcasting is broadcasting.

We want you to know you're not alone.

In fact, there are many of you higher ed podcasters out there, and we can all learn from each other.

That is right, Jen.

We can all learn from each other, and a great place that we're trying to build that spot for higher education
podcaster community is at higheredpods.com and at the Higher Ed Pod Con, which is upcoming on July 12th in Chicago.

And we have just opened up call for speakers.

So if you go to HigherEdPodCon.com, there's info there.

Let us know if you want to speak or join a panel.

We're also going to do panels, so you can submit a panel.

I've got some idea for panels.

Can you give us any teases?

Well, one tease that I can announce here first is that we've got a keynote speaker and our keynote speaker is Matt Abrahams from Think Fast Talk Smart, the arguably biggest higher ed podcast.

I would say the biggest.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think so.

So that's exciting.

So there we have it.

And we've had actually a whole bunch of interest from other folks that are interested in speaking.

So I'm super excited.

And you and I will be speaking.

That's right.

Well, we will be recording at least one episode, if not a couple of episodes there.

Live.

Okay.. Today we have Daniel Story from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Go banana slugs.

By far the best university mascot that we have talked to, don't you think, Jen?

I do.

I really wish the podcast topic was, How do you ever figure out that a slug would be a good mascot?

I feel like that's just as much as my question back in high school, because New Westminster, they're saying is, hi yak.

And they were like, let's get a yak as our mascot, because we're the hi yaks.

So, I don't know.

I feel like slug is in there.

You should have gone to California's Santa Cruz as part two.

But we're going to go there today.

We're going to learn more about what Daniel's story is, and we're going to learn what a digital scholarship librarian is.

That's right.

He's a digital scholarship librarian, which is super interesting.

We're going to get into that.

And then, Daniel has a lot of podcast stuff on the go or audio projects, as he said, and that's his primary scholarly output.

I just love that.

And the two things we're going to really get into is the Stories From the Epicenter, which is a ten part documentary podcast.

Very cool.

And then his ongoing podcast that he produces and hosts, History in Focus, which is from the American Historical Review.

So this is awesome.

Let's jump into it.

Let's do it.

Welcome.

We are excited.

We have somebody that I'm not exactly sure what his job is, but we're going to figure out, Daniel Story.

Also love his last name.

I want to know right off the top, what is a digital scholarship librarian?

Sounds cool.

Thanks for having me.

And what is a digital scholarship librarian?

Something that I feel like I'm figuring out as the years go by, uh, longer I'm in this position, but I mean,
essentially what I'm here to do is support and collaborate with both faculty and students here on my campus.

I'm at University of California, Santa Cruz, who are doing a different kinds of digital work, digital research, digital creative activity.

My path to this sort of job was, I'm a trained historian, but I also got into the digital humanities field while I was in grad
school, and then I ended up on the job market looking for jobs where I could really center that digital component of the work.

And it turns out that a lot of positions that are doing this kind of work are located in academic libraries.

And so that's eventually what led me here, but on a day to day basis, I get to Interact with all kinds of people doing all kinds of different projects.

And I focus mostly on different aspects of digital storytelling, including and especially podcasting.

And I do a lot of GIS digital mapping work as well.

So I feel like your last name really suits what you're doing.

Yeah, it kind of does.

That theory that your last name, like, like subliminally pushes you in certain career directions.

I'm one, I guess, supporting example for that theory.

Well, obviously podcasting is a big part of that, Daniel, as you mentioned, and something that struck me the first time we chatted, he said, audio projects are your primary source of scholarly output.

I thought that was really interesting and that stuck with me, but really there's two main podcast projects that we want to dig into today with you.

First is called Stories from the Epicenter.

That is a ten part documentary podcast.

You're, you were the lead producer on that.

And that explores the experience and memory from the '89 earthquake in Santa Cruz.

The second podcast that you're really focused on, and I would imagine spent a lot of time on, is you're
the editor and host of the History in Focus podcast, which is from the American Historical Review.

So maybe if, if you could just sort of explain a little bit of both of those podcasts and then we can start to dive into each of them.

Yeah.

So like a high level view of those two podcasts, Stories from the Epicenter was a project that I started about actually less than a year, um, into starting the job that I have here at UC Santa Cruz.

I moved from the Midwest.

And, you know, I'd, I'd been to California before, but I'd spent very little time here.

So I was kind of wide eyed and excited to learn about the new place that I was living.

And that year happened to be the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 earthquake that hit the Bay Area.

And at the time, a lot of the media focus, understandably, was on San Francisco and Oakland and that kind of area.

