Article,

PodcastRE Analytics: Using RSS to Study the Cultures and Norms of Podcasting

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DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, (2021)

Abstract

Over the past decade, podcasting has grown into one of the most important media forms in the world. This article argues that podcasting’s unique technical affordances — particularly RSS feeds and user-entered metadata — open up productive methods for exploring the cultural practices and meanings of the medium. We share three different methods for studying RSS feeds and podcast metadata: 1) visualizing how topics and keywords trend over time; 2) visualizing networks of commonly associated keywords entered by podcasters; and 3) analyzing norms and common practices for the duration of podcasts (as a time-based media format, podcasting is unusual in that it is not bound by the programming schedules and technical limitations that provide strict parameters for most audiovisual forms). The methods and preliminary results reveal how metadata can function as a surrogate for studying large collections of time-based media objects. Yet our study also shows that, when it comes to born digital media, the metadata are never fully separate from the objects they describe. We argue that future work in AV in DH needs to delineate between methods best suited for digitized media collections compared to those most appropriate for born digital media collections.

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