Next Steps More Clear
After starting the foundation of this podcast series, the next steps clear as to what I need to do. This includes recording the first episode, which should be the most fun part. Before doing that though, the DKC requires that I do a training in the Podcast studio since I have never used it. I recorded the podcast episode for my Archaeology class in a study room in Simpson Library, which was quiet but did not have the best acoustics and used the microphone on my laptop which was really scratchy sounding, so I think for this I need better sound quality and a space to support it, which is why I want to use the studio. I guess I can appreciate that I learned from that experience, and it should be cool to try that new space and equipment. In addition to recording, I needed to brush up the outline and make sure there was enough information on it, so I did that and sent it to guest star Michael Murphy to get his input. While I did that, I also scheduled the recording date, so February 6, 2025 was what we settled on. The last step to prep for everything is to sign up for a domain of ones own. I have decided on preservingourpastime.com as the web address and name of everything, it just has a nice ring to it. Upon signing up for it, I can start building it out and making it my own, which is pretty cool. This stage is exciting, because it will have something a little more tangible that I can show off and be proud of, outside of these blog posts of course.
My Plan for the Website
I have never built a website before, so I am going to preface this with the classic “I have absolutely no idea what I am doing” and the ever favorite “this will be a learning experience”. It seems like a cool concept, but I will have to learn a lot to make it look good. My vision at the moment is to have a main page talking about what each piece does and linking to the pages on the site where I am keeping everything. One of these links of course will be the StoryMap, another will be to the podcast. At some point I may have some pages with possible road trip itineraries to various ballparks and associated sites, because that is fun and also pretty tangible, especially for me who loves planning road trips. On the podcast pages I want to have some information about each episode and the process for making them, and a transcript of the episode with sources so people can learn more if they wanted to (and also to avoid plagiarism, no one wants to be accused of that). I may also include some pictures if it fits the episode to add a visual component to those that are interested in that, so naturally the podcast pages will be the biggest piece of the website. This plan is of course subject to change as I learn more, but I think it is a good starting point for knowing what I want to do with it. “preservingourpastime.com” was available as a domain, so now I just need to start building.
My Plan for Recording the Podcast
Recording the podcast does not require as much forward thought beyond preparing scripts and outlines, but there are still some things to consider, especially between recording, editing, and releasing the episodes. For now the plan starts with coordinating with guests if I have them, and recording the audio in the studio. After recording I need to edit, so I plan to use Adobe Podcasts for that. I was recently introduced to it and it seems pretty intuitive where I can drop the audio file into it and see a transcript that I can then edit and it changes the audio to fit the edits made. I strongly dislike hearing myself talk on recordings, so not having to do that is certainly ideal. I will have to learn this system, but that is part of the process. That makes it easier to make a transcript for the episode too, since it is there already. After that, I plan to put it on the website, probably just embedding the audio into it and having all the complementary information on the same page, and having a different page for each episode. This is my rough plan for now, and it will probably require more changes but I think it is also a good starting point.
Recording!!
Actually recording the Podcast was a fascinating experience. I did my training on the studio the morning of recording the first episode. The training contained all new stuff to me that was shockingly easy and when I went to do the recording later in the afternoon I felt really confident in my ability to use the space. This is ideal, because it makes things easier for me, but not what I was expecting at all. I tend to struggle using new systems so I was happy that it was as intuitive as it wound up being.
Sitting in the Podcast studio by myself with my outline talking to nothing but a microphone was a little strange, but felt better than talking at nothing into my computer microphone like I did in my Archaeology class. I tend to do better talking to other people, so adjusting to having those people as a virtual audience that will hear what I am saying later on will be something that I will have to get used to, and is also not something I was expecting to be as small a challenge as it was. Once I started talking about things I felt better and more normal, it just took a minute to adjust to the circumstances.
I wound up flipping the first episode from the preservation overview one to the baseball overview one, partially because I felt better about casually talking about it and mostly because my Historic Preservation episode guest was not available for any of the times I was able to reserve the space to record. That is a nice thing about preparing multiple episodes in advance, I could adjust as needed to be able to record. I expected the audio to be about 20 minutes, and it took 41 minutes. I will definitely have to take some out and move some things around in editing, but this is still a longer episode than I was expecting. That is not a bad thing though, I just know a lot about this topic because of personal interest and it did not take a lot of outside research, so I was able to freely talk more.
Editing, A New Ballgame
I have done a little bit of audio editing before, and by that I mean I threw some audio in SoundTrap for my Archaeology class and got rid of the dead air between words. I also tried to put some extra sounds in but it wound up not sticking in the final product for that one. To say my knowledge is limited in the way of audio editing would probably suffice. That is what makes learning fun though, I get to try new things. I am trying to use Adobe Podcast this time around, and immediately ran into a problem. It has a feature to make a transcription, and that feature was not working. That makes it a slight challenge to make it accessible, but that is okay, I can use Microsoft Word to do that. Or so I thought. It turns out talking for 41 minutes takes up a lot of digital space, and the file was too big for Word. Aside from that problem, I have been playing with other features and listened to everything to get an idea of what I need to fix. I will always hate listening to myself on a microphone, but this time was not too bad. I realized that I went all over the place with tangents but that is part of the fun of an episode like this.
Even though talking about the history of baseball did not require a lot of outside research, I did have to go find sources to back up what I was saying and cite on the website after the fact, so further grounding my knowledge in that way has been fun. That was part of why I listened to it again, so I could hear what I actually said versus what I had outlined and find any changes I needed to make to source hunting. Luckily there were not too many, so it worked out well on that front too.
Next Steps
The next steps are pretty simple, I definitely need to start building out the website, and editing the audio and making the transcript and supplemental material for this episode. As far as supplemental material, I want to have some contextual information but nothing too fancy, just enough to make it tell a more complete story because I definitely left some things out in some places. As far as this phase went, I’ve had fun. I’m looking forward to making it look and sound good now.