But the epicenter of the earthquake itself was actually right outside of Santa Cruz, where I currently live.

And it really like decimated the Santa Cruz downtown.

And did a lot of damage to a neighboring city in our county called Watsonville.

And so, yeah, seeing the 30th anniversary stuff, the different commemorations that were happening really grabbed my attention.

And I was given the opportunity to work with another librarian to put together a digital exhibit commemorating the earthquake.

And as part of that work, somebody said, Hey, Daniel, you might be interested in this collection of oral histories that UC Santa Cruz students did back in 1990.

So like months after the earthquake.

And I started listening to these oral histories and I was like, wow, this is just amazing, rich material that really immerses you in what the, this experience was and in the immediate aftermath.

And, you know, I just said, this would be a fantastic podcast to really explore what that experience was like, as well as
how it has been remembered and how that memory is kind of reverberated over the years in Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz County.

So I launched into that and I had some terrific undergrad students working with me on it.

We took some of those oral histories that were recorded back then.

We ended up doing thirty new interviews with people who were still around.

Some of whom were really instrumental in the kind of politics in the years after rebuilding the town, and it was
just a fascinating project to work on for lots of different reasons, which, you know, I can expound on if you want.

But it was also a very big learning experience for me because it was the first big kind of narrative style podcast that I took on and I'm really proud of what we did.

I also go back and listen to it, and, and like probably lots of us go back to listen to our past work and think of all the things that
you would change or do differently now, but yeah, that was just an amazing project that keeps coming up and keeps kind of coming back.

People discover it.

And reach out and that's a great thing that I was able to work on.

I think narrative is something that is a little bit underrated because it is a lot more effort to do than just a traditional conversational podcast.

But in the academic space, I think we've only just tapped the surface of it and we need to explore it more
because I'm thinking now when you're talking about this, it would be great to have more of these audio histories.

Because you get this textbook and most of us don't even read it.

They give it to you.

You look through it.

The teacher blabbers on and then that's it.

And if you could actually go in and like listen and really figure out all the history and use it as a tool to
write papers and stuff, I think it would be probably more beneficial than the way that a lot of us currently learn.

Yeah, I agree that a lot of opportunity that we often leave on the table when it comes to teaching history in classrooms, both at the college level and high school level.

And yeah, I think podcasts are terrific for the way that they can really immerse you and kind of give you an emotional connection.

to the story that you're engaging with.

And I think that is just so vital to like caring about the history of learning, right?

I mean, that is worth its weight in gold to find a way to care about what it is you're learning about.

And I think hearing people, when it's possible, hearing from the people who were there, um, obviously that's not always possible.

But when we're studying something that happened in 1989, there's plenty of voices that we can engage with.

And yeah, I agree.

Podcasts in the classroom, both to learn from and for, uh, students to produce, which is another part of my job to help people do podcast assignments in classrooms.

I really like this, the role of a limited series.

We work on a number of podcasts that are weekly.

And so there's this push that we can't miss a week.

We got to keep going.

We got to keep producing.

If we miss a week, we're going to lose an audience, push forward.

And then there's this dirty word in the podcast industry, Podfade, all these podcasts that have gone to the graveyard.

But I think in that discussion and focus, we neglect this role of a limited series.

And going into a project thinking that it's a limited series and coming out of a project knowing it's a limited series, and how do we use it, think about it differently.

Unpack that a little bit for us, if, if you could, like, where is this miniseries live and, and sort of how is it used?

It wasn't a one and done.

This is a project that was created to be listened to ongoing.

Yeah, I, I think that's a really interesting thing to consider.

So I'm a big fan of the limited series and I almost think of it a little bit analogous to the idea that you can write many, many words, but sometimes it's harder to be concise, right?

And it can be harder to say, we don't just have an unlimited number of episodes here.

We really have to craft the story and make it as high quality and as engaging as we can within these episodes.

There's a beginning and an end and we can map that out.

It just becomes a very different animal, a different kind of project to tackle than a weekly podcast or a monthly podcast or something.

It's also nice to be able to make that commitment, right?

We're going to work on this for this period of time, and then the project's done.

So there's just lots of benefits to it, I think.

In our case, and I think in many cases, if you can latch onto a topic, a project, or in the case of Stories from the Epicenter,
something connected to local history, something that is notable enough to have commemorations around it from time to time.

When certain anniversaries come up, then that project will have occasion to be revisited by people.

And there'll be a certain inflection points along the way, which is basically what has happened for us.

Like we did it, we actually released it the year after the thirtieth anniversary.

And then this year is the thirty-fifth anniversary.

Yeah, lo and behold, there was interest in talking about the earthquake.

