Simpson Center Podcasts
One project I've been working on for the past year or so is the digitization of the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities' big lecture series: The Solomon Katz Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities.
Most of the work has gone into encoding the video recordings (into WMV, QT and Real... sigh...), but I also wanted to see if we could set the content up as a podcast. After all, most of the video is just talking heads -- you might as well listen while you're walking or driving rather than watch them at a computer. Here's the actual link to the podcast page, and here's a screenshot of what it looks like (for those who don't have iTunes):
There are some caveats to using the 'podcast' distribution model with these lectures:
- There are only 3-5 Katz lectures every year, so this is kind of stretching the limit of the notion of "subscription." No weekly or daily updates here.
- There's no centralized directory system for podcasts (that I know of.) While I appreciate the frustration of those who point out that 'pod' is a misnomer since the audio files work on any device, not just Apple mp3 players, the fact remains the Apple iTunes Music Store is a popular place for people to go to look for spoken-word content. So I developed our XML files for that target audience first, with other podcast directories (Yahoo!, etc) to come soon.
- On that last point, these public lectures given at a state university are, obviously, free and not for sale by anyone. Thus putting them up on the "iTune$ Mu$ic $tore" seems a bit odd -- but as the screenshot above demonstrates, there's no money changing hands. Luckily, the overwhelming majority of all podcasts are free (and/or ad-supported) so I think people understand that the iTMS works in a non-commercial manner for this kind of content. All the audio files are actually hosted on UW servers -- Apple just parses our XML file.
Notwithstanding the above factors, the actual people giving these lectures are pretty interesting -- Judith Butler, Marjorie Perloff, Alain Badiou, etc. Later this summer I'm going to be adding a lot more in, as we digitize the back catalog. For now, if you have Apple iTunes installed, click here to see a selection of what we've put up so far.