It ended up being re aired on campus radio, re aired some parts of it on a community radio station.

And we did a little small event kind of revisiting the project here in the library where I worked.

Some people use the term evergreen, but a topic that isn't gonna fade or become too dated in the way that it's presented, can be revisted again and again.

And it's also, a lot of years, there's at least one faculty that I can think of, but there may be others in our history
department here that uses it in a class when they're talking about oral history and talking about local history.

I think there's a lot of things in there for us and for our audience here to take away.

One of the things I think was really interesting is I think the fact that it's been played on the local college radio and some of these other, so like in the classroom, I think makes a lot of sense.

And that's kind of where almost like first place my brain went, like that's a good thing.

But I don't think we take advantage of these, like the college radio stations that are so prevalent and to put these
limited series podcasts on, obviously they live in Apple and Spotify, et cetera, but like there's these other channels.

I applaud you.

I think that's great.

Yeah, and often these, like, campus radio or other, another, there's like a sort of university podcast called the Slugcast.

Oh yeah, you're a Banana Slug.

Yes, our official mascot is the Banana Slug.

So there's a Slugcast podcast, and they also re aired the episodes this last year.

And the point I was going to make is many of these people, these entities, are actually really maybe hungry for content.

They're more than happy to have, you know, like we have this slot and you're coming along saying, Hey, I have something that people might like to listen to that will fill that slot.

So I think a lot of those kinds of collaborations are really, you know, mutually beneficial.

And hungry for good content.

I think this is something we need to stress.

And I'm seeing a lot more articles about this as AI comes out.

Obviously AI is a great tool to help things go faster, but they're saying now people are starting to get wise, the listener, because it's not good content.

People are just flooding it because they're like, I want to have a podcast in here, well let's use this, but
they're not using it as a companion and they're not getting to the nitty gritty of creating good content.

And if you can create good content like you guys are doing, other people will use it because we're also starting to see on a main stage how reciprocal podcasts are.

There have been children's podcasts that have been really popular.

They're now being turned into books.

They're being turned into movies.

I feel like yours could be taken and put into a full documentary for Netflix one day.

People want good ideas and they want basically the playbook on how to do it.

And if you can provide them for it, then it's good.

That's why I love the fact that you're also teaching, uh, your students how to do this.

So what are some of the things that you're teaching them?

Obviously make good content.

Yeah.

I mean, the kinds of things that I get to emphasize are, I mean, I'm working with students who maybe I've never tackled any project like this at all.

So part of it is walking them through some of the basics, the technical components of how to record and how to edit audio.

But yeah, talking about ways of shaping story and ways of approaching narrative and mapping that onto,
rather than making an outline for an essay, how is it different when you're writing for spoken word and yeah.

So, and the other thing that I really love to do with students is listen to other podcasts with them.

And we will kind of like dissect storytelling techniques and podcasts that we appreciate.

I don't know if you guys have heard of this kind of audio projects contest series, I suppose, called Audio Flux.

They do a call for submissions.

They have like a theme that you have to explore in some way.

And then the other big constraint is the piece that you submit can be no longer than three minutes.

And so they end up picking five winners and then they publish these five winners.

And so by now they've done this three or four times.

So there's like twenty or so of these three minute long pieces.

And they're like, a really rich, beautifully sound designed story, every single one of them in three minutes.

And it's perfect for playing in class with students because you can play it once and then you could say, did you notice this, this and this?

Let's listen to it again.

'Cause you know, three minutes you can play it two or three times and yeah, anyway, that is a great project to explore in and of itself.

But that's one of the things I love to do with students.

And that's another thing that I think a lot of people are learning, is a podcast or audio content does not need to be an hour.

Uh, it can be three minutes.

It just depends.

Your content is going to dictate, your presenter is going to dictate, uh, and I come from I'm going to
mention the R word, Neil, but radio and, uh, you have to be able to do your break in such a short time.

Like you have to get all the meat and potatoes and make engaging in either thirty seconds or sixty seconds.

'Cause we have two types of spots.

And I always say that is the best training ground for people doing podcasting or content curation, because
if you can make your story so strong in 30 seconds or 60 seconds, you got it made in all the other formats.

Yeah, that's amazing.

One of the other things you, when we chatted about Stories from the Epicenter, you mentioned there was also a community engagement component to it too.

So, I love the fact, so there was a student component to it, which was super cool.

And then there was a community component to it as well.

Can you sort of explain that a little bit for us too, please?

Yeah, I mean, kind of the origin of that was I started with material that was here in the university archive and
one version of this project would have been just, let's use this material and produce our own narrative about this.

But very quickly, I just felt like really to do justice to this, we need to be talking to the people out in the community who experienced it.

And not only that, it's a great opportunity, right?

There's a lot of synergy there when you can collaborate with people outside your institution.

So part of the community engagement was that I interviewed thirty people.

Most of whom had no direct connection to the university.

These were people in Santa Cruz and in Watsonville, a number of whom were on city council or somehow involved in the emergency response.

And so just talking with people out in the community was a really great experience.

But then we also ended up partnering with two community institutions.

One was Santa Cruz public libraries who were doing their own oral history project around the earthquake at the same time and a place called the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.

Or the MAH, as they call it, who had a, an exhibit, uh, commemorating the earthquake again for the thirtieth anniversary.

So I was very much of the mindset of how can we like collaborate and bring all this work together.

So we produced a bunch of, well, ten episodes.

And then the last two episodes were one produced by the folks at Santa Cruz public libraries drawing on their own oral histories that they were doing.

And then the other produced by the MAH and they interviewed some people who were kind of the focal point of the exhibit.

It was just, I think honestly, one of the most fulfilling, rewarding parts of this were all the connections that were made, including with
another person that I was able to collaborate with was Nikki Silva, who's one half of the Kitchen Sisters, the kind of OG radio producer duo.

And she happens to be a UCSC alum and lives nearby, but she did some recording on the street style in the week after the earthquake.

Oh, wow.

And she had these tapes and she was like, I've never used them and I feel so guilty that I've never used them for anything.

I would love it if you could find a way to, you know, incorporate it into your project.

And I was like, yes, please.

So, connecting with Nikki also was a great part of this project.

But yeah, those connections.

In fact, honestly, zooming out even just from this project, one of my favorite things about the work of podcasting is talking to people who I might never otherwise, you
know, our roads might have not have crossed or I would not have had an excuse to reach out to them and say, Hey, could you spend half an hour with me talking about whatever.

I can't agree with you more on that, just this podcast, Continuing Studies, for Jen and I, the people that, we're almost at two
years now, and the people that we have met and connected with, and some of them continue to, um, converse with has been tremendous.

And it's amazing the people that we find just like in this niche of academic university podcasts, which you
think is so narrow and tiny, but it's just like every single week we find more people doing cool things.

And I just really love you explaining to us about the Stories from the Epicenter.

And I think that from a university academic scholarly perspective, it is a super interesting way to think about things, projects
and research and ways that students can listen to and tap into that the community involvement and everything, is just tremendous.

It's quite inspiring actually, I think.

So let's jump to your second main podcast gig in quotes.

And that's the, as I mentioned earlier, that History in Focus podcast, and that's from the American Historical Review.

Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah.

So History in Focus is, let's see, we're in our third season and it is a monthly podcast that explores and tries to
bring to life and make more accessible the scholarship that is coming out in the AHR, the American Historical Review.

So it's essentially a work of engaging academic research and trying to make it more accessible sometimes in the form just of a conversation, which is totally cool.

And then other times with particular kinds of pieces, we will go a little more narrative style and do
some sound design and make something that's a little more like immersive from that kind of perspective.

I often say like if you listen to something like the New Yorker Radio Hour or something, which I'm not comparing
ourselves to, but it's a similar concept in that our fuel for our content is the material that's coming out in the AHR.

Not that we can cover it in anything close to a comprehensive way, but yeah, we take some article usually, and the AHR is increasingly publishing really interesting, innovative, non traditional
kinds of articles exploring how history is being done in kind of non traditional ways or how history is done outside of the kind of traditional academic, you know, the ivory towers of the university.

So there's a lot of really interesting material for us to engage with.

And I've had lots of cool cross institutional collaboration doing that kind of work with other producers who have cycled on and off to help me with it.

How is this podcast turned into an important channel?

I feel like it's an important channel for the journal now.

Tell me a little bit about it, or maybe there's no story there, but how it's grown into a key, like, obviously it's a printed journal, correct?

Yeah, yeah.

A large website, digital presence as most journals do.

Then how does the podcast play into that as another channel for the journal?

Yeah, yeah.

I think part of it is just giving people another avenue into the content of the journal.

We're not under any assumption that people are reading every issue cover to cover.

The more ways that we can give people into the material that the journal's publishing, the better.

So that's one element of it, but I think the more interesting part of it is what I just referenced, that the
journal is evolving toward a more capacious, understanding of historical work and historical scholarship.

And the podcast in some ways is able to capture some of that in a way that the print version alone can't.

I think the podcast lets you see the, the work of these historians in a more human light.

You see the people, you see their own passions and struggles and the challenges and you hear it, right?

You hear the emotion in their voice or the excitement in their voice.

And then in the podcast, we're able to like bring in other kinds of media material.

Obviously it's an audio medium, but we're able to bring in archival audio related to their work or what they're writing about.

We're able to engage different kinds of nontraditional articles in different ways.

There are times, and I'm working on one for release, just this coming March of 2025.

It'll be out, a piece where the writer just is reading their piece in its entirety.

And it's a very personal reflection on a collaborator that they worked with who passed away during the COVID pandemic.

And so that's just an example of like one of the kind of non traditional articles that the AHR is publishing more and more of.

And so we're going to like sound design this with this scholar reading their material.

And it's pretty emotionally heavy as you might imagine with that topic.

But to kind of circle back to your general question, I think those are the kinds of opportunities that the podcast can capitalize on that print alone maybe can't do quite in the same way.

Well, I find it to be more authentic and not only that, you can kind of understand it better because I think sometimes with just text and written text and
even we deal with it in our daily lives, either it be social media or text, it can be misinterpreted because we all have our own thoughts when we read.

So when you're hearing it from the source, there's not that much misinterpretation.

You're actually seeing that person's point of view.

Totally.

Yeah.

Going back to what I said earlier, I think helps you to not just engage intellectually, but on some kind of
deeper level to really care about what this person is exploring and to see a bit behind the scenes, right?

I hear people talk about not just the finished product that you see on the page in the journal, but how they got there and the kinds of ups and downs and challenges that they had to overcome

And allowing us not to make assumptions.

Right.

I really like that notion that you're saying of the human side of the historian, their POV, why they
got to where they got to or whatever, I think is super interesting, especially for a topic like history.

You don't have to answer this, but right now there's this negative lens being put on journals.

It's almost like they've been dragged through the mud and they're really being questioned and challenged.

And I think that comes to the heart of sort of the scientific challenge right now that we're seeing.

But like, do you think a podcast is a good answer to that?

Yeah, I mean, I, I think the podcast can be a way to, uh, humanize the work so that if somebody like is sort of reflexively skeptical of the academic form of the, the
journal or the article, and certainly, you know, the field of history and humanities and in general is really taking a lot of attacks and hits and skepticism right now.

So yeah, there are a lot of challenges for us to deal with and overcome in this moment.

And I think one answer to this is it's like all hands on deck, whatever kind of things we can use and employ to communicate the importance of these ideas and topics.

We should use anything, any tool we have to hand.

But I do think that something about the podcast, it's maybe a way to soften those barriers and soften the skepticism that might be there when you can speak to people directly.

And say, Hey, you know, I'm a human trying to navigate this stuff just like you.

And there are hard topics that we have to deal with and hard things that we have to work through.

I think there's definite potential.

I think that it's a medium that we're seeing more and more universities lean into and I think is really, is really an
interesting way to directly counteract some of that negative rhetoric, which is just seeming to bubbling to the top.

Yeah, for sure.

And you can talk about really complex ideas in a more casual tone, you know, like that's possible in a podcast and I love it.

I love, honestly, sometimes I love to hear an expert stumbling over their words a little bit.

You know, it's like, yeah, they're just like me.

Well Daniel, so good to have you join us.

Really, really appreciate sharing so much about what you're up to and your story and your candor as well, actually, too.

So thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks.

And I really appreciate the work that you all are doing.

Jen, wasn't that another great conversation we had with a higher ed podcaster?

Yeah, it was a great story.

Haha.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

But just because his name is the best.

But in all honesty and all seriousness what he is doing by documenting history through audio and having the relatable
conversations of hearing people that have actually been there during that time, I really think is like the key to future learning.

Totally.

I want to chat with more journal podcasts, podcasts that are sort of coming from journals.

This was our first one with the journal that he works on, which is the American Historical Review.

Anyone out there, a podcaster who works on a journal, we'd love to chat with you.

I think this is a really interesting angle for sure.

So anyway, Jen, why don't we call it there.

Call it there.

Until next time, thank you so much for tuning in to the Continuing Studies podcast, a podcast for higher education podcasters.

We hope you found this episode informative and inspiring.

If you enjoyed the show, we encourage you to follow and subscribe to our podcast on your preferred platform so you'll never miss an episode.

But if you found this episode particularly valuable, please consider sharing it with your friends and colleagues who also might be interested in higher education podcasts.

We also invite you to join your peers on HigherEdPods.com where you can connect with other podcasters in higher education and learn from others in the field.

Thank you for being part of our community.

We look forward to continuing to bring you valuable insights and conversations around higher education podcasts.

See you in the next episode.